Quantified Play: Self-Tracking in Videogames

This essay develops the concept of "quantified play" to describe and analyze the recent practice of self-tracking in the play of videogames. I argue that statistical, self-tracking utilities in videogames shape how gameplay "appears" and how it is experienced and valued by users. I proceed by situating contemporary self-tracking in games as part of a broader history of play as "quantified." From there, drawing on interdisciplinary studies of self-tracking, as well as Bernard Stiegler's postphenomenological analyses of technology, I characterize quantified play in three main ways. First, it is voluntary and occupied with self-knowledge. Second, it is used in mundane or everyday contexts. Third, it relates to the habitual faculty of users. The remainder of the essay illustrates the concept of quantified play through two examples of tracking hardware and software-showing how numerical or statistical apprehensions of player activity (and visualizations thereof) shape how we negotiate videogames.