ABSTRACT
The concept of counterplay was first applied to video games by Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, who saw video-game development and, by extension, the consumption and use of video games by players as an act of “Empire”, an exploitative structure in which value was extracted from workers and players alike (2005). For Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, “Digital games are produced by and productive of the multi-layered arrangement of military, economic, and subjective forces associated with the form of imperial power. …” This, through concepts such as “work as play” and the commercial adoption of game mods, constituted an “apparatus of capture”.
