Krytyka gier (cyfrowych) i nowe media: prolegomena do ludycznych (cyber) symulacji

[(Digital)Game Criticism and New Media:  Prolegomena to the ludic (cyber)simulations], in A. Dytman-Stasieńko, J. Stasieńko (red.) (2011), Język a multimedia 3. Dialog – konflikt. Wyd. Dolnośląskiej Szkoły Wyższej, Wrocław, pp. 322-338  ISBN 978-83-62302-43-7 (com referee]

Abstract

This article proposes an overview, as accurate as possible, of the genesis and first scientific and academic steps of Ludology Studies (Game Studies), especially, in confrontation with other media. On the one hand, this new scientific field within the Communication and (Ciber and Algorithmic)Culture Sciences has evolved in close interchange and, in some cases, even comparatively with the field of New Media Studies, being historically parallel to the development of e-culture and digital culture (especially from the 1950s onwards). On the other hand, as was the case with other areas of knowledge, stemming from the confrontation with narratological analyses, it seeks its methodological, disciplinary and scientific specificity in the (criticist) configuration of new, phenomenologically considered categories, namely of “gameplay experience” and of “mediation”. The question which arises prima facie, and which has been mentioned with varying degrees of insistence and incisiveness by other scholars, is to know whether this new study object, called «videogame» or «electronic/digital/computer game», as object of study of Game Studies (but which does not end there!) does not force us to design new hermeneutical categories, since it implies an activity which, as regards experience, is different from the one analysed in formal terms by the descriptive methodologies in use in other media. Indeed, the ergodic simulation/gameplay category allows for new ways of experiencing/designing mediation/immersion and with it we find ourselves closer to depicting ourselves, playful and mechanically, on the other side of the mirror/screen (different from the mirror/paper) where we find ourselves transformed, more often than not in heteronymic terms, into an Alice made into person.

Keywords
Ludology/Game Studies, Narrativity, Gameplay, history of discipline, New Media

Ensaio editado (em polaco)

Ensaio (em Inglês)

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