The Object and the Code: Analyzing Video Games through Software Studies and Speculative Realism

The article deals with the analysis of the ludic and mechanical aspects of the video games using Levi Bryant’s notion of onticology. It expands the Bryant’s idea that the being is composed entirely of machines or processes, and treats a video game as a collective of objects that communicate with each other through various codes. The main focus of this approach is to analyze the instances in which the said objects present a certain type of self-alienation, independency and agency that allow for a continuous reconfiguration of the states in which a video game object can be found. The various scripts and their role in altering the communication patterns within the game mechanics are investigated in the context of bots, regarded as both automatic prothesis of the human agents and autonomous interpreters of the games’ implicit rules. Cases of speedruns, glitches and particular uses of the basic C++ language syntax are also considered as the examples of events in which the hidden properties of the objects form a collective process of a video game. On such grounds, this paper discusses the possible removal of distinct ontological domains of subject and object in the context of object-oriented philosophy, taking into account the fluid hierarchy of beings and their mutual inaccessibility.
 

The article deals with the analysis of the ludic and mechanical aspects of the video games using Levi Bryant’s notion of onticology. It expands the Bryant’s idea that the being is composed entirely of machines or processes, and treats a video game as a collective of objects that communicate with each other through various codes. The main focus of this approach is to analyze the instances in which the said objects present a certain type of self-alienation, independency and agency that allow for a continuous reconfiguration of the states in which a video game object can be found. The various scripts and their role in altering the communication patterns within the game mechanics are investigated in the context of bots, regarded as both automatic prothesis of the human agents and autonomous interpreters of the games’ implicit rules. Cases of speedruns, glitches and particular uses of the basic C++ language syntax are also considered as the examples of events in which the hidden properties of the objects form a collective process of a video game. On such grounds, this paper discusses the possible removal of distinct ontological domains of subject and object in the context of object-oriented philosophy, taking into account the fluid hierarchy of beings and their mutual inaccessibility.