The Boundaries of a Video Game as a Work of Art

Abstract

This article is dedicated to rethinking of some fundamental concepts inherited by game studies from journalistic, game design and commonsensical discourses and therefore revealing their increasingly problematic nature over time. By framing a videogame as a system of signs and using basic principles of semiotics, we will critically assess such concepts as avatar, interface etc. and attempt to reinvent them in such a way that they could better serve the needs of academic language of description. The result of this work is the introduction of several concepts that should help to draw clearer boundaries between objects and their interactions in games, between interface and not-interface, and also between playing subject’s “self” and “not-self” which is traditionally described through the “avatar — world” opposition. The initial stage of this work is an attempt to bring the “turn to the reader” in game studies to its logical conclusion, which would help humanities research of video games to follow in the wake of other media studies. By shifting the emphasis from the study of constructs to the processes of construction, we get an opportunity to get rid of the implicit assumption of the existence of a work of art before interpretation, which in itself could be seen a significant obstacle on the way to this turn. Further, this paper proposes the foundations of a semiotic model of a video game, distinguishes syntactic, semantic and pragmatic dimensions of video game simeosis, and proposes “interaction” as the main unit of analysis, as opposed to the “object” generally accepted as a unit of analysis in various unscientific languages. As an alternative to the concept of "avatar", suitable only for a narrow range of games, the concept of a "system of controlled interactions" is proposed here, which is applicable both for video games in which there is an "avatar" in the conventional sense, and for those games where this is not the case, including non-digital games. Finally, for a better understanding of the interpretation of video games, this work introduces the concept of a “field”, borrowed from the discourse of cinema studies and adapted for game studies. With the help of this concept, we get the opportunity to adequately describe the normative and subversive ways of interpreting video games, as well as describe the strategies that users develop in order to distinguish between "errors" and technical imperfections of games from the author's intentions, and make choices regarding whether to interpret or to ignore certain audiovisual information.