‘What Was Your First Experience of a Videogame?’: The Fantasmatic Structure of Videogame Memory

Abstract

Videogame memories are not simply mental records of what happened in the past; they are also texts to be interpreted. Taking a psychoanalytic approach, this article conducts a textual analysis of 115 recorded acts of videogame memory from Checkpoints, a podcast that ran from 2015 to 2018. Analysing subjects’ responses to the question ‘what was your first experience of a videogame?’, it argues that what is absent from videogame memory – what cannot be remembered – has unconscious significance. What cannot be remembered gives rise to the fantasmatic structure of videogame memory. By mapping this fantasmatic structure across memories of the first videogame experience, authority figures, separation and individuation, and childhood fears and phobias, the article argues for the necessity of a psychoanalytic approach to videogame memory. Psychoanalysis pays close attention to the subjective dimension of our recollections – in this case, that which speaks beyond the historical content of videogame memory.