On Seeing and Being Seen: Perception and Visibility in Video Games

Key insights

7 takeaways

01
Play is framed as a relation of power: just as a game is built to account for a player's actions, the player can aim to account for the game's, drawing on Foucault's notion of power as immanent force relations.
02
The paper introduces two concepts: visibility, the degree to which a larger system can account for the actions of those within it, and perception, an actor's awareness of how a system understands their actions.
03
Using gameplay examples from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Nintendo, 1998), the author outlines three non-totalizing 'gradients' of visibility and perception describing how the player-game relation can unfold.
04
Against Mackenzie Wark's view that only intellectual 'gamer theorists' can unpack gamespace, the paper argues that play is broadly accessible, unlike critical theory literacy or the coding skills required for game design, so play offers wider revolutionary potential.
05
The author argues that working on and at play is a necessary form of labour for living in opposition to the dominant order, with critical play serving to expose a game's operational logics so they can be judged and changed.
06
The paper concludes with the Game Workers Unite movement as a real-world example of resistance to the blurring of labour and leisure under post-Fordism.
07
The paper updates earlier concepts including Galloway's 'countergaming' (2006), Schleiner's 'ludic mutation' (2017), and Dyer-Witherford and de Peuter's 'games of multitude' (2009).

Summary

This paper argues that the relationship between a player and a video game is fundamentally one of power, and that this relationship mirrors the broader connection between actors and the systems within which they operate. Drawing on Foucault's conception of power as a multiplicity of force relations, the author proposes that just as games are designed to account for player actions, players can equally seek to account for the game's operations. The work positions itself against theorists such as Mackenzie Wark, whose "gamer theory" suggests that only intellectuals can properly navigate and disrupt what he terms "gamespace," and it instead locates emancipatory potential in the everyday practice of play itself, which nearly anyone can undertake.

The central conceptual contribution is a pair of linked terms: visibility, the degree to which a larger system can account for the actions of those within it, and perception, an actor's awareness of how the system understands their actions. The author deliberately keeps these definitions broad so they can apply to any game-like structure, though the analysis is limited to video game play, which the author frames as a safe space for experimenting with the values of late-capitalist society. Using examples from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the paper outlines three non-totalizing "gradients" through which visibility and perception overlap in play, offering a heuristic for the varied ways players and games relate.

The discussion extends these ideas to the critical potential of play and to the reclamation of leisure from the logics of labour and capital. It engages existing scholarship on the resemblance between labour and play and on the ideological work games perform, and it revisits underdeveloped concepts including Galloway's "countergaming," Schleiner's "ludic mutation," and Dyer-Witherford and de Peuter's "games of multitude." The paper concludes with a brief look at the Game Workers Unite movement as an example of resistance to the blurring of work and leisure under post-Fordism, arguing that critically laying bare a game's operational logics is a necessary form of labour for living in opposition to dominant systems.