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Most play spaces support completely different actions than we normally would think of when moving through real space, out of play. This paper therefore discusses the relationship between selected game rules and game spaces in connection to the behaviors, or possible behaviors, of the player. Space will be seen as a modifier or catalyst of player behavior. Six categories of game space are covered: Joy of movement, exploration, tactical, social, performative, and creative spaces. Joy of movement is examined in detail, with a briefer explanation of the other categories.
This text compares the special characteristics of the game space in computer-generated environments with that in non-computerized playing-situations. Herewith, the concept of the magic circle as a deliberately delineated playing sphere with specific rules to be upheld by the players, is challenged. Yet, computer games also provide a virtual playing environment containing the rules of the game as well as the various action possibilities. But both the hardware and software facilitate the player’s actions rather than constraining them. This makes computer games fundamentally different: in contrast to traditional game spaces or limits, the computer-generated environment does not rely on the awareness of the player in upholding these rules. – Thus, there is no magic circle.
Landscape aesthetics drawing on philosophy and psychology allow us to understand computer games from a new angle. The landscapes of computer games can be understood as environments or images. This difference creates two options: 1. We experience environments or images, or 2. We experience landscape simultaneously as both. Psychologically, the first option can be backed up by a Vygotskian framework (this option highlights certain non-mainstream subject positions), the second by a Piegatian (highlighting cognitive mapping of game worlds).
This paper highlights the different ways of perceiving video games and video game content, incorporating interactive and non-interactive methods. It examines varying cognitive and emotive reactions by persons who are used to play video games as well as persons who are unfamiliar with the aesthetics and the most basic game play rules incorporated within video games. Additionally, the principle of “Flow” serves as a theoretical and philosophical foundation. A small case-study featuring two games has been made to emphasize the numerous possible ways of perception of video games.
The space-image
(2008)
In recent computer game research a paradigmatic shift is observable: Games today are first and foremost conceived as a new medium characterized by their status as an interactive image. The shift in attention towards this aspect becomes apparent in a new approach that is, first and foremost, aware of the spatiality of games or their spatial structures. This rejects traditional approaches on the basis that the medial specificity of games can no longer be reduced to textual or ludic properties, but has to be seen in medial constituted spatiality. For this purpose, seminal studies on the spatiality of computer games are resumed and their advantages and disadvantages are discussed. In connection with this, and against the background of the philosophical method of phenomenology, we propose three steps in describing computer games as space images: With this method it is possible to describe games with respect to the possible appearance of spatiality in a pictorial medium.
In a common description, to play a game is to step inside a concrete or metaphorical magic circle where special rules apply. In video game studies, this description has received an inordinate amount of criticism which the paper argues has two primary sources: 1. a misreading of the basic concept of the magic circle and 2. a somewhat rushed application of traditional theoretical concerns onto games. The paper argues that games studies must move beyond conventional criticisms of binary distinctions and rather look at the details of how games are played. Finally, the paper proposes an alternative metaphor for game-playing, the puzzle piece.
Jesper Juul has convincingly argued that the conflict over the proper object of study has shifted from “rules or story” to “player or game.” But a key component of digital games is still missing from either of these oppositions: that of the computer itself. This paper offers a way of thinking about the phenomenology of the videogame from the perspective of the computer rather than the game or the player.
One of the informal properties often used to describe a new virtual world is its degree of openness. Yet what is an “open” virtual world? Does the phrase mean generally the same thing to different people? What distinguishes an open world from a less open world? Why does openness matter anyway? The answers to these questions cast light on an important, but shadowy, and uneasy, topic for virtual worlds: the relationship between those who construct the virtual, and those who use these constructions.
This first volume of the DIGAREC Series holds the proceedings of the conference “The Philosophy of Computer Games”, held at the University of Potsdam from May 8-10, 2008. The contributions of the conference address three fields of computer game research that are philosophically relevant and, likewise, to which philosophical reflection is crucial. These are: ethics and politics, the action-space of games, and the magic circle. All three topics are interlinked and constitute the paradigmatic object of computer games: Whereas the first describes computer games on the outside, looking at the cultural effects of games as well as on moral practices acted out with them, the second describes computer games on the inside, i.e. how they are constituted as a medium. The latter finally discusses the way in which a border between these two realms, games and non-games, persists or is already transgressed in respect to a general performativity.