Session 4: The Future of Interactive Entertainment

4th Global Conference

Friday 13th March – Sunday 15th March 2009
Salzburg, Austria

How Video Games Produce Meaning through Narrative and Play
Jef Folkerts
School of Communication & Media, Hanze University Groningen, AS Groningen, The Netherlands

My aim is to provide clarity about the nature of the videogame as a meaning generating system, while I consider imagination a central concept. I approach videogames as a common part of culture, that can be looked at as a signification system, just like other common cultural products like magazines, art,  tv-shows, newspapers, films, books, ads, fashion, design, et cetera. I have examined the artistic and aesthetic nature of games: could imagination in a game experience be comparable to our perception of art and literature? Grounded on a distinction between first and second order representation I have scrutinized the meaning generating capacity of game stories. First order representation is the concrete representation of (narrative) occurrences, while second order representation concerns involvement with a consciousness, with a perspective on the meaning-making proces  related to those occurrences. My hypothesis is that processes of signification in videogames are similar to those in literature and film, but that these signification processes betray a different nature, producing different effects – to a large extend induced by the gamers prosuming mental ánd physical input.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

One of the most important problems which appeared in the computer mediated civilisation is the content usability for people with limited abilities of perception and interaction. Authors argue that digital communication has shown all inconveniences of so-far interfaces to the knowledge and of communication devices in the range of their usability and accessibility. Traditional ergonomy ensured the comfort of using the devices mainly to users without disabilities. The Net revealed the existence of the vast global community of disabled people who wants to come out from the ghetto of their own disfunctions and participate in other communities. The Internet is often the only chance to cross the barriers of this specific exclusion.

The Web design should take into account the aspect of various disabilities of the users. There exist both formal and informal instructions of accessible design. In some milieux of designers of interfaces and internet applications and content managers the publishing of content and materials which are accessible is even a sign of ‘good manners’. Therefore, there is the grassroots discourse of accessibility which is conditioned socially. It is often contradictory to the discourse of global corporations, embodying their own non-standardised solutions. The struggle of the ‘able-bodied’ community for the accessibility of the content for people with disfunctions of perception is a new form of global thinking about creation and maintenance of communication standards. It is often connected with the generation of open access to the content basing on Creative Commons licenses and technologies of Open Source.

Ideologists and designers of usability and accessibility in the range of human computer interaction are precursors of this new way of thinking about the needs of online communities, which are aiming to the ‘noble simplicity’ enabling to encode complicated symbolic content—simplexity. Usability understood in this way exceeds the limitations of political correctness with its compulsory necessity of double coding and decoding of meanings. Such anthropological situation may become the natural bridge between the world of those who can see and those who are blind or other communities with limited access to the content.

The paper analyses some procedures of improving the effectiveness of communication and interaction with the computer by the process of web designing. It shows some examples of community initiatives connected with accessibility and everyday problems of disabled people. Authors reflect on the roles of mechanisms of social content-generation and visualisations of communication obstacles both on-line and off-line. Projects which resulted in real changes of architectural solutions or development of their accessibility are to be described. The change in accessibility in symbolic and mediated communication is also the chance for revolution in thinking about the physical space. Thus, the Net impacts not only the architecture of information but also the architecture in traditional meaning. This way of thinking about the Network, communities and the new ergonomy of communication is therefore a kind of introduction to the reflection on new society without communication obstacles and on further evolution of humans connected to the computer, active in social terms due to technological interfaces and independently from the limitations stemming from biology or traditionally meant disfunctions.

Download Conference Paper – PDF