Abstract:

Many digital gameplay practices involve the player being reflexive about their own actions. They may attempt to bring non-conscious dispositions to awareness as part of transforming their own play – an essential aspect of the askēsis (training, practice, or development) involved in improving play. If Foucault remarked that “it is the forms of reflexivity that constitute the subject as such”, we may ask: what are the features of these forms of reflexivity associated with digital gaming and what kind of subject might they entrain? Could they hone a discerning familiarity with habituation itself – a task that is perhaps no less than, as Clare Carlisle has remarked, the work of philosophy? Could it even be possible in a way that the practitioner is able to attend to their own habit-formation in non-gaming spheres of life?

These lofty hopes resonate with the hopes that have been pinned on aesthetic self-fashioning by thinkers such as Foucault and Nietzsche. It is, however, arguably beset with formidable difficulties. We face an environmental entrainment of our habits and forms of reflexivity so that they that tethered to commodified practices that dispose us to be loyal consumers of a franchise. Neoliberal imperatives of individual responsibility prime us to prefer optimized strategies which yield quantifiable gains and to adopt off-the-shelf strategies. Yet there perhaps comes a point in highly accomplished gameplay practices where the experience of the player ineluctably moves them beyond these habits. This talk will examine Magic: the Gathering Arena (2019) limited draft as a case study from which to explore these questions and to think whether the forms of player reflexivity and judgment involved may be thought to feature an aesthetic dimension.

Biography

Dr Feng Zhu is Senior Lecturer in Digital Games and Culture in the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. His research focuses on the significance of gaming practices as ways in which players carve out habits, dispositions, modes of perception, and relations to self. He is interested in understanding such processes as informing us about how we have always worked on ourselves and how there may be ethico-aesthetic possibilities to wander away from existing forms of subjectivity. He is the Associate Director of the Centre for Ecologies of Attention and Perception and the Lead of the Digital Humanities Game Lab.

Registration:

https://forms.gle/crBuC2Qq8t7xDEPT7

Free of Charge. R.S.V.P by 19 January 2026 (Monday)
 

Time:

14:00, 21 January 2026 (Wednesday)

Venue:

M7001, Level 7, Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre, City University of Hong Kong