From Cyborgs to Digital Companion Species: Reimagining Player-Game Relations

Drawing on Donna Haraway’s concepts of cyborg and companion species and extending upon the discussion of virtual companion games, this paper suggests that computer games can be seen as a vivid example of digital companion species. In so doing, it broadens the descriptive scope of companion species from labeling particular game genres to characterizing the relations between players and games in general. Following Haraway’s companion species, this paper proposes the notion of “techno-symbiosis” as a radicalization of the idea of “techno-intimacy” (Allison 2006) implied in virtual companion games to reimagine player-game relations. The conceptual shift from cyborgs to companion species, from techno-intimacy to techno-symbiosis, can problematize the separation of computer games and players as bounded entities that underpins anthropocentric views of computer games, echoing posthumanist and new materialist approaches to game studies (Janik 2018; de Petris & Falk 2017) that attend to the reconfiguration between players and games.