Posts Tagged ‘postmodernism’

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.”

References:

• “Computer Games, between Text and Practice“, edited by Dario Compagno and Patrick Coppock
• “Gamer Theory” by McKenzie Wark, read few quotations from his book.
• “Persuasive Games” by Ian Bogost, read few quotations from his book
• “Video Game Spaces” by Michael Nitsche, read few quotations from his book.

• Videogames open a new domain for persuasion: procedural rhetoric, “the art of persuasion through rule-based representations and interactions”.
• “When we create videogames, we are making claims about processes in the human experience, which ones we celebrate, which ones we ignore, which ones we want to question.”
• “Videogame players develop procedural literacy though interacting with the abstract models of specific real or imagined processes presented in the games they play. Videogames teach biased perspectives about how things work. And the way they teach such perspectives is through procedural rhetorics, which players ‘read’ though direct engagement and criticism.”

The world as a gamespace:

• “There is no idle time in The Sims”.
• “Work becomes a gamespace, but no games are freely chosen anymore. Play becomes everything to which it was opposed. It is work, serious, morality, necessity”.
• “The utopian dream of liberating play from the game, of a pure play beyond the game, merely opened the way for the extension of gamespace into every aspect of everyday life”.

Algorithms:

• “What is distinctive about games is that they produce for the gamer an intuitive relation to the algorithm”.

An article summarising the Heterotopia of Walt Disney World presentation that I gave in October 2009 is now published in the February edition of the Philosophy Now magazine. The article is part of a series of papers about ‘continental tales’ and the concept of narrative in Continental philosophy.

Citations from the short and very interesting book written by Marc Augé in1995 (contemporary philosophy and anthropology):

• “If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place. Supermodernity produces non-places, meaning spaces which do not integrate the earlier places: instead these are listed, classified, promoted to the status of ‘places of memory’, and assigned to a circumscribed and specific position.”

The slides of the lecture I gave few weeks ago can now be consulted here. I used the example of Walt Disney World to illustrate the concepts of Utopia, Heterotopia, Postmodernisn and Consumerism. It would have taken me two hours to explain all the relations between them and the theme park. My presentation was limited to half of that time and only a subset of the slides were used for the Philosophy for All lecture. Don’t hesitate to leave your feedback. I hope that the slides are still understandable even without any comments.