Just arrived from my first participation in an international DiGRA conference. Lovely time with colleagues from the game studies community! DiGRA is the major international association for scholars and practictioners who research digital games and associated phenomena. I presented my paper (as you see on the image) in a session about "Digital Data Clouds". The session was chaired by Martin Roth, who had plenty to contribute to the discussion, and I was glad to present my piece just before Darshana Jayemanne, Stuart Anderson, Heikki Tyni and Olli Sotamaa presented theirs. It was the second time I had the opportunity to attend to a presentation from Heikki and Olli, and I find very productive resonances between our projects. In my talk I proposed to explore gaming from a media infrastructure studies perspective, articulating why I think this is an important approach at the moment, especially considering the case of cloud gaming infrastructure, how it failed so far, and how it is currently being developed. As I was kindly provoked by one of the peer reviewers of the conference to show what could be the practical contributions of this approach to Game Studies, in the second part of the presentation I also suggested three particular methodological contributions that media infrastructure studies could make to research on gaming. In the final part, I pointed out why I think the phenomenon of cloud gaming should be observed through interdisciplinary lenses. In order to spur a debate on the subject, I argued that the successive failures to implement cloud gaming under a platform business model opened up a paramount opportunity to entangle the research on digital games with media infrastructure studies (Starosielski 2015, Parks and Starosielski 2015, Plantin and Punathambekar 2018), and in particular with the media-philosophical perspective that Peters (2015) calls "infrastructuralism". On the level of infrastructure, these entanglements encompass not only the technical milieu of digital platforms but also associated regulatory, bureaucratic, environmental and geopolitical issues. For instance, the transnational companies providing scalable cloud gaming services have to cope with nationwide, locally-based energy providers or build their own facilities to supply their demand from local resources. At this level, challenges touch the more substantial layer of critical infrastructure, energy sourcing and natural resource management.
To understand the sociotechnical complexity of gaming infrastructures, one should also consider how the energy metabolism sustaining cloud gaming services involve matters of political geography. As historian of technology Per Högselius (2018, 10) puts it, “the geopolitics of energy is not only about the energy that is in and on the Earth – fossil fuels, uranium, forests, winds and waves. It concerns the long-distance movements of energy”, encompassing the pipelines, ships and transmission towers needed to establish an efficient trade chain, as well as the places where energy in its diverse forms is produced, refined, stored and consumed. As digital gaming also involves significant geoeconomic assets, its study should not disregard the interplay of geopolitics and energy infrastructures that enables the practice as a habitual, planetary-scale communication technique. Therefore, interdisciplinary perspectives become necessary to better understand how the phenomena of cloud gaming intermingle with the sociotechnical underpinnings of contemporary societies.
0 Comments
|
AuthorThis blog is meant to provide a space for discussing the geophysical as well as the the imaginary entanglements between media infrastructures and organic environments. In the coming months, it will be dedicated to my current project, Cloud Gaming Atlas, which is particularly interested in observing and interrogating the infrastructures developed for cloud gaming initiatives in regard to their environmental implications. Additionally, it should also gather information about events and publications related to my project at the Zukunftskolleg and the Department of Literature, Art and Media of the University of Konstanz. Archives
January 2024
Categories |