Aesthetic Theory and the Video Game

Description

This book draws on aesthetic theory, including ideas from the history of painting, music and dance, to offer a fresh perspective on the video game as a popular cultural form. It argues that games like Grand Theft Auto and Elektroplankton are aesthetic objects that appeal to players because they offer an experience of form, as this idea was understood by philosophers like Immanuel Kant and Theodor Adorno. Video games are awkward objects that have defied efforts to categorise them within established academic disciplines and intellectual frameworks. Yet no one can deny their importance in re-configuring contemporary culture and their influence can be seen in contemporary film, television, literature, music, dance and advertising. This book argues that their very awkwardness should form the starting point for a proper analysis of what games are and the reasons for their popularity. This book will appeal to anyone with a serious interest in the increasingly playful character of contemporary capitalist culture. Preface and acknowledgements Illustrations Introduction The aesthetic approach Why an aesthetic approach? Play and form form, taste and society Art and politics Culture industry re-visited Notes Ludology, space and time From ergodicity to ludology Gameness and its limits Abstraction, virtual space and simulacra The rhythm of suspended time Ludology, narratology and aesthetics Notes Controller, hand, screen Hands and touch The controller Video game image Embodied activity and culture Notes Games, dance and gender Dance and art Habitus and embodied play Choreography in Mirror's Edge A dance aesthetic Choreography and discourse Aesthetics and gender Notes Meaning in virtual worlds Fictional worldness Neo-baroque entertainment culture Form and fictional content Death and allegory Play and mourning Notes Political aesthetics Unit operations Rhetoric and persuasion Badiou's inaesthetics The ludological truth event Dancing our way to where? Notes Bibliography