The Performance of Digital Play

2018

This dissertation is a multidisciplinary study on video game gameplay as an autonomous form of vernacular experience. Plays and games are traditional research subjects in folkloristics, but commercial video games have not been studied yet. For this reason, methods and concepts of the folkloristic research tradition have remained unknown in contemporary games studies. This thesis combines folkloristics, game studies and phenomenological enactive cognitive science in its investigations into playergame interaction and the video game gameplay experience at large. In this dissertation, three representative survey samples (N=2,594, N=845, N=1,053) on "Rewarding gameplay experience" are analyzed using statistical analysis methods. The samples were collected in 2014-2017 from Finnish and Danish adult populations. This dissertation also analyzes data from 32 interviews, through which the survey respondents' gameplay preferences, gaming memories, and motivations to play were further investigated. By combining statistical and qualitative data analyses, this work puts forward a mixed-methods research strategy and discusses how the findings relate to prior game research from several disciplines and schools of thought. Based on theoretical discussions, this dissertation argues that the video game gameplay experience as a cultural phenomenon consists of eight invariants in relation to which each individual gameplay experience can be interpreted: The player must demonstrate a lusory attitude (i), and a motivation to play (ii). The gameplay experience consists of explorative and coordinative practices (iii), which engender a change in the player's self-experience (iv). This change renders the gameplay experience inherently emotional (v) and performative (vi) in relation to the gameworld (vii). The gameplay experience has the dramatic structure of a prototypical narrative (viii) although a game as an object cannot be regarded a narrative in itself. As a key result of factor analytical studies and qualitative interview analyses, a novel approach to understanding player-game interaction is put forward. An original gameplay preference research tool and a player typology are introduced. This work argues, that, although video games as commercial products would not be intuitive research subjects for folkloristics, video game gameplay, player-game interaction, and the traditions in experiencing and narrating gameplay do not differ drastically from those of traditional social games. In contrast to this, all forms of gameplay are argued to be manifestations of the same vernacular phenomenon. Indeed, folkloristic research could pay more attention to how culture is experienced, modified, varied and expressed, regardless of whether the research subject is a commercial product or not.

In this paper, I argue that game studies must continue to move towards a rejection of the representationalist ontologies that restrict explorations of play. I suggest we look to Karen Barad’s agential realism as a basis for new theories. In her work reality is understood as a continuous production of performative materiality [1]. This idea resonates with the continuous, looping hardware and software actions that construct videogame worlds. While Barad’s work requires a certain understanding of elements of quantum physics, when contextualised within the sphere of digital games, we can instead focus on its implications for theories of play and action. I will focus on experiences of playing Antichamber [3] and Manifold Garden [5], reading them as active engagements with materiality, as understood by Barad, that have the potential to challenge particular ontological concepts. Ultimately, this paper furthers the idea that games can function as important philosophical tools due to their role in interactive (or ‘intra-active’) phenomena, over visual or representational qualities.

This paper is partly a response to the ongoing debate in the game world about whether games can be art, and partly an excerpt from my Ph.D. research. I aim to offer some insights in the cognitive experiences gamers have while playing - hopefully useful to both designers and scholars. I will argue that an art experience is a particular kind of cognitive experience, namely a distinctive type of imagination. The essence of an art experience is the mental representation of a signification process, a sort of mirrored representation that is also known as mimesis. I hope to demonstrate that it is a universal feature of art to mirror life, or more accurately, a deliberate view on it. And that what constitutes art is not defined by the properties of an artefact, but by our experience of it, by our mental actions. Along the same line I maintain that the boundaries between what we usually label entertainment and what art can not be as sharply defined as we generally assume. The main arguments in the aforementioned debate concern affective features, perceivable aesthetic qualities (as opposed to artistic properties), and the uniqueness of a game. I will set out explaining why most expert assumptions seem not discriminating enough to distinguish an art experience from an entertainment experience. Next I present some theoretical perspectives on both kinds of experiences, after which I will explain how they are being mixed and intertwined in everyday practice. Some gameplay examples should finally illustrate this inevitably condensed theoretical framework, drawn from my more detailed and elaborated dissertation on signification, imagination and mimesis in games .

XIV Symposium of Mexican Students and Studies “Knowledge into Solutions”, 2016

[This material was Published by the Committee of the Symposium of Mexican Students in Edinburgh, UK Edinburgh, Scotland, UK December 2016.] Addresses videogames as an ergodic audio-visual narrative medium, in which we are allowed to explore the borders between interpreters and receivers. Pointing that in the forms of narrative expression and transmission of the story, the mode of acquisition thereof greatly influences the way of use. Reaffirming there are forms of narrative that can only exists or be consumed in certain media, referring specifically to those in which it requires direct intervention and a non-trivial reader, in this case video games. Also describes video games as a narrative form, which offers an open path of the experience of "be" and "being there" through the erlebnis, the act that generate knowledge through interpretation. mexsoc(.)org(.)uk/proceedings/ All rights reserved. This work is registered with the UK Copyright Service. Registration No. 284712509. Symposium of Mexican Students and Studies. ISSN 2514-314X Copyright © 2017 Organising Committee of the Symposium of Mexican Students and Studies. Edinburgh, Scotland, UK December 2016. Romano Ponce-Díaz.

The Philosophy of Computer Games (Philosophy of Engineering and Technology)