Molecular Mario: The Becoming-Animal of Video Game Compositions

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s nonrepresentational philosophy can be deployed for thinking about video game aesthetics as forces that are composed to produce affects of varying intensities. Through the concept becoming-animal and associated concepts such as rhizome and machinic assemblages, the article describes the video game through the affective, nonrepresentational, compositions of players, characters, and diegetic objects of different kinds. Variations they explain emanate from a single plane of pure multiplicity, a plane of immanence, differing by their intensities and how those intensities are assembled and diagrammed. The article begins by asking questions specific to the video game plane from which concepts are invented, or here borrowed and adapted from Deleuze and Guattari, to analyze the form in an open-ended manner. By putting the theory in motion, the article demonstrates the value of a Deleuzian approach to the study of video games.