ABSTRACT
Marleena Huuhka’s chapter, “Journeys in Intensity: Human and Non-Human Co-Agency, Neuropower and Counterplay in Minecraft”, revisits Chapter 9’s idea that the relations between humans and nonhumans could be viewed as a type of Deleuzo-Guattarian assemblage, and explores the human-machine cooperation conducted in the digital environments of Minecraft from this perspective. Playing video games is thus described as an activity that combines various agents, materialities, and species into operations that produce pleasure, but which – at the same time – also enable oppressive, colonialist, and violent practices inside as well as outside of the fictional worlds of the games. The chapter’s argumentation draws especially on the concept of counterplay, which refers to the type of gameplay that somehow obstructs the rules or goals of the game being played. The concept has been previously discussed by Thomas Apperley as well as by Hanna Wirman and Rika Nakamura, but here, Huuhka identifies two entirely new practices of counterplay that allow, or even aim at, deconstructing the inherent logics of video games.
