Game Works by

Game Works:

dbschlarb — 2025-06-12 08:45:21 UTC

My current project, tentatively titled Game Works, examines the cultural work performed by digital games, also known as video or computer games. The term “work” in the title functions as both analytical metaphor and research paradigm: As digital procedural objects, games generate meaning by prompting players to exert effort to make them unfold. Through their affordances, games draw players into a collaborative, cybernetic dance of multi-layered analytical activities and semiotic manipulations of the game world. These activities, as theorists David Golumbia and Alexander Galloway have shown, resemble information work more than they do play. Games help players negotiate culture by engendering activities that straddle the line between work and play, to create meaning. Meaning, in other words, emerges in the collaborative analytical and semiotic tasks performed by means of games’ design. My project, then, theorizes this meaning-making activity specific to digital games and then proceeds to apply the resulting insights to examining the way games function within established paradigms such as ecology, class, gender, and race, but with a special focus on how games make accessible for us the technical logics of algorithms, software, and computation as the operate in these cultural fields.

Understanding the effort of playing digital games, as I define it here, helps us comprehend the shifting and often blurred delineations between the concepts work and play in the contemporary information and knowledge economies. Because of their procedural nature—the way they make us perform task in predefined ways—games can help us understand contemporary mechanism of social and political control. However, play need not be pernicious. Games can also make us inhabit agencies other than our own, helping us comprehend identities and experiences that differ from our own and allowing us to access otherwise opaque processes in the material world.

I begin explaining significance of this kind of effort-based, ludic meaning-making, or “game work,” by defining and theorizing the effort players exert in and through games. My project then situates games in a specifically American cultural history characterized by the shift to the postindustrial information and knowledge economy since the 1970s. If we want to understand cultural phenomena such as workplace gamification and digitization, I propose, we must consider game work in the context of the history of the American political economy and its policies regarding digital technology and information work. In a third step, I analyze games under the cultural studies rubrics outline above.

Digital Information Work and the Political Economy of Play

dbschlarb — 2025-06-12 08:51:50 UTC

Biographie

dbschlarb — 2025-06-12 08:52:58 UTC

Damien B. Schlarb, Ph.D., vertritt in 2024/25 den vakanten Lehrstuhl für Amerikanistik / American Studies an der Universität Regensburg. Er arbeitet als wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter für Amerikanistik an der Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz im Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies, wo er Kurse in amerikanischer Literatur und Kultur unterrichtet. Seinen Doktorgrad (Doctor of Philosophy, Ph.D.) erwarb er an der Georgia State University (Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A.), wo er während seines Promotionsstudiums sieben Jahre lang lebte und arbeitete. Seit 2009 unterrichtet er sowohl an U.S.-amerikanischen als auch an deutschen Universitäten Kurse zu amerikanischer Literatur und Kultur, kritischer Theory, akademischem Schreiben (Englisch) und Digitalen Spielen.

Zu seinen Forschungsschwerpunkten zählen amerikanische Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts, die Verbindung von Literatur & Religion, Romantik, Kurzgeschichten, literarischer Postsäkularismus, Afrofuturismus und Videospiele.

In der akademischen Selbsverwaltung sammelte er durch verschiedene Vertretungen großer Lehrstühle (Regensburg, Mainz) Erfahrung. Zudem war er als Layout-Editor für die wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift South Atlantic Review (South Atlantic Modern Language Association) und als Managing Editor für Amerikastudien / American Studies (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Amerikanistik) tätig.

Sein erstes Buch, Melville’s Wisdom: Religion, Skepticism, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century America, ist 2021 bei Oxford University Press erschienen. Im Rahmen seiner Habilitation (2nd book) arbeitet er an einem Projekt in Digital Game Studies.

Semiotics, Analysis, Play

dbschlarb — 2025-06-12 09:23:27 UTC