Research from 'Aesthetic Theory and the Video Game' by Graeme Kirkpatrick Pt 1

Basic Details:
KIRKPATRICK, G. (2011), Aesthetic Theory and the Video Game, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

1.

• I argue that video games are not communications media in any standard sense but objects that furnish us with particular kinds of experience. 
• These experiences are a variety of game, or structured play, but they are also something more than this. What this 'more' is, what is consists in, is the enigma that has triggered the most heated academic debates about the video game and how we should study it and I argue that it is best understood as an historically specific instance of aesthetic form. 

2.

• It involves making the claim that video games are aesthetic objects before they are anything else, which has consequences for other parts of the discussion we want to have about them. 
• Most people agree, for example, that play or gameplay as it is referred to in connection with video games, is central to what people do with them and should inform our understanding of them in various ways. 

3.

• It is a conservative implication of ludology, for instance, that video games stand in the tradition of older games like chess or football and that it is only in light of this that we can see their true novelty. 
• Others find in them a source of cinematic innovations, with new viewing practices and new visual possibilities that extend the history of popular entertainments. An aesthetic approach finds itself in the, perhaps fortunate, position of seeming to claim that video games are art. 

11.

• Ludology is a branch of game studies centred mainly in Scandinavian universities that emphasizes the games of video games and rejects attempts to analyse them as 'narratives' or texts in which meaning plays the dominant, ordering role. 

12.

• ... the best way to understand modern video games is to focus on what they feel like to the people who play them and to reflect on what the significance of that feeling responses might be in the contemporary cultural context. 
• Taking an aesthetic approach to video games is made more complicated by the fact that everyone who writes about them already accepts that they have aesthetic properties and there is even some consensus that these properties matter and should inform our assessment of the medium as a whole as well as of individual games.

13.

• Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska, for example, suggest that much gameplay is motivated simply by the search for 'visual pleasures', writing at one point that players may find aesthetic pleasures simply from 'the quality of graphical resolution alone' (King and Krzywinska 2006: 130). But what makes a visual experience pleasurable? On what basis do we separate the visual aspects of an experience that also includes other sensory components and questions concern aesthetic structure and it is in answering them that the resources of classical aesthetic theory are useful. 
• ... the concepts of play and form take us beyond a superficial characterisation of visual pleasure towards an appreciation of the whole experience of gameplay in terms of how it feels to players. 

15.

• This book argues that the relation between games and art is an important key to understanding either of them properly in the current period. Video games inherit certain of their key properties, especially form, from an art world that has to some extent absented itself from important areas of experience. 

17.

• Video games go not have to 'mean' anything to be popular and their popularity can be intelligible without reference to interpretation. This does not mean we should ignore the contents of on-screen imagery or what that imagery might represent or signify in some contexts. 

19.

• The term 'gameplay' is often used by rarely defined. As commonly employed it refers to the game dynamics, or more simply, 'how it feels to play a game'. Although this feeling is influenced by a game's audio and visual aspects, gameplay is usually considered a consequence of the game's rules rather than its representation. 
• Using this definition, we can say that the gameplay of chess is deliberative and [sic] while the gameplay of Burnout 3 is frantic and easily accessible. 

23.

• Aesthetic experience occurs when we find that something is pleasing to us by virtue of its form. Such an object stimulates us in the sense that it provokes and incites a feeling response, but it does so in a way that goes beyond merely being pleasing to the eye. 
• In aesthetic experience, which for Kant is almost exclusively about natural beauty, we find our imagination is pitched against our understanding- we can't discern 'order and finality' in the object but not its purpose. 

24.

• ... the human disposition to play is at the heart of the human creative response to being cast adrift in a meaningless universe. It it is not meaningful in itself, play is the activity that makes meaning possible by spinning forms out of the darkness. 
• ... play has intrinsic rhythm and harmony (1950: 10) and it is present as a kind of beating pulse in the sciences as well as the arts. 
• ... play is associated with contests and with representation, sometimes taking the form of role play. Play always goes on within what Huizinga calls a 'magic circle'; a specifically delineated zone where the normal conversations of social life are placed on hold and the rules of play (however minimal) are given free reign. 

25.

• The importance of play here lies in its foundational role for our ontological security and subsequently personal identity, because it is here that we first gain a sense of ourselves as agents who can act on the world and who must, in turn, adapt ourselves to its reality. 

26.

• ... the video game can be seen as a kind of stand-in for the parent, later the friend, with whom the subject constructs this precarious sense of a self grounded in transitional phenomena. Play here is based on a kid of formlessness that precedes both ego development and a secure sense of reality. This pre-ontological domain is one that we have to play our way out of in order to secure a sense of ourselves and to learn about the world. 
• Fantasy is an excess of imagination. Eve n short of delusion it can impede our ability to process external reality properly and inhibit the development of our inner personality. 

32.

• Aesthetic theory is concerned with understanding how it is that human beings find some situations, objects or artefacts attractive, or even beautiful. 
• Video games merit the concern that has been reserved for such items not because they are beautiful or 'art' but rather because they exist in a very specific tension with beauty and art, editing into the field of tensions that define the artwork and position it in relation to other social elements, and this incursion is essential to understanding them. 

48.

• ... ludology correctly identifies what is essential to the video games as a cultural object, namely, its character as a form of structured play. At the same time, however, the discussion here acknowledges the importance of meaning-oriented video game analyses, which have forced ludology to reflect on the differences between traditional games and their modern, digital variant. 
• Video games are more than games in the traditional sense. However, scholars who emphasise the story element in games jump the gun when they assert that attention to meaning and to the story-telling dimension of video games is the correct way to address the deficit in ludology's approach. 

50.

• Scholars who understand well how film works, for example, find that video games seem a lot like films except that the audience participate in determining what happens in the on-screen drama. 
• This active role for audiences can be called interactivity since it seems to reflect a new responsiveness on the part of the medium and implies a degree of complexity that makes the media object more like an interlocutor or co-participant and less like a finished work to be apprehended contemplatively.

54.

• ... Jesper Juul repudiated narrative theory's application to video games on the grounds that this theory introduces a temporal discrepancy that is essential to all reading but not present when playing video games. In narrative theory it is the difference between the time of narrating and that of the events narrated that is all-important. 
• According to Gerard Genette, for example, the temporality of a written text always involves a 'metonymic displacement' (Genette 1980: 34) whereby we, as readers, allow the false time of the story to stand in for the true time it takes us to read it. 
• This discrepancy between the time of reading and that of the events narrated is essential to the process of meaning-interpretation as it constitutes a kind of space where the reader interrogates and reflects on what she is reading. 
• The idea that games 'tell stories' is simply compatible with the reality that they are played in a singular time:
• In a verbal narrative, the grammatical tense will necessarily present a temporal relation between the time of the narration (narrative time) and the events told (story time). Additionally, it is possible to talk of a third time, the reading or viewing time...
• ... the game constructs the story time as synchronous with narrative time and reading/viewing time: the story time is now. Now, not just in the sense that the viewer witnesses events now... 

55.

• ... but in the sense that events are happening now, and that what comes next is not determined. (Juul 2001: 13-14) 

61.

• ... Kucklich presumes a strong role here for interpretative meaning in these processes, especially fictional meaning. The problem he raises it that sustained activity applied to a game seems to require a narrative or meaning element to explain why players seek to effect the relevant state transitions. 
• ... identification with character and immersion in some kind of storyline seem to be needed, to mediate, or explain the extra-ludic player activities- the things they do that do not fall under the lusory attitude. 
• Meaning based explanations would situate their play in a larger, fictional or social setting and would explain their involvement in all of its aspects. 
• Kucklick's point is that player activities, including... 

62.

• ... perhaps even subversion of the game's projected or advertised narrative context, must be meaningful for peopel and these meanings must play some explanatory role. 
• The fact that video games commonly include filmic and textual elements counts strongly in favour of such an analysis. 
• In the move between game states players' attention does move to extra-ludic reflection but their activities involve actions need to be understood as integral to the video game form as whole. Alexander Galloway usefully characterises non-story related actions as 'form playing with other forms... a play within the various layers of the video game' (Galloway 2006: 36). In this multi-layered play the human element must switch between discrete... 

63.

• ... sets of rules, each bearing different kinds of relation to meaning, including some movements and activities that have no significance at all, captured nicely in Galloway's phrase, 'multiple vectors of agitation' (2006: 38). 

75.

• Max Payne is an object with a distinctive feel, or aesthetic and this determines its character as an experience for players. At the centre of this is a feeling of expectation or anticipation that is worked and reworked by the tensions and releases of play- exactly what, for Ranciere (2007), connects the various experiences of form in the aesthetic regime of art. 
• The element of repetition is the clearest illustration of the importance of rhythm to the medium. Distinct types of action repeat and recur throughout the course of Max Payne. 
• When it happens you can assume a different attitude, namely, that of poking around, exploring the game situation to see what you are supposed to do next. Exploring, righting and watching correspond to feelings of tension, excitement and relaxation in the body of the player. 
• They define the rhythm of incorporation specific to Max Payne- different games have different rhythms. 

77.

• In video games the action and the intensities of experience are much more like music in being relatively detached from these elements, to such an extent that we often need cut-scenes to remind us where we (our characters) are supposed to be in the game's overall 'story'. 
• Such is the extent to which we are concentrated on play, its 'feel' and dynamics, and such is the narrowing of our focus onto game elements as signs not in a narrative story, but of the need to perform this move or that. 

79.

• Diderot's paradox, is a much discussed idea from theatre studies and concerns the actor's assumption of a role to which they must appear to be thoroughly committed if they want to carry the sentiments of the audience. The paradox is that they can only achieve this appearance through concentrated attention to something else (namely, the performance itself). 
• While an actor must know feelings intimately and express them sincerely to produce them in an audience, he cannot achieve this goal by sincerely expressing those feelings on stage but must have recourse to artifice. 
• The best actors are not the ones who actually feel what their character is supposed to be feeling. 
• This applies very much to games, who cannot identify too strongly with their characters, since they have to master the playing of the game. It illustrates a fundamental aesthetic problem with the idea of a straightforward (tension and paradox free) immersion in virtual space and fictional role play.