Global Futures Seminar: Pasi Väliaho Event

Video Games, Neural Selves and Biopolitical Visual Economies

A generic description of a couple of seconds of playing a first-person shooter like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2011) on PlayStation®3 might go as follows: “I crouch down and hide myself behind the wall, lean to my left to get a better view of the situation; feeling a bullet hitting my shoulder unaware where it came from, I panic, jump up and start to fire.”

This talk addresses the ways television and computer screens have today become occupied by a multiplicity of pre-verbal visual-kinetic images that literally make us move by evoking fundamental feelings of arousal and kinaesthesia at the heart of self-experience. Focusing on the visuality of video games, and the politics thereof, the purpose of the talk is two-fold. 

First, drawing on contemporary neuroscience, it analyzes the evocative power of video game imagery to pattern motor actions and the proprioceptive organization of selfhood.

The talk argues that neuroscientific conceptualizations come across as indispensable in addressing the complex dynamics of embodiment involved in gameplay, in particular the ways in which the “sub-representational” visuality of video games taps into the brain’s simulational power to predict and adapt to new situations. 

Secondly, the talk discusses the mechanisms of repetition, reiteration and standardization of cognitive and perceptual capacities that video games implement in plotting agency in today’s neoliberal biopolitics. Video game imagery, the talk puts forward, should be understood as part of a larger visual economy shaping subjectivities today – a visual economy based on a future-oriented, preemptive logic that structures our lived realities, ranging from virtualized “wars on terror” to the (ir)rationalities of finance capitalism.