Through the Ludic Glass : (Making Sense of Video Games as Algorithmic Spectacles)

Video game analyses have historically focused on the human act of play or on the events resulting from the player’s act. Until recently, spectating has remained an analytical domain of film theory and visual arts. In game studies, this perspective has changed, with the arrival of the phenomenon of gameplay spectating and game streaming on a mass scale, and its leakage into academic as well as popular consciousness. How does the spectacle change the analytical perspective towards video games as objects of scholarly analysis and video gaming as reflective practice? In this paper, I will approach the video game as an algorithmic spectacle and propose an analytical perspective to study this phenomenon, reaching out to theories of moving (digital) image proposed by the philosopher Vilém Flusser and the filmmaker Harun Farocki.