Now Your Playing with Graphics Processing Power: Nvidia and the Discursive Pleasure of Artificial Intelligence

By bringing Huang’s flywheel metaphor into conversation with research on ludoeconomics (Giddings & Harvey 2018) and post-Fordist production (Kline et al. 2003), this paper will provide a political economic analysis (Kerr 2017; Rella 2024) of Nvidia and its relationship with masculine modes of technicity (Dovey & Kennedy 2006) prevalent in PC gaming subcultures (Consalvo & Paul 2019). Ludo-economics, according to Giddings and Harvey (2018), can be understood as a ‘primary heuristic’ for understanding the cultural economy of neoliberal late capitalism – a cultural economy that is reimagining gaming industries as an integral component of a larger ‘flywheel’ driving the development of Artificial Intelligence data center infrastructure.