Performativity in Art, Literature, and Videogames

by Darshana Jayemanne

Overview

This book modifies the concept of performativity with media theory in order to build a rigorous method for analyzing videogame performances. Beginning with an interdisciplinary exploration of performative motifs in Western art and literary history, the book shows the importance of framing devices in orienting audiences’ experience of art. The frame, as a site of paradox, links the book’s discussion of theory with close readings of texts, which include artworks, books and videogames. The resulting method is interdisciplinary in scope and will be of use to researchers interested in the performative aspects of gaming, art, digital storytelling and nonlinear narrative.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783319853963
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	05/13/2018
Edition description:	Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2017
Pages:	331
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Darshana Jayemanne is Lecturer in Art, Media and Games at Abertay University, UK. Previously he was a researcher at The University of Melbourne, Australia. His current work investigates art, media and games and has appeared in venues such as Fibreculture, ToDiGRA Journal and The Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Videogames as Performances
Part I. Framing Devices: Performative Loops in Literature and Art History
2. How to Do Things With Images
3. What is Rhyparography?: The Ambiguity of the Framing Device
4. 'Fanciful Microscopy': Framing Devices and Uncertainty in Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49

Part II. Anterior Motives: Performance in Videogames
5. Anterior Motives: From Subjective Shot to Portal’s Figure of Reversal
6. Performative Multiplicities
Part III. The Body Eclectic: Distortion, Distraction and Tactile Experience
7. Serial Aesthetics: Gaming’s Metamorphic Bodies and Baudelaire's 'Argot Plastique'
8. Physical Wit: Games and the 'Tactile Unconscious'
Part IV. Performative Multiplicities: A Method for Analyzing Videogame Performances
9. The Nip and the Byte: Analogue and Digital Performances in Videogames10. Time Invaders: Conceptualizing Performative Game Time
Conclusion

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“As the novelty of the academic study of videogames fades into institutional respectability and disciplinary convention there is a need more than ever for an ambitious theory of games and gameplay that insists on their strangeness, instability and messiness. Jayemanne’s central concept of performative multiplicity draws critical attention to the aesthetics, cybernetics and lived experience of digital games as media in play, and articulates them with expressive and creative culture at large. Matching astute analysis of popular games with philosophical and anthropological insight, the book is challenging and thought-provoking throughout. Performativity in Art, Literature and Videogames promises to be both a key text for an ambitious game studies, and a provocative invitation to rethink and re-view the philosophies, histories, and futures of art and media from a ludic perspective.” (Seth Giddings, Associate Professor of Digital Culture and Design, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, UK)

“As soon as we begin from the problematic of resolving how videogames are performatively framed, Jayemanne lines up a history which immediately falls into view. By reversing and inverting cherished and long-held models of reading videogames, Jayemanne has built the case for considering literary, art and game framing devices all together. While game studies is beset on all sides by the recumbent social sciences, human-computer interaction models, the remnants of a dissipated and digitized humanities, scholars are still returning to the big and critical questions of how things make meaning. In cataloguing his “new eclectic bodies, forms of physical wit, anterior motives and intention spans”, Jayemanne captures the energy of this intellectual moment, and announces a historical question unlike any other, while looking forward to how we’ll study ourselves tomorrow.” (Christian McCrea, Lecturer in Media and Communication, RMIT University, Australia)