‘People are robots, too’: Expert gaming as autoplay

Abstract

Abstract This article theorizes gaming expertise as a form of automated play (autoplay) by considering automation as a production of an arrangement of bodies and forces that solicits speed and accuracy in the processing of sensory, perceptual and cognitive events. Autoplay is not a property specific to technical machines, but to assemblages of machinic and organic bodies. In putting forward this notion of expertise as autoplay, we are not privileging either human bodies or technical components. Instead, resisting this dichotomy, we analyse the relations that constitute this assemblage, and the historical trajectories that shape and capture it – namely, the military–entertainment complex’s pursuit of seamless communicative circuits for threat detection and response. After operationalizing this framework through a look at expert players in League of Legends, this article concludes by drawing out some implications of what it means for particular subjects to play with(in) automation.