Playgrounds of authority: space, power, and agency in DyingLight

The application of Deleuzoguattarian frameworks (1987) can be seen in the scholarly contributions to theories of videogame play (Martin-Jones and Sutton 2007;Cremin 2015; Cremin 2016), authority (Dyer-Whitheford andDe Peuter 2009;Galloway 2006;Mukherjee 2015), and spatial composition (Taylor 2007;Wood 2012).Martin-Jones and Sutton (2007) note that videogame space is multidirectional, labyrinthine and non-linear, containing multiple interconnected elements.As such, these elements resemble the Deleuzean (1987) concept of the rhizome in their organisation.Cremin (2015) foregrounds the importance of player agency in the exploration, completion, and therefore necessarily co-creation of games.Spatial compositions can be explored in tandem with player agency in order to understand the meaning of the distribution of authority and agency through virtual space (see, for example, Bdi 2022).Drawing on Deleuzean concepts of space, Wood (2012) argues that the interaction between player action and their surroundings is generative of recursive space.This can be understood as the space generated through initial interactions between the player and their surroundings, a process that recurs in the progression of play (Wood 2012).