Avant-garde, emergency, and digital games discourse

What may be considered as the greatest emergency in the contemporary world is the lack of a sense of emergency; the prevailing feeling that everything is fine, that, despite ongoing crises, we live in the only acceptable system, and it is impossible to imagine any alternative to it. Mainstream digital games, by offering repetitive, standardised, and predictable forms of gameplay, by focusing on technological advancement, and by exploiting workers in large corporations, became a part of that emergency. According to Santiago Zabala, what is needed to recover the sense of emergency and to break through contemporary complacency, is an "aesthetic force," a disruptive artistic shock. What is proposed in this article is the possibility of considering the avant-garde as an aesthetical force in the field of videogames; a force that shocks the player and demands something more than a simple contemplation. As presented by game scholars, avant-garde videogames (through formal experimentation and political intervention) open the medium, and propose games that object to standardised, mindless repetition. Avant-garde games proclaim new ways of playing, accept diversity that opposes the stereotypical image of a player as a white, heterosexual male, and propose new kinds of engagement with the outside world. They tend to "remove the automatism of the perception" by disrupting players' engagement and through disclosure of the system. To achieve that, avant-garde videogames break through the category of flow, problematize notions of videogame hermeneutic and interrupt the feeling of immersion

(The Work of) Play in the Age of Electronic Reproduction

Electronic technologies have allowed for the mass (re)production of new media artifacts on a previously unachievable scale. While media across the board have been effected by the scope of such technology, videogames specifically provide an interesting and generative point of contact in the digital world. Videogames bridge gaps between the academic, political, and popular often unintentionally and unconsciously in ways that other new media artifacts and technologies cannot. But, while this is so, there seems to be a gap in discourse that brings together virtual and embodied experiences in order to create a more cohesive and holistic understanding of the role that videogames, play, and aesthetic experience have in an increasingly technologically mediated world. This project aims to build a foundation upon which to critically approach videogames, and new media more generally, through an understanding of the relationship between avant-garde aesthetics, electronic technologies, and massively reproducible play environments

"Moments to Talk About": Designing for the Eudaimonic Gameplay Experience

This thesis investigates the mixed-affect emotional experience of playing videogames. Its contribution is by way of a set of grounded theories that help us understand the game players' mixed-affect emotional experience, and that support analysts and designers in seeking to broaden and deepen emotional engagement in videogames. This was the product of three studies: First — An analysis of magazine reviews for a selection of videogames suggested there were two kinds of challenge being presented. Functional challenge — the commonly accepted notion of challenge, where dexterity and skill with the controls or strategy is used to overcome challenges, and emotional challenge — where resolution of tension within the narrative, emotional exploration of ambiguities within the diegesis, or identification with characters is overcome with cognitive and affective effort. Second — further investigation into the notion of emotional challenge become a reflection on the nature and definition of agency. A new theory of agency was constructed — comprising of Interpretive, Actual, Mechanical, and Fictional Agency. Interpretive Fictional Agency was highlighted as particularly important in facilitating a mixed-affect gameplay experience. Third — further interviews led to a core concept of `emotional exploration' — an analogy that is useful in helping explain how to design for emotional challenge, why players would be interested in seeking it out, and how the mixed-affect emotional experience is constituted during gameplay. These three theories are integrated and the mixed-affect emotional experience of interest resulting from gameplay is defined as the ‘Eudaimonic Gameplay Experience’. It is hoped that this will help developers and researchers better understand how to analyse and design single-player videogames that increase the chances for a deep, reflective and more varied emotional experience to take place, and take advantage of the latent expressive and artistic potential that still remains under-explored in videogames

Electronic Literature Experimentalism beyond the Great Divide: A Latin American Perspective

It may be true that contemporary digital culture is by now deeply rooted in everyday life of an important part of world's population–including our habits of writing and reading. Yet digital literature remains more or less invisible to most people. Many people can feel "at home" within digital everyday life and, still, consider that literature is only something related to print books, at most digitized. Regarding this–at first sight– paradoxical situation, I will argue that its cause lies in the strong experimental impetus that digital literature has entailed since its first appearances in mid- 20th century. E-lit has kept this impetus up to the present; therefore, it stays under larger audiences' radar; audiences who in general play along with mainstream digital culture. However, from my standpoint this e-lit experimentalism, which does not easily accept the whole predigested package of digital culture in its mainstream form and meaning, may also open interesting possibilities to building disruptive perceptual and cognitive experiences at a larger scale contesting hegemonic digital culture. One condition to accomplish such an endeavor, though, would be to surpass the reproduction of the–in part rejected since the sixties–"Great Divide" (Huyssen) between high and lowbrow culture or, maybe in a more accurate description of nowadays culture, between smaller but highly selfreflective audiences and broader, usually less reflective ones...Fil: Kozak, Claudia. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Sociales. Instituto de Investigaciones "Gino Germani". Estudios Culturales; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero; Argentin

The Dreamcast, Console of the Avant-Garde

We argue that the Dreamcast hosted a remarkable amount of videogame development that went beyond the odd and unusual and is interesting considerd as avant-garde. After characterizing the avant-garde, we investigate reasons that Sega's position within the industry and their policies may have facilitated development that expressed itself in this way and was recieved by gamers using terms that are associated with avant-garde work. We describe five Dreamcast games (Jet Grind Radio, Space Channel 5, Rez, Seaman, and SGGG) and explain how the advances made by these industrially productions are related to the 20th century avant-garde's less advances in the arts. We conclude by considering the contributions to gaming that were made on the Dreamcast and the areas of inquiry that remain to be explored by console videogame developers today

Following in the steps: Gus Van Sant’s Gerry and Elephant in the American independent field of cultural production

This paper considers Gus Van Sant's Gerry (2002) and Elephant (2003) as manifestations of contemporary American independent cinema that, characteristically, balance departures from mainstream/Hollywood convention with the use of frameworks that locate such films as marketable to particular niche audiences. The initial focus is on the use of formal devices, particularly in the very-long take, that mark these films out as distinct from typical mainstream production. Aspects of international art cinema are drawn upon to situate such films within particular regions of the independent spectrum—the latter being understood here as an example of what Pierre Bourdieu terms a 'field of cultural production', in this case one that stretches from the avant-garde to the margins of Hollywood. Formal analysis is considered in relation to the substantive content of the two films and the specific contexts in which each was produced and distributed, and in relation to the kinds of audiences to which they are likely to be targeted