Chaos at the Europoort : Performance, Empathy and Materiality in Euro Truck Simulator 2

This paper discusses the conditions of possibility for relating to, understanding, and appreciating “gameplay performances”, that is, computer games as played by other people, through an existential-ludological and phenomenological analysis of 'mundane vehicle simulators', in particular Euro Truck Simulator 2 (2012, later ETS2) with TruckersMP multiplayer mod (2014). It appears that as facing the player with a distinctive existential condition characteristic to computer games, but lacking many of the other characteristics commonly associated with computer games, mundane vehicle simulator like ETS2 provides a ‘test case’, which allows ‘isolating’ the effects its distinctive existential condition has to the nature of technology-enabled performance, thus opening new avenues of enquiry in the relatively untheorised area of gameplay as performance (Fernandez-Vara 2008; Owen 2017; Causey 2003; Dixon 2007);