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Slides for a talk at the Panel: "Understanding Play Practices: Contributions to the State of the Art, at DIGRA 2009 "Breaking New Ground", International Digital Game Research Association Conference, Brunel University, London, 01-04 September, 2009
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DIGRA 2009
International Digital Game Research Conference, Brunel University, London, 01-04 September, 2009
+Patrick J. Coppock
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Department of Social, Cognitive and Quantitative Science, School of Communication and Business http://unimore.it http://sce.unimore.it [email protected]
Research Network: game_philosophy@unimore http://game.unimore.it
+My Title
Videoludic Texts as Sites of Enactive Practice:
Reframing the Text-Practice Dichotomy
+Two types of intentional agency in text
1) an implicit (or model) reader inscribed in the text by its empirical author, designed to model and guide reader interactions with the text
2) an implicit (or model) author that emerges in the course of a reading or viewing of the text as a kind of trace that embodies the particular style, voice, or persona of its author.
+The Play of Intention in Text
+“Open” Aesthetic Works
(cf. Eco 1984)
“Open works” are communicative strategies designed by authors with an active interpretational role for their readers in mind
“An open text cannot be described as a communicative strategy if the role of its addressee (the reader in the case of verbal texts) has not been envisioned as at the moment of its generation”
“The reader as an active principle of interpretation is a part of the picture of the generative process of the text.”
+Fictional Possible Worlds
Semiotics of Fiction (Eco: Lector in Fabula, 1979; I Limiti dell’Interpretazione,
1990)
Fictional possible worlds may be characterised as: “Small worlds”, “furnished” with actors and objects with
certain “properties” “… alternative ways things might have been, not descriptions
of these ways.” “… states of affairs … described in terms of the same
language as their narrative object “Finite, enclosed”, “handicapped”, “parasitic on the real
world”, must be “taken on trust” “Constructed by human minds and hands”.
+The Anthropological Role of Fictional Possible Worlds
Fictional characters live in a handicapped world. When we actually understand their fate, then we start to suspect that we too, as citizens of the actual world, frequently undergo our destiny just because we think of our world in the same way as fictional characters think of their own.
Fiction suggests that perhaps our view of the actual world is as imperfact as that of fictional characters.
This is the way that successful fictional characters become paramount examples of the “real” human condition.
+Reality, Fiction and Imagination
Cf. Iser
Fiction (both literary and lying/make-believe/simulation) mediates between reality and our anthropological ability to imagine (and re-imagine) ourselves and our relations with various types of alterity or otherness.
Fictional play spaces/texts function as a kind of “transitional object” – cf. Winnicott
Fictionalising Acts open up for different “areas of play”, where new meanings can come into being
+Reality, Fiction and Imagination
Cf. Iser
Three Types of Fictionalizing Acts Selection – of aspects of reality to be represented in fiction Combination – (generally in non standard ways) of
representations of aspects of reality in fictional texts Self-Disclosure – impostion on reader by the text of a
revelation of its own fictiveness, forcing acknowledgement of its “as-if” character
+Fictionalising Acts
Selection results in Intentionality
Combination results in Relatedness within the text
Self Disclosure results in Bracketing (suspension of disbelief)
+Fictionalising Acts and the World
WORLD / BEING
Empirical Objects/Material Forms of Otherness Human Culture
Convention-Governed Cultural Representations Fictionalising Acts
Selection Combination Self-Disclosure
+Fictional Acts and the World
Fictionalising Acts are underlied by: Free Play – oversteps what is and turns in the direction of
what is not Instrumental Play – brings to light the motivation for thisw
overstepping
+Amodal Enactive Experience
Alva Noë “Action and Perception” (2004) All perceptual experience has an uneliminable amodal
component. This allows us to experience concrete aspects of the
physical world as co-present, in spite of the fact that some of their empirical details may be hidden from our view at any given time.
+Amodal Enactive Experience
The inherent “reality” of our embodied phenomenological experience is grounded in the fact that we know from past experience we have real possibilities to use our physical agency and mobility to explore and “fill out” details of practical, spatial and other relationships between ourselves, our environment and its various objects in ways that can be interpreted by us as meaningful.
+Tangible, Intangible & Mediated Cultural Artefacts
+Material Cultural Artefacts
+Intangible Cultural Artefacts
+Mediated Cultural Artefacts
+First Person Shooter
+RPG Second Person
+Character Portraits
Freeman was born in Seattle, Washington, and from the time he was a child, he had a strong interest in theoretical physics. After seeing some teleportation experiments, teleportation and its applications became Gordon’s obsession. He eventually received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics.
+Speed Runs
+Enactive Interfaces
+Player – Avatar Relations
+Brain-Wave Interface
+Player-Console Relations
+Holistic Gameplay Space
+Holistic Cinematographic Playspace
+Transworld Transmedia Gamespace
+Transworld Transmedia Gamespace
+Transworld Transmedia Gamespace
