Meaningful Transformation: Intra-activity and Video Games

Justyna Janik's paper applies Karen Barad's concept of intra-action, drawn from her agential realism, to the study of digital game play. Its central claim is that the video game object and the player transform one another within play, determining their own boundaries and co-creating meaning, rather than interacting as pre-existing, independent entities. The paper positions this as a contribution to posthuman game studies, a field it argues has produced relatively little work on meaning-making within the player-game relation and on the ethical foundations of human engagement with technology.

The argument unfolds through several linked claims. Transformation is shown to operate at material levels, such as changes to the game environment, improved eye-hand coordination, or repetitive strain injury, and at cognitive and emotional levels, such as responses to socially engaged games or difficult choices involving bonded non-player characters. The paper's principal case study is the glitch, which it treats not as an intrinsic property of a technological artefact but as something that emerges only within the material-discursive practice of play. A glitch shifts the boundaries of both game and player, altering the object's affordances and the player's exploratory behaviour.

The analysis also addresses agency and meaning. Drawing on Barad's refusal of the subject-object division, the paper frames agency as a dynamic force between actants and characterises the glitch as evidence of the video game object's autonomy rather than its "pure agency." Meanings attributed to glitches, including humour, economic exploitation, art curation, and community mythology, are presented as dependent on the game object's materiality, supporting the conclusion that the game is a co-creator of meaning and a partner in play. The paper is a conceptual, theoretically grounded presentation, and it offers no empirical sample or survey data.