Through theatrical techniques of enstrangement, game-play may reveal uncritical familiarity with the quasi-natural conventions of ideology – be they generic, social or political. An understanding of game-play as dialectical process akin to the relation between subjects and ideological power structures furthermore demands a recognition of the critical potential of game-play. Through close analyses of Cart Life, the Stanley Parable and Spec Ops: the Line I argue for game-play as a dialectical process, past academic scholarship that posits either games as procedural systems of interpellation or play as mythical unrestrained creativity. That subject of play, meanwhile, is split between played subject (the presented avatar and the game’s content), the playing subject as demanded by the ludic power structure of rules and the interpreting subject that is tasked to understand and inform the process of game-play. Comparing roughly twenty years of scholarship on ideological play, ludology, narratology, game design, proceduralism and play-centred studies, I argue that games dynamically present stylized simulations of a possible world, occurring to the subject of play in a here-and-now that at once grants autonomy while doing so in a paradoxically rigid structure of affordances, constraints and desires. By addressing the structural parallels between ideology and digital games as organizations of quasi-natural conventions, I argue in this thesis that games have the capacity to model, propose and reflect on ideologies. They do so perhaps more so than linear narrative media, as game-play presents both fictional worlds, systems and a spect-actor present as participatory agent. Digital games provide a fruitful comparison to ideologies because they resemble ideologies as an organizing structure entered into and because they serve as a systematic test case for alternatively organized (ideological) worlds.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |