NANO (Jul 2014)
Circuit Bending Videogame Consoles as a Form of Applied Media Studies
Abstract
This article raises a number of questions: Where do the parts on gaming circuit boards come from? Whose hands made them? Under what conditions? What happens to the materials in a device once we discard it? Perhaps predictably, these questions do not commonly come up when videogames are studied diegetically, based solely on what is expressed on the screen (Montfort; Kirschenbaum 27-28). However, the material study of hardware offers an approach that highlights material traces that may otherwise go unnoticed by gamers and scholars alike. Furthermore, it prompts an important question in the context of game studies: What do gamers and scholars tend to ignore when they are at once enthralled and distracted by the experiences afforded by the video, audio, and textual elements of games? As I argue below, circuit bending encourages a deep engagement with hardware that offers a materials-first approach and brings awareness to issues of exploitation not commonly raised and recorded by screen-centric analysis alone.
