Video Game Détournement: Playing Across Media

Key insights

7 takeaways

01
Fanny Barnabé's paper treats video game détournement (mods, machinima, let's play videos, speedruns, fanfiction) as a marked form of ordinary play rather than a separate activity.
02
The paper distinguishes two modes: "détournement of the game," which modifies the game object itself (e.g., Kaizo Mario World hacks), and "détournement by playing," which transforms meaning through performance (e.g., the Halo machinima This Spartan Life).
03
Its central thesis is that the boundary between playing and remixing is theoretically hard to fix, and both can be understood through the player's playful attitude rather than the game as a stable formal system.
04
Play is located in the player's attitude rather than in the object, so any object can be played with and détournement emerges as a marked variant of that play, distinguished by salient markers that create distance from the source game.
05
Détournement works by reassigning meaning to game assets; using Bardzell's notion of subjective style, the paper shows Halo's tank and plasma pistol being resemanticized as characters and a medical scanner.
06
The author concludes that détournement is best understood as a discursive effect activated by stylistic "figures" rather than a closed category of works, and proposes rhetorical analysis of player-made remixes to reveal their formal interest and the rhetoric of game language.
07
The paper frames détournement as a fundamentally ludic practice that redefines the creator as a player.

Summary

Fanny Barnabé's paper argues that video game détournement, the remixing and repurposing of games through practices such as mods, machinima, let's play videos, speedruns, and fanfiction, should be understood as a marked form of ordinary play rather than as a separate activity. Drawing on the Situationist concept of détournement, which in its original form was not inherently subversive, the paper distinguishes two modes: "détournement of the game," which modifies the game object itself (as in the Kaizo Mario World hacks), and "détournement by playing," which transforms meaning through performance (as in the Halo machinima This Spartan Life). The central thesis is that the line between playing and remixing is difficult to fix theoretically, and that both can be understood through the player's playful attitude rather than through the game as a stable formal system.

The argument rests on the claim that play resides in the player's attitude instead of in the object, so any object can be played with and détournement emerges as a marked variant of that play. Building on rhetorical and game-studies frameworks, the paper holds that such remixes are distinguished by salient markers that create distance from the source game. The contrast between a Halo 3 frag montage, which makes minimal deviation from standard play, and the Red vs. Blue machinimas, which radically resemanticize the source material, illustrates this range.

Central to the analysis is the idea that détournement works through the reassignment of meaning to game assets. Using Bardzell's notion of subjective style, the paper shows how Halo's tank and plasma pistol can be resemanticized as characters and a medical scanner. The author concludes that détournement is best understood as a discursive effect activated by stylistic "figures" rather than as a closed category of works, and proposes that rhetorical analysis of player-made remixes could reveal both their formal interest and the underlying rhetoric of game language. The paper ultimately frames détournement as a fundamentally ludic practice that redefines the creator as a player.