Video Game Détournement: Playing Across Media

Taking as a starting point the French concept of “artistic détournement” and its application in the context of video games, this paper aims to study creative remix practices that use video games as materials or as matrices to produce derivative works. Precisely, the research examines a diversified range of productions whose common feature is to be created from video games (mods, machinimas, let’s play videos…) in order to question the relationships between the notions of détournement and play. Where is the boundary between these two activities? How to define and categorize the various forms of détournements in the specific context of the video game culture? Can these remix practices that go beyond the frame of the game and extend themselves to other media be described as “playful”? By crossing rhetoric and theories of play, this paper will try to answer these questions.