Game World Phenomenology

 Today I had some spare time from other obligations so I could do some thinking and reading. Even with just an hour to spare I read and sorted som essays on Atmospheres edited by Tonino Griffero. There i found a few good notations on the historical development of atmospheres as a subject within phenomenology as well as notes on when the term gets useful in writing. I also found a few essays in the collection that I really don't need to read; after a few pages it was clear to me that I had no use for them. That too is work. I also read the introduction and a few short chapters in Monroe C. Beardsley's Aesthetics  and while I will read more there I think it's way to much philosophy to be useful for anything but background knowledge. There's really not a lot of time in this process for deep background reading. I also spent ca 15 minutes playing Grand Theft Auto III (Rockstar, 2001), remembering what a joy that game is. Driving around in a small low-res city and listening ...

 There is a pleasure in being in a game world, an escapist pleasure of being somewhere else, in a more interesting world where you have more agency and more capabilities. This pleasure is not new, nor specific to games, on the contrary most art has this potential for escapism; paintings, novels, theatre, opera and cinema have all been mediaforms where other worlds have been crafted. Games have one more thing than the predecessors; games are interactive and can at times provide a very open structure for how to perceive oneself to be inside these other worlds. A painted world is static but lets the viewer wander over it's surface. A narrative story is linear and we must walk through it on the path given by it's creator. Games can be very open and allow for many different paths through a world, and the gamer has agency in it.  So I will look at the effect of being in the game world with a phenomenological eye and comparing it to ways of being in worlds made through painting, scen...

 This is an experiment, it may not last.  In 1993 I was accepted as a PhD student at the department of Art History, I had an idea about Digital Aesthetics that I proposed as the subject of my thesis. My point then was that I somehow could see and describe new forms of artistic production inside the then very speedily evolving world of computer graphics and online technology. But I also got very much involved in teaching Art History so the thesis remained half-written and I gave up on the project. There where more stuff happening in my life at the time, and I was not the best prepared PhD-student. Instead I became an adjunct and teacher at my department. A few years back I wrote a short article in an anthology on Nature that we all at the (now) division of Art History worked with. It was a very enjoyable writing process and I restarted my thesis project again. And then Covid hit and everything was turned up-side down again for almost two years. At the end of that period I had...