Art & Design

A computer game's player is experiencing not only the game as a designer-made artefact, but also a multitude of social and cultural practices and contexts of both computer game play and everyday life. As a truly multidisciplinary anthology, Extending Experiences sheds new light on the mesh of possibilities and influences the player engages with. Part one, Experiential Structures of Play, considers some of the key concepts commonly used to address the experience of a computer game player. The second part, Bordering Play, discusses conceptual and practical overlaps of games and everyday life and the impacts of setting up, crossing and breaking the boundaries of game and non-game. Part three, Interfaces of Play, looks at games as technological and historical artefacts and commodities. The fourth part, Beyond Design, introduces new models for the practical and theoretical dimensions of game design.

Computer games contribute to their players' emotions in diverse ways, ranging from sheer exhilaration to anger and disillusion. Our ability to enjoy computer game play that involves genuine intense emotions which in other contexts would be easily
deemed as "negative" suggests that there is something in the ways in which we make sense of computer games that separates gameplay from other activities we engage in. Focusing single player computer games and situating within the emerging field of computer game studies, this dissertation starts from the assumption that emotions are always already intertwined with the experience of play and proceeds to describe, not any idiosyncratic emotional experience, but the means by which games can ensure their contents to be involved in players' emotions.

Emotions are taken as intentional, as always about something. From this premise follows that to understand an emotion it is necessary to understand the reasons the subject has for relating to the object of the emotion in the particular way. Building on game studies, existential phenomenology, and philosophy of technology, this dissertation postulates a first person perspective from which to describe solitary computer game play and the emotions it involves in terms of their experienced signicance. From describing the freedoms and responsibilities imposed by the materiality of the computer game artefact on its voluntary player, the gameplay condition emerges as an intersubjective baseline for the players' judgements about events, objects, and states of aairs in the game, potentially surfacing as emotions.

Rather than being explained in terms of their rules, computer games appear as technological artefacts which simultaneously extend the concrete limitations against which their human players are free to realize their projects, and shape the ways in which human mind can be directed at aspects of the world. However, this can go on only as long as long as the player fulfills the requirements of which the gameplay condition comprises. Based on this condition, game artefacts can be described as standing out from among all other technological artefacts which co-shape human intentionality. By the conduct of emotional investment, the dissertation describes how voluntary players can end up experiencing emotions about aspects which would most likely seem trivial from a non-player's perspective.

Finally, the dissertation postulates an experiential ontology of computer game content, distinguishing between game content that is undeniable: crucial in terms of fullling the gameplay condition, and deniable: game content whose taking seriously is mostly voluntary. Thus, undeniable game content can be safely assumed as being involved in the emotions' of all players.

Building on phenomenological insights on the constitution of experienced significance within computer game play, derived from the author's earlier research on Tetris variations with explicit content, this paper presents a comparative close-playing analysis of a number of casual games about climate change. In this analysis, differences emerge between the means by which the games make their contents appear as significant to the players. These differences may have implications to the design of serious games: aligning the actual gameplay and the intended message can assist in safeguarding against players' transgressive interpretations.

This paper concerns with the emotions of a single-player computer game’s player. It identifies a challenge for games research trying to account for player’s experience from the detached and objective ‘scientific’ point-of-view. The paper suggests that  by looking at gameplay from the player’s  perspective, we can describe defining  characteristics, based on which inter-subjectively plausible assumptions about  player’s emotions could be made. In this paper one such characteristic is identified  as  the  gameplay  condition,  which  is  further  elaborated  in  relation  to  goals  in  singleplayer games.

This paper deals with the emotions experienced by a player. It problematises the empirical psychological study of players' emotions. The paper suggests emotions to be understood as structured relationships instead of as reactions. It proposes players' emotions to be analysed through their intentionality, by looking at games as constituting the objects of the emotions. The article questions the validity of objective knowledge about games for the purpose of understanding games as experienced. It presents a method of categorizing game content as it appears as objects of the players' emotions. The categorization is further demonstrated by looking at two erotic variations of Tetris.

In recent studies on emotions and computer games the experiential side of emotions is often left uncharted due to methodological constraints. Regarding a comprehensive understanding on computer games and emotions such ignorance is untenable. By basing its analysis on an experience already lived as an emotional playing experience, this paper examines emotions in play in regard to both their qualities and the totalities in which their objects reside. The paper investigates the
grounds on which some emotions in play could be said to be more real than others and suggests the existence of at least two totalities of emotions in play: the deniable and the undeniable.

This paper discusses the similarities and differences between participatory, interactive, and playable art. It suggests that computer games can provide novel perspectives on interactivity in interactive art. The paper also proposes that the implications of computer games to interactive art extend beyond whatever purpose and value computer games are perceived as having as products of popular culture.

This essay concerns with the overlap of interactive art and computer games. In order to arrive at a critique of the feasibility of using playability’s absence as a strategy in the design of ‘art games’, the essay contextualizes contemporary non-playable ‘art games’ in the discourses of both interactive art and computer games. For this purpose, a notion of ‘playability’ is derived from notions of freedom and responsibility. In the ‘cross-exposure’ of traditions, questions arise about authorship, and, the aesthetics and ethics of the relationship between the artworks and their audiences.

In this paper I will critically examine the phenomenological underpinnings of what we
might call the ‘spatiality paradigm’ in computer game studies – the project of using
spatial metaphors and terminology to understand computer game play. Drawing on the
(post-)phenomenological tradition, I argue that while this terminology is useful for
analytic projects seeking to shed light on the structure and form of the game artifact and
the processes it facilitates, spatial notions do not necessarily resonate with the first-person
experience of computer game play, especially in cases of playing games of genres which
do not rely on simulated locomotion and proprioception in three-dimensionally modeled
space. Furthermore, I argue that the differences between single-player and multi-player
games – namely that single-player games can be described, using Ihde’s framework of
intentionality relations, as situating in ‘alterity relations’ and multi-player games in
‘relations of mediation’ – further complicate the issue of spatiality in computer games.
Given these observations, I suggest that whereas the spatial notions appear problematic
for the purpose of first-person description of the experience of playing single-player
computer games, the notion of ‘game world’ seems more accurate a description of that
with which the players are engaged with.