Benjamin Nicoll’s research while affiliated with Queensland University of Technology and other places

Consciousness raising seems to be the most pressing task facing any project for environmental sustainability today. A psychoanalytic interpretation of the climate crisis, however, reveals that a far more urgent challenge is recognizing that we might be deriving jouissance, or unconscious enjoyment, from the very worsening of the crisis. This article contends that videogames are the ideal medium through which to grasp the form that our unconscious enjoyment takes—and, if mobilized against self-destructive capitalism, the emancipatory form our enjoyment could take—in the Anthropocene. Drawing on an analysis of the videogame Donut County, it makes two psychoanalytic interventions in ecocritical theory. The first is that any theory of the climate crisis must account for the subject of the unconscious—not as a nature-dominating individual, but as a hole in material reality. The second is that any project for environmental sustainability must avow the subject’s death-driven enjoyment rather than repress or avoid it.

It seems intuitive to conflate the gamic gaze with the player’s act of looking. To do so, however, would be to inherit from the first wave of psychoanalytic screen theory a misleading presupposition that the gaze is synonymous with the look. Taking influence from new Lacanian film theorists such as Joan Copjec and Todd McGowan, this article contends that the gamic gaze is an object in the visual field of play that disrupts the mastery of the player’s look. I develop this argument through an analysis of the 2017 videogame Gorogoa. By confronting the player with the gaze, Gorogoa reveals that the jouissance (enjoyment) of videogame play consists in the player’s unconscious drive to fail rather than their conscious wish for pleasure or mastery. To borrow terminology from Copjec, the gamic gaze marks the point of the player’s culpability—rather than visibility—in the visual field of play.

Videogame memories are not simply mental records of what happened in the past; they are also texts to be interpreted. Taking a psychoanalytic approach, this article conducts a textual analysis of 115 recorded acts of videogame memory from Checkpoints, a podcast that ran from 2015 to 2018. Analysing subjects’ responses to the question ‘what was your first experience of a videogame?’, it argues that what is absent from videogame memory – what cannot be remembered – has unconscious significance. What cannot be remembered gives rise to the fantasmatic structure of videogame memory. By mapping this fantasmatic structure across memories of the first videogame experience, authority figures, separation and individuation, and childhood fears and phobias, the article argues for the necessity of a psychoanalytic approach to videogame memory. Psychoanalysis pays close attention to the subjective dimension of our recollections – in this case, that which speaks beyond the historical content of videogame memory.

In this chapter, we use Nintendo Amiibo to interrogate the evolving intersection of crossmedia products and children’s cultures of play. Amiibo figurines are based on characters from various Nintendo franchises, such as Super Mario Bros., and use NFC tags to connect wirelessly to Nintendo’s Switch, 3DS and Wii U platforms. In their production, promotion and everyday use, the figurines solicit playful practices that cut across physical objects and digital spaces. Drawing on interface analysis, promotional discourses and videos of play on YouTube, this analysis highlights how Amiibos are framed as a means to envelop children in Nintendo’s crossmedia ecosystem by reinforcing a physical connection between child, toy, software, platform and intellectual property. Informed by the concept of postdigital play, we account for this reciprocal dynamic between children’s everyday play and the branded world of IoT products, and we point to emerging questions around children’s data literacies.

This chapter describes the ‘circuits of cultural software’ as a framework that guides the book and its analysis; offers a preliminary definition of game engines; and introduces the Unity game engine as the book’s core case study. It also discusses key terms such as cultural software, proprietary and commercial game engines, workflow, grain, literacy, and governance, and situates the book in relation to existing research on videogame production, game engines, and software culture. It briefly discusses Unity’s place in Australia’s videogame industry—which is where the research for the book was conducted—and provides a chapter outline.

This chapter argues that Unity’s ‘conditions of existence’ are predicated on a long history of developer- and player-oriented videogame-making tools, practices, and communities, and that the engine’s business model is consonant with a broader ‘platformization of cultural production’ in today’s media industries. It describes the emergence of proprietary game engines in the early 1990s in terms of a broader shift from programmer-centric development to content-centric development. It argues that Unity builds on long-standing agitations for ‘democratized’ tools in videogame development, such as those associated with modding scenes and indie development. It then discusses Unity’s platform-based business model, touching on the engine’s licensing structure; its revenue model; its asset store; and its attempt to establish spaces of ‘affective intermediation’ in videogame culture.

This chapter considers Unity’s aesthetic impact on the cultural work it is used to produce, developing the metaphor of ‘grain’, from woodworking, to consider how users are oriented towards particular design methodologies. The chapter first considers how videogames inherit a nebulous ‘look and feel’ from their engines. It then charts the interrelationship between the design principles that are developed within a medium and the design standards that are imposed by software and that, in Unity’s case, become design principles. Finally, the chapter considers Unity’s dominant design standard of iterative design, which encourages Unity users to take advantage of existing assets. Here, the look and feel of a game engine is directly caught up with the aura, or lack thereof, of an individual videogame work.

This chapter considers how cultural software situate and mediate the labour processes and skills of their users. Unity, the chapter argues, positions itself as a metaplatform for the coordination of workflows that are intensely individualized and distributed across multiple software environments. The chapter begins with a close analysis of Unity’s software environment and a consideration of how it encourages a ‘component-oriented’ approach to design. It then considers how this approach redirects the videogame development pipeline, decentring the role of the programmer in the videogame development team. Rather than simply ‘empowering’ non-programmers, however, the final section considers how Unity’s coordination of workflows requires developers to streamline, coordinate, and individualize their own labour processes, thus contributing to a broader reimaging of creative work under capitalism.

This chapter considers the different ways that audiences invest meanings in a cultural software. Inherent in any of these understandings of the role and mediations of a cultural software are assumptions as to just which skills, knowledges, and aesthetic decisions are fundamental to the process of creating works within any given medium. This chapter thus considers the literacies that mediate the perceptions of three different groups towards Unity: videogame developers, tertiary students and educators, and the enthusiast videogame press. Through an overview of these varied perspectives of what it means to use Unity, this chapter provides ways of considering how different literacies influence different understandings, positive and negative, of the role of a cultural software within a cultural field and within society more broadly.