Doctoral Thesis: While game worlds are created – affective portraits of the construction of space in a video game

In a time where our bodies are isolated from each other, our digital environment plays a more important role than ever. During the Corona pandemic, video gaming has reached new records and the sales of video games in the Nordic countries have significantly increased. Media is reporting that these difficult times can lead to a need of escapism, and due to the pandemic, the World Health Organization has begun to recommend people to play video games to maintain social distance. When we are encouraged to escape to game worlds, we need not only observe what these worlds might do with us – but also what we can do with them.

In order to understand how a sense of becoming is constructed and re-constructed in games, Laura Jaramillo is exploring how game worlds are created. By taking an affect theoretical perspective in her thesis, Laura is emphasizing the perceptible but often unspoken that circulates between bodies and potentially reshape subjects. In order to expand the understanding of the joint creation of a game space, she is following both formal game creators and gamers. This inclusive perspective is needed for a deeper understanding of how fictive realities are constructed.

The research will be presented as a monography in which Laura is using experimental ways of writing affect. The research methods are mainly nethnographical and auto-ethnographical, but interviews and document analysis are also included. Data is collected by following an organization for a year in their work with creating a game and by, thereafter, following gamers playing the game.

Keywords: video games, affect theory, nethnography, auto-ethnography, space, relational processes

Contact person

Laura Jaramillo
doktorand
laura.jaramillo@abo.fi