Complexity, Personification and Repetition: Aesthetic Abstraction in International Relations Theory and Game Studies

Abstract

It is no longer a novel observation to claim that video games have become an increasingly ubiquitous and influential form of popular media. Along with this increased public presence, a relatively new and relatively small body of scholarly literature has developed around placing games within their cultural contexts ("game studies"). Given how frequently games make reference to key topics in the field (war, trade, civilization, etc.) what or how the study of video games might contribute to international relations (IR) continues to be a question worth exploring deeply. It is the goal of this project to undertake such a study, with the specific aim of addressing what contribution video games as aesthetic objects can make to IR theory. This project is particularly interested in how games about politics offer multiple ways to navigate their narratives, and how this open formal structure offers unique ways of thinking about politics through ludic representation. Framed on the one hand by efforts in IR theory to turn to interdisciplinarity (namely the "aesthetic turn") and theories in game studies literature outlining the aesthetic dimensions of the medium on the other (namely the neo-baroque and procedural rhetorics), it will do so by conducting a formalist analysis of several "political simulators" with an eye to investigating the multiple ways games depict their narratives, the possible conceptual relationship between traversing these open structures and what this understanding of play might mean in political theoretical terms.