Ghosts in the machine: a transversal study of programming as situated cultural practice and the materialisation of play in code

How program code becomes a video game: a transversal, new-materialist study tracing ludemes from developer intention through source code to player experience. PhD dissertation, University of Bern, 2026.

PhD dissertation · University of Bern · 2026 · Open Access (150 pp.)

This cumulative dissertation investigates how program code becomes a video game by tracing the cultural and computational materialisation of ludemes, fundamental units of gameplay, from developer intention through source code to player experience. Drawing on new materialism, critical code studies, and theories of technicity and resonance, it re-conceptualises ludemes not as abstract rules but as materially embedded mediators that translate between computational structures and human phenomenology. To bridge the epistemological fractures between the humanities and engineering, and between screen and code, the dissertation develops a four-layer transversal methodology that scales between macro-level corpus analysis, meso-level systemic close reading, micro-level hermeneutic analysis of source code, and processual genetic criticism, enabling the study of born-digital artefacts in their full ontological thickness without reducing them to either pure text or quantifiable data. The dissertation comprises five articles that progressively reconceptualise the notion of ludemes through distinct analytical registers. These encompass distant viewing of historical video game graphics, theoretical grounding in sociological resonance and systems theory, structural analysis of historical source code comparing low- and high-level implementations of the same game, practice-based design research in developing a game, and genetic criticism tracing gameplay from ideation to encoding. The thesis contends that ludemes are culturally genealogical, computationally specific, visually manifest yet visually irreducible, relationally enacted through the interplay of player, code, and image, and, finally, expressions of tacit knowledge. Together, these studies articulate a counter-history of programming as situated craft and vernacular practice, while offering a transferable methodological framework for the digital humanities to investigate software as, simultaneously, pattern, system, code, and process.

Adrian Demleitner completed this dissertation within the Bit Philology project.

Links: DH Bern profile · Catalogue record (swisscovery) · Open-access full text (DOI)