Surveillance technicity: affect, retention and videogame analytics

Abstract

This article develops the concept of ‘surveillance technicity’ – drawn out of a reading of the notion of ‘surveillance capitalism’ alongside Stiegler’s account of mediated (temporal) perception – to think about how modern software interfaces capture and circulate data to do with user activity in order to condition user perception and behaviour in commercially desirable ways. In this article, I focus on an original case study of data analytics tools in videogames. I concentrate on the case of DotaPlus, an analytics tool for the popular multiplayer game Dota 2, arguing that positive gameplay experiences – or affective states – are shaped through the capture and relay of different forms of player data, yielded through various modes of surveillance. To think through the different temporalising effects of DotaPlus, and the mediation of different kinds of affective states, this article focuses on three distinct sites of surveillance: (1) self-surveillance, (2) lateral surveillance and (3) machine surveillance.