Computer gaming was not born sexist but was codified as an exclusively male practice as it peeled itself away from the rest of the burgeoning computer culture in the mid-1980s. This article traces the development of gaming’s gender bias through a discourse analysis of gaming magazines published in the United Kingdom between 1981 and 1995. In their early years (1981–1985), these publications present a milieu that was reflective on gender issues and concerned to include female participants. However, from 1987, the rhetorical framing of computer games, gaming and gamer performance was increasingly gender-exclusive and focused on the re-enforcement of stereotypically masculine values, albeit that much of this discourse had a humorous and ironic inflection. The article presents this as the gender-biased articulation of gaming discourse. Instead of viewing the gendering of computer games as something they inherited from previous kinds of games and activities, the article argues that the political economy of the gaming industry in the second half of the 1980s created specific conditions under which games and gaming were coded as exclusively masculine.

This article presents the idea of ludefaction as the negative underside of ludification. The project of transforming human practices into games to “enhance” their performance is related to new management and technology design practices that have been dominant since the 1980s. Studies suggest that this is an ambivalent process through which work comes to seem more attractive even as it makes more intense and invasive demands on its human subject. Beyond this, however, ludefaction grasps the way in which gamification intensifies exploitation in the, probably unprecedented, development of allowing power to tap into the radical imaginary, that is, the facility we have for creating an alternative, better world. A comparison of games with relational art is presented to clarify the stakes and suggest negative principles for progressive game design.

This paper will suggest that the society that devolves its communicative and aesthetic practices to informational technologies re-formats meaning and value in a way that deprives itself of a religious sensibility. It entertains the idea that that sensibility may be integral to our human condition and especially to the sense we have of a meaningful future. The question whether this problem, if it is one, traces to the technology or to its specific employment in neo-liberalism is also raised but probably not answered. George Steiner advances the hypothesis that “any coherent understanding of what language is and how language performs, that any coherent account of the capacity of human speech to communicate meaning and feeling is in the final analysis, underwritten by the assumption of God’s presence” [1, p.3]. A transcendent presence makes human communication through language possible. Central to his project of making us aware of this presence is the distinction Steiner draws between consumption and ‘ingestion’. We consume commodities, including the transient ephemera of mediatized culture, but ingest meaningful texts. Ingestion is a process of embodied learning, memorization. In reciting poems learned in our youth we enact the historical dimension of our society and ourselves. This argument rests upon a particular theory of language and its relation to the human that distinguishes it from mere information and in so doing separates communication from manipulation (the ‘moral’ dimension of Steiner’s theory). Linguistic meaning does not reduce to its logical or formal properties as these are grasped in the idea of a code but is rooted in the human body. Gesture, body and socius are, as Merleau-Ponty put it, the humus of an “original semantic thickness” possessed by natural language [2, p.234]. Meaning and value are ‘bodied forth’ [3, p.29] from this thickness. From the perspective of contemporary media theory, however, the notion of a weighty, embodied interpretation as opposed to a passive, superficial one is perhaps naïve. The distinction between consumption and ingestion seems too firmly drawn in an age when we have become used to actively consuming media – we dance the appropriate responses to video games, for example [4]. (Since the early 1980s this has included games with avowedly religious themes, including a version of the bible (Automata 1982)). Steiner addresses this challenge in later work. There he argues that, “…current changes in the experience of communication, of information, of knowledge, of the generation of meaning and of form are probably the most comprehensive and consequential since homo sapiens development of language itself” [5, p.217]. These changes are associated with Steiner’s main concern, namely that we seem to be “losing the future tense”. The informationalisation of communication and meaning-making liberates the imaginary from the symbolic in order to free pursuit of self-interest from any of the constraints associated with actually maintaining a coherent self. I will suggest that this is indicative of a change in the habitus of contemporary humans, in which dispositions and especially a specific experience of the temporal are standing in for ideology. Neo-liberalism [6] does not present itself as an ideology but is sedimented in individuals as a kind of expectant orientation addressed to the present (anticipation), commonly thematised as ‘maintaining a positive outlook’. This attitude is prior to any specific articulation and it maintains the human as a consumer and user of meanings, who bodies forth interpretations that are in his or her own interests. This sets the scene for a conflict of temporalities that underscores the antipathy between the informational and the religious. References and Notes Steiner, G. (1989) Real Presences Chicago: Chicago University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964) Signs North Western University Press. Benjamin, W. (1985) The Origins of German Tragic Drama London: Verso. Kirkpatrick, G. (2011) Aesthetic Theory and the Video Game Manchester: MUP. Steiner, G. (2001) Grammars of Creation London: Faber & Faber. Dardot, P. and Laval, C. (2014) The New Way of the World: On neo-liberal society London: Verso.

Feenberg’s conception of technical politics emphasizes the contingency of technical designs on contemporary choices. The resulting technology facilitates more choices in future, broadening the horizon on our possible interactions with the world. Thus far, Feenberg allies his position with optimistic instrumentalism, preserving critical theory from alliance with anti-technology positions. At the same time, however, Feenberg maintains that past technical decisions shape our current context and this involves the sedimentation of values associated with technology in the cultural foundations of social life. This means Feenberg’s technical politics requires a democratic framework to promote decisions aimed at producing better outcomes in the proximal, instrumental sense, but also needs reforms aimed at promoting more humanistic values through technology design. The first is would be consistent with the establishment of formal procedures aimed at the democratization of technology design but the second is more problematic, raising the question of what the humanistic values in question are. Feenberg (1999; 2002; 2010) delegates this issue to the aesthetic critique of technology design but this assumes inherent affinities between political, ethical and aesthetic values that may not hold. Feenberg’s suggestion is that various forms of modernism, in which the natural and the technical are blended in the creation of environments that work better for humans, rather than more efficient machines, should inspire a re-framing of design as a humanistic practice (and a practice of humanizing the world). In essence he maintains that the meaning of rationalizing the world, which is a fundamental part of technology’s mission, needs to be broadened by the inclusion of aesthetic principles at the normative heart of technology. The paper interrogates the meaning of ‘aesthetic critique’ in this context and suggests that this dimension of critical theory of technology should not involve the search for a more ‘positive’ or humanistic technological enframing but should rather limit itself to clarifying the place of technology design in a more progressive constellation of human-nature-society. References and Notes Feenberg, A. (1999) Questioning Technology London. Feenberg, A. (2002) Transforming Technology Oxford Feenberg, A. (2010) Between Reason and Experience: Essays in technology and modernity London.