"Good game?" : young people, geopolitics and violence(s) in the ludic assemblages of battle royale videogames and streams

Abstract

This thesis focuses on the young people who play, view and live-stream Call of Duty: Warzone and other Battle Royale videogames, to understand how geopolitics emerges through what I term ludic assemblages, and also to explore the affects/effects of this on young people. Building on emerging scholarship within the sub-discipline of popular geopolitics, this thesis will argue that processes of globalisation, have further entangled the young people who play, view and live-stream Battle Royale videogames and Twitch broadcasts in multitudinous processes of what Hardt and Negri (2000, 2004) term “Empire” (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2009). Specifically, in critically examining the (geopolitical) agencies, ambiguities and subjectivities of young gamers, this thesis attends to the ways in which they are involved in the co-constitution of ludic assemblages, through ‘everyday’, ‘violent’ and playful practices of videogaming and Twitch streaming. Furthermore, this thesis explores how young people as complex subjects negotiate the social effects/affects of these processes of militainment and ludocapitalism in their everyday lives, mapping the multiplicity of violence(s) enacted on and by young gamers (with)in these ludic assemblages of Battle Royale videogames and streams. In attending to the ludic in formation, I undertook an innovative, qualitative, mixed methods approach going under the label of assemblage ethnography (Ghoddousi and Page 2020), using participant observation (in digital and physical spaces), semi-structured interviews and autoethnography to investigate how the young people who play, spectate and live-stream Battle Royale videogames and Twitch streams, co-constitute and live geopolitics (Dittmer and Gray 2010). By moving away from the abstract, ‘textual’ focus of prior scholarship on how popular geopolitical discourse shapes the everyday, to instead engage with the ways in which young people are themselves co-constitutive of geopolitics, this thesis unpacks ambiguous notions of, and the relations between, play, geopolitics and violence.