Weird Encounters in Virtual Worlds: Towards a theory of performative, anarchic counterplay as resistance

This thesis suggests a basis for a new theoretical framework for performative and anarchic counterplay. Counterplay has been used in game studies to describe tactics and practices that are not intended by the designers of the game. Video games are culturally and artistically important medium – in addition to being a thoroughly capitalist one. My aim has been to search for new practices that have the potential to challenge hegemonic structures that do in many ways shape our understanding of our current society. Approaching gameplay from the point of view of performance creates new openings for both game studies and performance studies.

The theoretical framework comes from performance studies and games studies, enriched with posthumanist and new materialist strands. The material for this thesis has been collected from autoethnographic gameplay experimentation as well as from ‘gameplay as performance’ workshops organized for university students. The results have been published in four research articles, which demonstrate the progress of this research project from individual experiences towards new suggestions of anarchic, performative counterplay. Three of the articles deal with different adaptations of and experiments with the concept of counterplay. One of the articles suggests a taxonomy for analyzing the use of video games in performances, performance in video games, video games as performances and gameplay as performance. Together, the first three articles comprise a framework of performative counterplay. The fourth article then develops this framework further and introduces the concept of performative, anarchic counterplay.

Performative counterplay describes practices that engage with a specific game by applying the frame of performance into gameplay. It shifts the focus from the content of the game beyond the game to the rhizome of humans and non-humans, performance and gameplay. Anarchic counterplay takes a step further and forgets all conventions of gameplay altogether: it produces meanings by colliding norms and by embracing the randomness and the gratuitousness of the gameplay/performance rhizome. This thesis establishes new speculative practices that have the potential to challenge existing structures and hierarchies, both in the context of gameplay and performance.