Visions of the material body: Twitch.tv and post-phenomenology

Abstract

This article considers what broadcasts of video game play, transmitted through livestreaming platform Twitch.tv, can contribute to discussions around technology, materiality, embodiment and affect in videogaming – an interdisciplinary set of concerns for researchers in the humanities and social sciences. Specifically, I outline the methodological value of Twitch as a tool for addressing video game play as a post-phenomenological concern – providing a perspective of play as not emerging from an autonomous human subject, but from exchanges between humans and non-humans. To demonstrate this, this article discusses observations of livestreamed play of the popular PC-based rhythm game Osu. These observations spotlight how video game play operates as a messy and ongoing relation between bodies and technology, as well as demonstrates how Twitch streams can attend to the often taken-for-granted relations between non-human objects in play, which in turn shape the status of the body as it meets the game.