Playing is Performing: Video Games as Performance
Performing arts and playing video games are both forms of human creativity. They are also a form of leisure, a way of expression and a part of economic structures. They offer a position for both the performer and the audience.
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1 Introduction Performing arts and playing video games are both forms of human creativity. They are also a form of leisure, a way of expression and a part of economic structures. They offer a position for both the performer and the audience. Further, both playing and performing are processes, which in most cases do not produce any material products. An artistic performance ends, and player reaches an end in the game, but the enjoyment depends on the process. Both activities are about the journey, not the destination per se. Performing arts and games in general build upon play as a human activity (Huizinga 1980; Schechner 1988; Caillois 2001). Despite the common heritage, video games and performing arts have radically different positions or roles in the mediatized society of today. Performing arts—for example theatre, opera or ballet—still enjoy the place as ‘high culture’, whereas video games are seen as popular culture, more as products than as works of art.1 Video games have grown to be one the defining phenomena of the twenty first century. Along with the
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is a lot of discussion on whether or not video games can be seen as art, and if they are art, are they art through interpretation or intention. The definition of art is always changing, and video games as a relatively new form are reforming that definition. For a summary see Deardorff (2015).
M. Huuhka (*) University of Tampere, Tampere, Finnland E-Mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature 2020 M. Spöhrer und H. Waldrich (Hrsg.), Einspielungen, Neue Perspektiven der Medienästhetik, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30721-9_3
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digitalization of the society, video games grow in importance: They are part of education, leisure, sports, health and work (WePC 2019; Techopedia 2019). The aim of this article is to establish ways gameplay can be seen as performance. I will briefly examine the concept of performance by going through writings of performance scholars, including Marvin Carlson (1996), Richard Schechner (1988), and Erika Fischer-Lichte (2008). The aim is to pinpoint the defining characteristics of performance, especially on relation to video games as an activity. Next, I will present a definition of video games as performance, by matching the characteristics of performance with the action of gameplay. I will offer five different perspectives on video games as performance and as part of performance. This divide is not definite, but shows us different sides of both human-game-interaction and performance as a medium. These perspectives range from the usage of video games as a prop or additional media resource in conventional theatre to gameplay as performative activity. The aim is to extend the concept of gameplay through performance theory. The frame of performance is a playful attitude, which shifts the gaze from stories to actions by emphasizing performance’s processual nature. The categories suggested in this article are to be taken with a playful mindset. The main question
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