ENGL 4750-090 & ENGL 5050-092 Video Games & Culture » September 22nd: Video Game Aesthetics

September 22nd: Video Game Aesthetics

Plan for the Day

  • Canvas Posts
  • Video Game Aesthetics
  • More Critical Theory
  • History of Video Games to the discussion from last week

Your “Toward a Theoretical Lens Essay” is due tonigh

Video Game Aesthetics

While we could approach aesthetics from many different viewpoints, we’ll probably focus on how culture mediates video game aesthetics, which are “all aspects of video games which are experienced by the player” (p. 121). Maybe we should look at key parts of Ch. 5 “Video Game Aesthetics.”

Rules

  • p. 124: video games are transmedial–“an important feature of rules is that they are not tied to one particular type of material.”
    • The above comes from Japer Juul, who points out that “games can move between different media–sometimes with ease, sometimes with great difficulty” (2003, p. 48).
  • What are the function of rules in any game?
  • p. 125: ludus: rules relate to the conditions by which a player wins
    paidia: rules refer to gmae procedures
  • p. 125: Again, from Juul, “[o]utcome valorization rules…define which outcomes are considered positive and which are negative.”
    • Cultural studies approach question: What determines which outcomes are positive and which are negative?

Geography and Representation

  • p. 129: “if a game designer starts out with a preference for a certain graphical style, this preference is likely to influence the kind of game she will make.”
  • Explore this. What influences a game’s development?
  • p. 133: “Perspective…directly shapes how we perceive the game world and how close we can get to its characters and objects.”
  • p. 138: Active off-screen space vs passive off-screen space
    • What do video games allow players to do…and not have to do?
  • Graphical Style: Photorealism, Caricaturism, and Abstractionism
  • The Sound of (video game) Music
  • p. 147: “Video game designers typically want the music to adapt to the present circumstances of the game.”
  • p. 147: “[W]e are incapable of telling a computer how to go about composing good music.”–the AI prompt
  • p. 148: “[T]he feeling of realism….requires randomization.” And “generating a sense of realism….is a more complicated question of creating an aural world that mirrors the complexity of the visual one.”
  • The sound track…excuse me…the score of one’s life? Let’s complicate the notion of realism in video games.

Players

  • p. 151:  Do video games break the social aspect of games?
  • pp. 151-152: Artificial Intelligence
  • p. 152: How do MMORPG invite cooperation and conflict? What might be another similar social technology?

Questions

Why are video game aesthetics tied to the physical world?

Next Class

Keep up with the reading! Read Ch. 6 in Understanding Video Games. Remember, we won’t have class on Thursday, 10/06, so that would be a good time to start reading Introducing Cultural Studies, our second graphic guide.