AbstractsBiology & Animal Science

This thesis explores the historical development of digital gaming in the post-Fordist condition of cognitive capitalism. By utilising concepts from the fields of neurology, media philosophy and the Buddhist epistemology of the mind it studies the biopoilitcal aspects of gaming culture by looking at the practices and strategies that where historically applied by gamers, in order to map how these strategies functioned as a contemporary diagram of govermantality and how gamers can respond to this system of control. Thus, this thesis seeks to both examine the way gaming is related with the image culture of cognitive capitalism, which aims to produce flexible individuals that continuously solve problems and how we can respond to this affective matrix designed by the gaming industry. Accordingly this study is not limited in the way that software as an affective map organized by the industry that aims to control and produce flexible subjects, but also at the ways in which we can respond to these affective products by forming what Hakim Bey called ‘autonomous zones’ of subjectivation. To study this, I examine the ethical discourse of digital images, then move on to examine specific examples of games, reading them through the lens of Buddhist meditational practices and Foucault’s ‘technologies of the self’ as the basis for an ethical response to the control mechanisms of digital spaces. The concept of mindfulness, therefore, will be used to develop a new disciplinary approach that draws on the insights of Buddhist epistemology and its meditational technologies to suggest a politically engaged and utterly contemporary ‘care of the self.’