Distance as a New Perspective and Approach to Digital Play
With the rise of independent video games over the last few decades and the expansion of video game audiences, the variety of game genres, aesthetic styles, gameplay systems, and technologies continues to increase. As a result, what we call video games refers to various media with often quite distinc...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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University of Zadar
2023-11-01
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| Series: | [sic] |
| Online Access: | http://www.sic-journal.org/ArticleView.aspx?aid=737 |
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| Summary: | With the rise of independent video games over the last few decades and the expansion of video game audiences, the variety of game genres, aesthetic styles, gameplay systems, and technologies continues to increase. As a result, what we call video games refers to various media with often quite distinct features that can include, for instance, both clicker games and animal simulator games.In her book Playing at a Distance: Borderlands of Video Game Aesthetic, Sonia Fizek introduces the framework of mediated distance to understand the diverse experiences and aesthetics of playing video games. It is pointed out early in the prelude that the main and most popular approaches to video games have described them as “inherently interactive” and have attributed their significance to immersion, human agency, and direct control, referring to works by prominent game studies scholars such as Espen Aarseth, Jesper Juul, Eric Zimmerman, and Katie Salen (xi). This type of orientation around interactivity and the human player in control of the game, Fizek argues, reflects the “modern Western rhetoric of play as progress, power, and the self” while also neglecting the role of inaction as part of gameplay (xii). In response, she proposes ‘distance at play’ as a “medium- and matter-centric perspective” (xiv) instead of a human-centric one, and from this perspective, she aims to analyze different forms of distant play ranging from fully automated to spectated experiences. |
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| ISSN: | 1847-7755 |