Claudia Lo, Gender & Digital Culture

Organs of Play: an exploration of video game controller discourse

In the growing field of game studies, there has been a great deal of effort expended on highlighting the relationship between player, screen, and console. However, there is another component that has been left out of this equation, and that is the video game controller. My thesis is an exploration of video game controller discourse: who speaks of it, how the controller is constructed, and how this construction impacts us as players and more broadly, what this might tell us about the relationship between ourselves and our technology. I do so via an analysis of marketing materials as well as considering contemporary scholarship, using queer theories of embodiment and Foucaultian understandings of discourse as theoretical guides.