This paper explores the practice of game cosplayer in the Global South as a site of epistemic contestation and a process of meaning-making. The research focuses on the everyday ontology, subjectivity, and agency of individual players operating within broader digital social networks. Utilizing official developer-hosted web forums and social media as digital cultural archives, this conceptual paper examines how solitary actors embody and negotiate with hegemonic narratives (lore) and the aesthetic architectures of global video games—while remaining entangled in the norms, relations, and expectations of the digital communities they inhabit.

Through the lens of digital anthropology and by adapting Anna Tsing's concept of precarity into the digital anthropological realm, this study analyzes textual artifacts and visual representations of in-game character cosplay as products of material culture. Analysis of these artifacts reveals that individual cosplayers in the Global South operate under conditions of double precarity: local material constraints on one hand, and the computational aesthetic domination of the developer on the other. Yet, it is precisely within these precarious conditions that creative agency emerges. Through everyday modification practices and personal interpretations, cosplayers produce pluriversal identities that subtly challenge the developer's universalizing knowledge.

This study asserts that human-technology interaction within the material realm of the body is a crucial cultural practice. Through it, cosplayers at the margins of the global digital economy reclaim the epistemic agency that has been unilaterally defined by the developer—a process that does not occur in isolation, but in and through digitally mediated social relations.

Keywords: digital anthropology, material culture, individual subjectivity, embodiment, precarity, contestation, epistemic, Global South