Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

Discussing the preliminary findings of a digital ethnographic field research conducted with gamers from Türkiye, this paper analyzes how competitive multiplayer digital games function as fields of subjectification, reshaping social relations through new regimes of the body and affective flows.

Paper long abstract

Historically, games has functioned as a fundamental catalyst for the constitution, transmission, and reinforcement of social relations. As Johan Huizinga (1938) posited, culture does not merely contain play; it arises in and as play. In the contemporary era, digitally mediated play continues this trajectory, serving as a primary site for the production and mediation of sociality. While early digital games facilitated the "softening" of the transition from distant computational machines to everyday domestic tools (Jagoda, 2020), contemporary ludic artifacts do more than encourage technological adoption; they function as sophisticated fields of subjectification and production of social relations. Through networked competition, collaborative teamplay, and participatory fan cultures, digital games enforce a new regime of the body — characterized by high cognitive attention and minimal physical kinesis — while orchestrating affective flows between hardware, software, and the player (Anable, 2018). These systems necessitate and produce novel social configurations, ranging from digital comraderie to the intensification of polarization. Consequently, these dynamics create new forms of interaction that is potentially open to new forms of socialization but often reproduce, reinforce, or exacerbate existing divisions -mostly concerning race, class, gender- found in offline societies. Drawing on preliminary findings from a qualitative study funded by Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, including semi-structured interviews (n=10) with Turkish gamers and participant observation, this paper analyzes how competitive multiplayer digital games facilitate the production and reproduction of digitally mediated social relations.