Posts Tagged ‘art’

Can we feel empathy in a video game? In his essay Adamant Bodies. The Avatar-Body and the Problem of Autoempathy, Adriano D’Aloia argues that we hardly can because of the relationship we need to maintain with our game avatar. The player is foremost busy in dealing with his intra-subjectivity, “the mediation between the actual user’s Self and the virtual avatar’s Self”. There is a lack of Otherness. The player’s hyperactivity, at the same time enunciator, character and spectator, makes it even more difficult for him to establish an empathic relation with the characters of the video game. Paradoxically, passivity allows the spectator to fully mirror the emotions coming from a movie, which is very different from the kind of involvement required by video games.

Where does the video game end and the real life begin? With the arrival of simulators, augmented reality and social networking games, frontiers becomes harder to define. And so is the magic circle that separates the fantasy world from the outside world. But is there really a real, outside world that would be exempt of any fantasies? And could video games be completely isolated from their cultural context? Is the concept of magic circle not outdated? In his essay Spatial Typologies of Games, Alex Wade suggests instead to locate video games using the three spaces of Henri Lefebvre: perceived space (how we interpret space), conceived space (space of science and rationality) and lived space (the space where we live). He adds another dimension, digital space. Video games are multidimensional in his model, and need to be situated on the four axes.

By Mathias Jansson

How old is Super Mario and how long is a life in videogames? Mario Gerosa and Jennifer Grace-Dawson’s paper Chronology and Historicization in Virtual Worlds and Video Games begins with what seems to be an obvious statement: “Time in virtual worlds is not the same as in real life: in virtual worlds there is a different experience of time.”  If we read a book, see a movie or play a videogame we can experience years of history in the realm of a couple of hours. The real time is in the narrative structure crunched into a room-time that is moving a lot faster than our own time, jumping from event to event and skipping the transport holes, i.e. the boring parts.

What is the essence of a game? Is it its set of rules or the story it tells? This is put in simple terms the academic debate that dresses ludologists against narratologists. Most of video games have both, rules and a narrative. But what about games like Tetris? Do they also tell a story? In his essay, Bridging the Narratology-Ludology Divide. The Tetris Case, Jack Post argues that Tetris does, at the condition we extend the concept of the narrative. According to Roland Barthes, “Narratives of the world are numberless and distributed amongst very different substances (languages, gestures, images) and present in many genres to which we could of course add computer games.”

By Mathias Jansson

In the paper The Collapse and Reconstitution of the Cinematic Narrative: Interactivity vs. Immersion in Game Worlds, Otto Lehto wonders what a game is and comes with the following observation: “The game narrative needs to be ‘written’ (played) before it can be ‘read’ (interpreted). Games provide fluidity of interactive immersion: the interface as the place of the merger between the player and the game.”

How can we make sense of a video game? In his essay, Manic Miner under the Shadow of the Colussus: a Semiotic Analysis of the Spatial Dimension in Platform Video Games, Joaquin Siabra-Fraile argues it is thanks to “pragmatic net of objects”. What can be done with objects of a video game determine the logical space of actions. The regularity of that logical space, or system, enables meaning. Immersion is the acceptation by the player of that net of logical conditions; it is the only way for him to make sense of the goal and to complete the video game.

By Mathias Jansson

A key characteristic of a videogame could be that it has rules. You have to follow certain rules to succeed in the game. The rules could be as simple as in Pong, hit the ball, or as complex as in Civilization, build an empire from scratch. In his essay Interpretive Cooperation and Procedurality. A Dialogue between Semiotics and Procedural Criticism, Gabriele Ferri describes the cooperation between players and rules as follow: “Users’ cooperation with an interactive matrix generates a ludic discursive universe inside the TIAG (this-is-a-game) layer in which gaming interactions are acknowledged to be fictional. When the focalization is shifted inside it, users abide to TIAG interpretive rules and temporarily set aside encyclopaedic knowledge of the world – not being surprised, for example, by the height of Super Mario’s jumps.”

We have two facebook groups for those interested in semiotics, contemporary art and video games:

• The Semiotics of Video Games facebook group, created at the occasion of this project. The group is all about the production of meaning in video games: how does it work, what is the message, how does it relate to our everyday cultural reality?
• The Game Art facebook group focuses on its part on contemporary art inspired by videogames.

The Welcome to My Place project was talked about in the following publications and events.

January 2011: Conversation with Kati Blom on the appropriation of space, from the International Society for the Philosophy of Architecture.

September 2010: Study on Verticality presented at the European Conference on Complex Systems (Lisbon, Portugal).

Here is a series of three artistic videos around the theme of verticality. I made them while I was in Hong Kong in May 2010 to complement the Welcome to My Place video collection and my researches on the philosophical concept of place. While I visited many cities in my life, Hong Kong is a particularly striking vertical experience, because of its density and uncompromising modernisation.