Playful Experiments: Conditions of “An Experience” in Touchscreen Games by a Non-Hermeneutic Perspective

Playful Experiments: Conditions of “An Experience” in Touchscreen Games by a Non-Hermeneutic Perspective

Felippe Calazans Thomaz (Federal University of Bahia, Brazil) and Jorge Cardoso Filho (Federal University from Recôncavo of Bahia, Brazil)
Copyright: © 2016 |Pages: 21
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-0261-6.ch016
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Abstract

This study investigates the conditions to aesthetic experience in games for touchscreen devices from a non-hermeneutic perspective. For that reason, the body and the technical devices are taken as fundamental dimensions in the process of having “an experience”, in which their material aspects are not indifferent. In other words, what is of interest is to analyze game situations and the mutual influence between player and game, in the sense of identifying elements that could lead to “an experience”, taking as objects the games Mountain and Monument Valley. Moreover, concerns to understand how such titles contribute to the broadening of the technoludic experience. The article is sustained in the induction that from the moment in which characteristics of traditional games are tensioned, it seems that they assume an air of experimentation in their ways of calling to action. We argue that “an experience” can emerge from the articulation between “effects of presence” and “effects of meaning”, so that the material constitution of the medium is not indifferent.
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Aesthetic Experience And Performance

On a flat surface, the most effective way of joining two separate points is through a straight line. The connection between the poles assumes a connecting element, which, in turn, results in a new spatial configuration. This same line draw itself in a progressive and orderly manner, leaving a place and heading to another, continuously. This illustration is taken as a way to examine some delineations of the concepts of experience and game and the resulting transposition of the latter to the digital landscape, placing what is in between as a guiding thread of the argument.

Thus, pragmatism addresses the issue of experience as an active movement between the living creature and the surrounding environment (Dewey, 1980). Among past experiences - constructs of socio-historical order - and the situation at hand, the subject captures and is captured, affects and allows to be affected by what is revealed to the senses. It is an everyday game by which subjects constantly sense the surroundings while being inserted in it, in a rather conscious manner. So, to conceive experience in pragmatism one must imply a special attention to the “in-between” space of one and another instance: past and present, with respect to time; body and environment, in relation to space. It is worth noting, however, that this duality is not presented as a separation, but as a continuous sharing that ultimately characterizes the flow of life itself.

In this sense, experience arises primarily from interactive situations. That is, the planning activity aimed at a particular accomplishment is what gives the status of experience to a conscious movement. Through successive phases, the seemingly dichotomic aspect of interactions is integrated in a mutual equilibrium that results in affectations. Just as the line that connects two separate points, it is a cumulative process that aims a specific purpose, as described by John Dewey (1980):

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