Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is about the videogame using concepts borrowed and adapted from the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to create a new plane of thought appropriate to the form. Deleuze and Guattari discusses that virtual is distinct from the concept of virtual reality, it is a virtue of becoming, of affect and motion, that has little in common with digital technologies as Massumi explains: Equating the digital with the virtual confuses the really apparitional with the artificial. Videogames were once the byword for low culture. Nintendo, which dominated the industry for the best part of a decade, were considered by some the saccharin entertainment behemoth sweetening their sinister purpose to colonise the dreams of American children with cute avatars and bright colours.