גדעון דישון

This chapter develops a concept of postdigital gaming as a sensibility for understanding contemporary gaming practices. The authors outline a set of theoretical moves that aim to reorient longstanding scholarly assumptions about games and gaming practices, particularly in the context of education: from games-as-objects to games-as-relations, from causal determinism to distributed agency, and from technological solutionism to situated critical practice. These moves are an effort to reckon with the algorithmic infrastructures, commercial logics, and sociotechnical entanglements that govern today’s gaming experiences, aspects that dominant approaches in educational research have struggled to account for. The authors argue that gaming practices are fundamentally and irreducibly relational, that they cohere through a variety of contingent arrangements of actors, both human and non-human, that exceed attempts to isolate them, to measure them. The chapter ends with a discussion of postdigital gaming’s implications for research and practice, with an emphasis on approaches that work to make legible gaming’s opacities and embeddedness in broader platform ecologies.