The characteristics of computer games are a question of media environments. The trilogy on media and play practices published by David Sudnow in the late 1970s and early 1980s demonstrates as much. Across the three texts, practices of jazz piano play, writing with keyboards, and playing with an Atari game are in contact with each other. It is symptomatic that research on games and play has thus far mostly dealt with Sudnow’s Atari text. Placed side by side in a cluster, however, the three texts ask entirely different questions.

Playing computer games comes with technical requirements. With reference to games, the “technical” mostly means the microelectronic: chips, memory, frame rates, graphics processing – anything that can be increased or enhanced and therefore lends itself to escalating, masculinist fantasies and promises of “technical” progress. But the technicity of computer games encompasses many more, and even more complex, matters. Bodies, controllers and consoles folding into and around each other, the way games feel to the touch, the way figures and bodies are being built, sorted, and the ways they move: all of this is part of the technical dimension of computer games.

My dissertation project is concerned with the body techniques players have to learn, and and the practices of play they perform. Following an approach informed by practice theory, media theory and media autoethnography, case studies of the cardboard models and folding instructions of Nintendo Labo, the zippers and vibrations of Astro’s Playroom, the logics of sorting (out) bodies in character editors and sperm banks, and the techniques of walking and delivering parcels, my project focuses on practices that precede the stability of computer games as a singular medium.

Laura Laabs is research associate at the University of Freiburg, where she works at the Institute for Media Culture Studies. Her work currently focuses on computer games and the practice turn in media theory. In her dissertation, she writes and plays with cardboard boxes, elephant trunks, zippers, faces, weather maps, mail carriers, and carrier bags. Additional interests include feminist media theory and STS, office and home media, embroidery art and haptics/tactility as modes of aesthetic experience. She is part of the editorial team of “Paidia. Zeitschrift für Computerspielforschung”. Laura Laabs was a member of the Graduiertenkolleg “Configurations of Film” from 2020 to 2023.

laura.laabs[at]mkw.uni-freiburg.de