The Production of Subject and Space in Videogames

"The Production of Subject and Space in Video Games" argues that the player's experience of game space cannot be adequately explained by the familiar inside/outside duality that dominates game studies, and proposes instead that player subjectivity and ludic space are produced simultaneously. The author begins by tracing the fixed ideal viewing position of linear perspective, inherited from Renaissance and Cartesian representation, which is treated as natural and transparent yet in fact produces unified spectator-subjects. Drawing on Florenski's critique of linear perspective and on Lacanian theory, the paper suggests that inverse perspective offers a productive alternative for rethinking immersion, and it notes that game studies has largely left this inherited framework unexamined.

The central theoretical move is to replace camera distance, embodiment, and interface-as-barrier with suture and the broader field of gaze as explanatory frames. Working through Lacan, Barthes, and Lefebvre, the author contends that games operate as second-order semantic systems that recruit real-world signs such as humans, physics, and objects as signifiers. The effect is that players perceive a constructed system of values as empirical fact. Işiğan's contribution extends this reasoning by applying Clemens's "compass of disorientation," a framework of eight orders of misrecognition each paired with a rhetorical figure, to show how an inability to distinguish inside from outside sustains an experienced "as if" that masks symbolic causality as natural agency.

The scope is interdisciplinary and theoretical rather than empirical: the analysis draws on media aesthetics, philosophy, film theory, critical theory, and architectural phenomenology, and it offers no quantitative data. Its conclusions rest on argument and textual analysis, and it advocates moving game scholarship beyond the inside/outside opposition toward an account of ludic space and ludic subjects as co-produced.