UC Riverside

This dissertation identifies the digital mediation of the technological carnivalesque in mobile smartphone, console, and PC games. Video game and mobile technology clearly show the human in transition, as phasic, and in a constant state of ontogenesis and technogenesis. The technological carnivalesque renders moot fixed notions of human identity regarding gender, sexuality, race, and class, and instead works to expose the cultural practices and technologies that construct, police, and exploit these fixed notions of human subjectivity and identity. Therefore, it is crucial that notions of human subjectivity and technicity are thoughtfully and critically approached, inviting an expansive and unprecedented future for human subjectivity that welcomes a collective approach to the human that emerges in unthinkably radical forms. Each chapter highlights and examines a different digital game or digital media text, emphasizing the transformative dialogic that operates between users, game developers, and hardware and software. Chapter 2 studies Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl (1995), a hypertext that exposes the gendering of information and bodies in western culture and uses the hyperlink as a point of feminist critique to understand the body and embodiment as phasic, technically contingent, and transforming. Chapter 3 analyzes the id Software’s first-person shooter, DOOM (1993), as contributing to a radical, open-source code model of information sharing over a budding internet of the early 90’s. id’s open-source ethos stands in direct dialogic contrast to that of Nintendo’s Read-Only Memory software, and this dialogic draws into critical question the desires and logics regarding the distribution of human technics within late-stage capitalism. Chapter 4 and 5 analyze two major mobile games: Pokémon GO and Animal Crossing: New Horizons and discuss the unprecedented transformative influence that mobile games hold due to their massive implantation via global smartphone networks. Ultimately, the project attests to the ongoing importance of digital media hardware and software as a crucial site of emerging ontogenesis and technogenesis. Moreover, the project demonstrates the real potential for comparative and critical approaches to media to offer valuable new models for understanding how human ontogenesis and technogenesis emerges through the embodied practices surrounding media and media interfaces.