Abstract
The State of Player
I have recently moved to a new place and for the internet, I go to the technical library in Prague. I can answer my e-mails on my mobile phone, but to play a competitive multiplayer video game I need to have a stable connection. At first, I was embarrassed and tried to sit so that nobody could see what I was doing. But soon I don't care anymore. A part of the library is open 24 hours a day for people who are studying for important exams, and when I leave in the evening, I see another person playing a first-person shooter on a big gaming laptop.
Being a gamer today means being one of the 2.9 billion active gamers worldwide. There is not just one way to play, there are infinite ways. It does not necessarily constitute an identity, although it can. It is not a sub-culture, although it was in the past. The enigmatic figure of a video game player - a gamer - is the subject of this research.
I am a gamer myself. This personal involvement, combined with the lack of deeper and richer reflection in our society on such an emblematic figure of today's world, serves as the starting point for this research. Although people spend several hours a day playing games, there is little to no self-conception. Most players are pulled and dragged, they continue forward, they snap from one present to another, as if the playerโs consciousness has no room for anything else.
To get to know the fragmented and shape-shifting figures of a gamer, one must take into account the details of subjective experience. To approach such reality means to live through it and lose oneself - and to experiment with ways of sharing about it. The high degree of subjectivity and speculation, that is later involved in retrieving, and reliving observations is highly questionable from the perspective of hard science - but a productive task for the complementary discipline of artistic research.
Being a player is an immersive and diverse experience. By exploring these experiential traces, this research aims to trace the gamer in its many forms, creating access to this figure for the general public and, perhaps more importantly, for the gamers themselves.
Finally, by tracing these ways of being, I would like to create a space for negotiation - a certain emancipatory effect in terms of self-definition and self-awareness of the gamer. Thus, the transformative potential of this research lies in providing the gamer with agency in the question of how one wants to be a gamer, for what reasons, at what cost, and in what form.