Virtual materiality, potentiality and subjectivity: How do we conceptualize real-virtual interaction embodied and enacted in computer gaming, imagination and night dreams?

How do we conceptualize virtual materiality in terms of the avatars and weapons seen in computer games, for example, as well as virtual discourse and subjectivity as phenomena intra-acting with real-life materiality, discourse and subjectivity in children's everyday lives? How do we understand the intra-activity of such elements in children's night-time dreams? In this article, I discuss some of these issues, while bringing together Karen Barad's agential realism and Giorgio Agamben's concept of 'potentiality' to enhance and refine my analytical approach to real-virtual enactments. This theoretical framework allows me to question the potentialities of gaming, movies and dreams as they enter intra-activities with the comprehensive set of apparatuses that enact a child's agency, subjectivity and relational practices. The analyses and conceptual refinements that I present here are based on empirical data involving interviews with and observations of children between 8 and 14 years of age.