Passion Traps

Passion Traps is an artistic installation project that seeks to highlight how the concept of ‘passion’ interacts with people in videogame production. Passion as a concept enacts curious entanglements in the context of videogame production: it lures workers to production, energizes them to make systemic changes, and can take them to the edge of complete burnout and back again. This project acts as a physical reminder that totalizing methodologies about how to characterize a group don’t get at the heart of the issue – especially in videogame production. Without the embodied, experiential knowledge of the people who labour to create the games that we enjoy, both scholarly and activist interventions into videogame production lack a critical understanding of how affect plays into the creation of games. By highlighting how passion functions as less of a binary and more of an entanglement that is unique to the people experiencing the entanglement, this project shows how critical methodologies that empower and highlight embodied, experiential knowledge are necessary parts of game studies, and social science writ large.