Playing With Non-Humans: Digital Games as Techno-Cultural Form

Seth Giddings's "Playing With Non-Humans: Digital Games as Techno-Cultural Form" argues that game studies needs a serious debate about the digitality of digital games. Its central thesis is that understanding both gameplay and the techno-cultural context surrounding it requires recognising non-human technological agency. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies and Actor-Network Theory, the work critiques the social constructivist and textual models that dominate media studies, contending that technologies exert material effects that cannot be reduced to their social consumption, and that humans and non-humans form symmetrical networks.

Using the strategy game Advance Wars 2 as its primary case study, the work proposes conceptualising gameplay as a cybernetic circuit rather than an extended cyborg body. It treats emergence and autonomous software behaviour, including Dennett's example of the chess program, as means by which digital games can themselves be understood as actors in their own right. This reframing shifts attention from games as passive texts toward the active role of the software systems that players engage with.

A key analytical contribution is the application of Dennett's "intentional stance." Players pragmatically ascribe intelligence to complex systems without assuming genuine consciousness or anthropomorphising them. Applied to the game's artificial intelligence, the analysis finds that enemy units respond dynamically to player positioning, and that the game's emergent complexity, comparable to cellular automata such as Conway's Game of Life, reflects a genuine form of technological agency.

The work concludes that digital gameplay constitutes an everyday, unmetaphysical technoculture deserving serious study alongside its cultural dimensions. Its theoretical grounding draws on a bibliography spanning roughly 1971 to 2005, engaging with debates in ludology, cyberfeminism, actor-network theory, and media theory, and with scholars such as Juul, Frasca, Haraway, Turkle, and Latour.