Ludo-spectatorship as Gaming and Metagaming: Exploring the Pleasures of Assemblage

This paper, presented at DiGRA 2024, examines the relationship between ludo-spectatorship and game pleasure, arguing that spectating is not merely a peripheral activity but a constitutive part of how players experience videogames. The author, Xin Pan, defines ludo-spectatorship as practices of spectating objects within, around, and outside videogames that occur before, after, and during play. Drawing on Espen Aarseth's coinage and Boluk and LeMieux's concept of metagaming, the paper proposes two forms: in-game spectation, where players must observe to play, and spectating play, such as watching game streams, which sits outside the game itself. Its central thesis holds that these forms are interrelated and that the pleasure they produce is shaped by tensions between witnessing and participating.

The study conceptualizes game pleasure broadly, extending beyond happiness to include intensity-driven responses such as delight, epiphany, frustration, and suffering. Adopting Brian Massumi's notion of affect, it understands pleasure as an embodied, psychological, and intellectual response arising from the interplay of the player's body, game mechanics, controllers, and audiovisual feedback. Theoretically, the work combines Taylor's assemblage of play with Actor-Network Theory, Object-Oriented Ontology, and Deleuzian rhizomatic thinking, treating both human and non-human actors as co-constitutive of experience.

Methodologically, the project relies on Seth Giddings' microethology, combining participant observation of the author's own playthroughs with textual analysis. Case studies cover in-game objects such as avatars, monsters, and landscapes, along with four types of game streams: explanatory videos, Danmaku videos, Let's Play, and speedruns. The sample is small and the approach is interpretive rather than statistical, so the findings are presented as analytical propositions rather than generalizable data. The scope is limited to single-player videogames, leaving multiplayer and competitive contexts largely outside the analysis.