Video games, culture, freedom, manipulation, game design, player experience, digital media, interactive art, gamification
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Abstract
This document explores the concept of video games as a cultural phenomenon, discussing their role as a medium for both freedom and manipulation, and their relationship with the player and the designer.
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[...] Video games maintain an intimate relationship with the technological matter of our daily lives. They hold up to us the broken mirror of contemporary subjectivity,21 adds Triclot, referring back to the idea that the game is a reflection of our society that extends between the interstices: it is present everywhere, covers different forms and different aspects and immerses itself in life in a 'total way. Free action but also manipulative, its purpose tends to interactivity with the player, both active and spectator. [...]
[...] It is not unreal or non-real; it is alongside the real, it doubles it, it is its reserve."16 If we have seen that video games can be freedom like manipulation for the pleasure, we have also had the opportunity to grasp to what extent this medium is imbued with totality. Video games would therefore be a complete art, since it does not exist at the expense of reality but rather alongside it. Could we therefore qualify it as 'total art'? [...]
[...] And me, then?'14 This is what Triclot calls 'the rupture of the ludic pact' in that the game designer has manipulated the player-viewer to offer a different experience of pleasure, caught in the simulation itself. We could consider this as a unhealthy pleasure of knowing the player is caught in the turmoil, a true drift of manipulation, but also a politicization of the player, in that 'there is here a way of doing politics for games that is otherwise more powerful than the simple diffusion of explicit messages. Because it now touches on the acts of play themselves, their configuration. [...]
[...] In fact, the artist's goal is to talk about alterity in the age of virtual reality: Mark Farid is about to give up everything for a month in order to live virtual reality." Seeing I is a project where the artist will live for twenty-eight days in a gallery wearing a virtual reality headset and an active noise-cancelling headset. Throughout the duration of this performance, everything he experiences through the headset will be a video and audio stream recorded by a complete stranger who will normally go about their life. What this stranger eats, Farid will eat. When they go to bed, Farid will go to bed. The data will be recorded in advance, for example to be able to prepare meals or retrieve everything that will make this experience-performance as realistic as possible. [...]
[...] Is the game no longer a free action but a directed manipulation? Because video games create a visual spectacle where the player acts and sees himself acted upon. He experiences satisfaction, a vertigo, a pleasure,'6 notes Alexis Blanchet. The notion of pleasure thus enters the game, pleasure induced by the developers of the video game in question, but also pleasure experienced by the player. Defining video games would therefore, for us, mean perceiving it as a matrix of freedom (social experience of personal construction, of its culture), but also as a manipulation (aesthetic instrumented experience that delights both the player and the creator). [...]
