Play the Body Electric: Sex and Desire in Indie and Experimental Single-Player Sexual Videogames

"Play the Body Electric: Sex and Desire in Indie and Experimental Single-Player Sexual Videogames," blends feminist, queer, and Deleuzo-Guattarian theories of affect to analyze how single-player indie and art videogames make sexual meaning. Using textual analysis and close playing of fourteen indie, art, and experimental videogames as well as examples of avant-garde film, science fiction, and ceramic and performance arts, I examine the way these videogames use visuals, haptics, rhythms, sounds, colours to maximize the sexual affordances of single-player videogames. In Chapters 1 and 2, I present an affect-based approach to single-player sexual videogames rooted in the concept of desire and desiring machines as a productive alternative to dominant harm- and risk-centered frameworks that position sexual videogames as potentially risky, anti-social, or dangerous. Chapter 3, I make a case for thinking about the sexual capacities of videogames themselves, rather than thinking of sexual videogames as poor facsimiles of 'real' sex or human bodies. I suggest that abstraction is one technique that developers of indie and art videogames use as a way of taking technologically mediated sexual pleasure seriously. Chapters 4 and 5 explore the sensory experience of playing sexual videogames. In these chapters, I dig deeply into central mechanisms of meaning-making – touch, sound, and rhythm – to tease out the affordances of videogames in making sexual meaning through onanistic play. Finally, Chapter 6 explores how surveillance and platform governance become assembled as part of desiring machines. I argue that while single-player videogames may not be social, they are relational. Approaches rooted in assemblage theory require us to attend to the complex ways that single-player videogames intersect with systems of power, players’ previous experiences, and a host of other complex assemblages. My dissertation outlines an interdisciplinary approach and theoretical framework for analyzing sex in videogames and taking their affordances seriously in their own right. In doing so, it emphasizes the sexual affects, feelings, and pleasures inherent in the embodied act of playing videogames.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Legal Studies

Grantor dc:publisher

Carleton University

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Ketterling, Emily Jean

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright © 2024 the author(s). Theses may be used for non-commercial research, educational, or related academic purposes only. Such uses include personal study, distribution to students, research and scholarship. Theses may only be shared by linking to the Carleton University Institutional Repository and no part may be copied without proper attribution to the author; no part may be used for commercial purposes directly or indirectly via a for-profit platform; no adaptation or derivative works are permitted without consent from the copyright owner.

Language dc:language.iso

en

DOI

10.22215/etd/2024-16024

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:carleton.scholaris.ca:20.500.14718/43315