The performative aspects of videogames are not lost on those who consistently play them. Games, in general, can be a form of recreation, a show. Their immediate audio/visual stimuli lends itself perfectly as a spectacle for an audience of others to passively watch, from the AI controlled “attract” mode first present in early arcade machines to the maximum capacity audiences that clamor to see gaming tournaments and record attempts taking place at conventions and venues the world over.

Ian Bogost, in his Gamasutra article “Performative Play,” provides some fine examples of how some games are, in essence, bringing the duality between fantasy-world action and real-world implication to light in a more immediate and explicit way, through “performative mechanics.” This is certainly apparent with games like Wii Fit (2007) and Dance Dance Revolution (1998), which actually require specific physical interaction, but also shines through in more experimental games like Attent, designed to be played in office environments as a means of assigning value to internal memos and email, with the hope of actually increasing productivity and reducing unnecessary digital clutter (as anyone who has ever crossed items off of a personal “to-do” list knows how satisfying an organizational meta-game can be). While there is still a kind of “separateness of play,” to quote a Johan Huizinga term that Bogost uses—a way to escape inside of an alternate reality while still safely being grounded in the tangible one we are all familiar with—games that utilize or experiment with, or even comment on, the performative mode inherent in other types of media are evoking, as Bogost puts it, “a special kind of play for which outcome alone is an insufficient criterion.” Roger Travis, in his own series of articles on performance in video games, labels this relationship as “Performative Play Practices,” which he defines as an “intersubjective performance that takes place in a cultural zone demarcated for play (that is, as not having an effect on material circumstances, although that demarcation does not mean in actual reality that material circumstances are unaffected).”

Bogost and Travis have both written great pieces on performative play, and I don’t want to retread over already covered ground, but I would like to offer my own thoughts and examples of what I consider to be “modes of performance” and how they affect gaming culture as a whole.

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Posted by Kurt Shulenberger on April 6th, 2009 :: Features :: Tags : Attent, Dance Dance Revolution, Grand Theft Auto IV, Gravity Bone, Half-Life, Ian Bogost, Interactivity, Metroid Prime, Roger Travis, Super Mario World, Video, Wii Fit
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