Cocktail Cabinets

Across the academy we see a move to study objects in new ways, not just in the current waves of Speculative Realism and Object Oriented Ontology, but also as part of a longer, slower, material turn. This turn orients us toward things and toward objects, signaling a shift within game studies toward the spaces of the player. Understanding the cocktail cabinet in the context of these shifts adds important material and spatial dimensions to game studies’ readings of characters, mechanics, and settings, along with the technical systems that enable and constrain those phenomena.