British DiGRA
In the summer of 2021, I wrote and presented a paper for the British DiGRA Conference called The Fuel Rats —An Affective Mutual Aid Network Against Galactic Capitalism. In it, I explore the formation, operations, and structure of the Fuel Rats, a player group in the MMO Elite Dangerous. I draw delve into the anarchist principles the group was founded on and how this continues to exist in spite of the game’s hyper-capitalist world and mechanics. From there I relate the group to the real world and what lessons we can learn from them about community support and the possibilities of building a life detached from capitalism.
Research @ Games @ Brunel
In 2019 I took part in an event at Brunel University led by Alan Butler focusing on Photographical agency in games. As part of this event, I produced the above piece of photography using the surveillance systems in WatchDogs 2 to criticise surveillance both in games and in our lives.
As part of the Research @ Games @ Brunel event the following year I presented this work, along with others produced at the event, while also exploring how it had reshaped the way I play games.
Particularly I focused on The Diary of Mark Wright, an in-character journal I created for my character in ProjectZomboid (a thing I still do whenever I play the game). This started my interest in alternative and subversive styles of play is what led to the papers mentioned above and below.
Working Hard or Hardly Working: An Analysis of the Relationship between Work, Labour and Play
Working Hard or Hardly Working is the longest piece of academic writing I’ve created. It was written as part of the final year of my bachelor’s degree and defines a new type of video game called working games which earn this name from their shared focus on simulating potential real-world jobs in their core gameplay loops. After defining this genre I then delve into how it reflects real-world attitudes towards jobs and labour through analysing how these concepts are presented in working games and the relationship between the job being emulated and the player’s societal class.
From this point, I explore wider societal concepts in relation to working games, particularly, gender and emotional labour, and conclude by exploring alternative representations of labour in games that goes against the norms of the genre.
While this paper covers a really broad range of topics I’m really proud of the analysis I was able to do there. Particularly, drawing connections between seemingly unrelated games like Viscera Cleanup Detail and Florence was a lot of fun. In fact, I had some many concepts I wished to discuss that this quite easily could have been a book rather than a single paper.
Portfolio | Daniel Cox 