Perceiving Digital Gameworlds

Description

When perceiving objects within digital gameworlds, it is often the case that the avatar, situated within the gameworld, cannot see what the player, external to this world, has perceptual access to, or vice versa. Based on such situations, as well as a Waltonian framework (Walton 1990), I discern three kinds of perception that are involved in digital gameplay:

1) Fictional perceptions, or what the characters within the gameworld, including the avatar, are represented as perceiving.
2) Players’ actual perceptions from their perspective as external observers of the gameworld.
3) Imaginative perceptions, or what players imaginatively perceive when taking on the role of participants in the gameworld, as so-called ‘virtual subjects’ (cf. Gualeni & Vella 2020).

Game designers usually try to avoid discrepancies between these different levels of perception, often with the goal of enhancing the feeling of being immersed in the gameworld (cf. Tavinor 2021). In this paper, however, I focus on the aesthetic relevance such divergences can have. Through examples, I show how perceptual discrepancies can be valuable expressive devices, eliciting interesting narrative, emotional, and cognitive effects.

Period	1 Jul 2023
Event title	European Society for Aesthetics Annual Conference
Event type	Conference
Location	Budapest, HungaryShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International