Description
Book SynopsisThis book analyses video games like Grand Theft Auto and Resident Evil as aesthetic objects. Drawing on philosophical theories of art from Kant to Ranciere, it focuses on what games feel like to players and argues that their appeal can only be adequately understood by relating them to developments in contemporary art and recent cultural history.
Trade Review"An established scholar of the sociology of gaming and computers, Kirkpatrick (Univ. of Manchester, UK) argues video games are autonomous cultural forms that should be considered art."
"Kirkpatrick positions the aesthetics of video games in interactivity, outside the traditional realm of formal or literary representation."
"......adds a distinct, if rather conservative, perspective on video game play to the burgeoning field of game studies."
I have yet to encounter a book as extensive and thought-provoking as Aesthetic Theory and the Video Game.
...Kirkpatrick’s book is an illuminating exploration of how a players body and a game intertwine, or how, “a generation of young men have grown up dancing with their hands.”
There is no doubt that this book is important: for the academic theorization of gameplay, aesthetic theory, and cultural studies in its broadest, interdisciplinary or ‘indisiciplined’ manifestations… Rancière is one of a plethora of writers with whom Kirkpatrick artfully weaves propositions and readings of games to accumulate a coherently mapped theory of gaming as an aesthetic cultural practice... I have yet to encounter a book as extensive and thought provoking as Aesthetic Theory and the Video Game.
You’ll never look at a controller the same way again after Kirkpatrick explains how we’ve been conditioned to use carefully designed blobs of plastic to influence an image.
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Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
Introduction
1. The Aesthetic Approach
Why an aesthetic approach?
Play and form
Form, taste and society
Art and politics
Culture industry revisited
2. 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
3. Controller, Hand, Screen
Form, vision and matter
Hands and touch
The controller
Video game image
Embodied activity and culture
4. 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
5. Meaning and Virtual Worlds
Fictional worldness
Neo-baroque entertainment culture
Form and fictional content
Death and allegory
Play and mourning
6. Political Aesthetics
Unit operations
Rhetoric and persuasion
Badiou’s inaesthetics
The ludological truth-event
Dancing our way to where?
Index
