Sacred Games - Becoming Gods : Priming digital game ethics

Sammanfattning: The point of departure for my research is a perceived breach and resulting dissonance between how digital games and other parts of society that are similar in form, enact certain aspects of life. This shift was made especially clear in massive multiplayer games in 2004 with the release of World of Warcraft, the design of which panders to cultural weak points, rather than attempting to mimic them. Digital games are far-reaching. In February 2019, ‘Apex Legends’ reached over 10 million players in less than 72 hours. Nonetheless, the idea of games as separate from the ‘real’ is persisting. Digital games have become a cyclopean gathering of liminality, and there are still no form-based ethics emerging, from either industry or society. Even though society is now undergoing the same abstracting digitisation, that has been a base for game design for a long time, there is a continuing separation in the knowledge applying to games or ‘reality’. The purpose of this thesis is to explore different ontological, epistemological, and ethical understandings of digital games as media, technology, modes of experience, and form. This is undertaken by using the situated and reality producing grating1 of technoscience, together with an eclectic range of concepts such as media as a message, agential reality, liminal phases, anticipation, and ergon. The research delineates a primer for applied studies within the rhizomatic structure of digital games, digitisation, technoscience, and media-technology. In accordance with this aim, the thesis has a fragmented, non-linear, and mosaic approach. This licentiate thesis is a compilation of three papers with a complementary introduction and an epilogue.