Ibid., loc. 400.
10 Ibid., loc. 98.
11 Ibid., loc. 311 and loc. 578.
12 Schell, Jesse: The Art of Game Design, loc. 1079.
13 Ibid., loc. 1149.
14 Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al.: Understanding Video Games, loc. 1095; Mäyrä: An Introduction to Game Studies, loc. 580.
15 The necessity of an historical analysis of ahistorical-systematic attempts at definition is stressed by Mäyrä: An Introduction to Game Studies, loc. 550.
16 See Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al.: Understanding Video Games, loc. 1112: “... the definitions say nothing about digital computation and thus are definitions of games and not merely video games.”
17 See, for example, Juul: Half-Real, loc. 103: “[T]he history of video games is partly about breaking with the classic game model.”
18 Ibid., loc. 63: Juul also sees digital games as explicitly outside of the tradition of “cinema, print literature, or new media.”
19 Salen/Zimmerman: Rules of Play, loc. 1358.
20 Mäyrä, Frans: An Introduction to Game Studies, loc. 715.
21 Ibid., loc. 691.
22 Ibid., loc. 812.
23 Mersch, Dieter: "Logik und Medialität des Computerspiels. Eine medientheoretische Analyse", in: Distelmeyer, Jan/Hanke, Christine/Mersch, Dieter (ed.), Game over!?: Perspektiven des Computerspiels, Bielefeld: transcript 2008, pp. 19-41, here p. 20.
24 Ibid., p. 35.
25 In regard to analog games, Mersch says: “While it’s true that classical forms of play can be as well reduced to operators in decision logic and thereby mathematized as chess computers demonstrate, decision logic is not constitutive for many game situations—I should like to mention children’s games, competitions, ritualized forms of play, sports etc.” (Ibid., p. 37) Thereby the question remains what sort of relationship should arise between digital and analog games, i.e., between the two “kinds” of analog games: those, which like digital games are bound by “logical decision making operators,” and those, which remain independent of them.
26 See Bergo, Bettina: “Emmanuel Levinas,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, August 3, 2011; http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/levinas/. {Bergo, 2011 #3246}{Bergo, 2011 #3246}{Bergo, 2011 #3246}{Bergo, 2011 #3246}See also Lévinas, Emmanuel: “The Philosopher and Death,” in: (ed.), Alterity and Transcendence, New York: Columbia University Press 1999, pp. 153-168.
27 See Reynolds, Jack: “Jacques Derrida (1930-2004),” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy – A Peer-Reviewed Academic Source; http://www.iep.utm.edu/derrida/; Derrida, Jacques: Mémoires: for Paul de Man, New York: Columbia University Press 1986.
28 See Baudrillard, Jean/Lotringer, Sylváere: The Ecstasy of Communication, Brooklyn N.Y.: Autonomedia 1988. For Baudrillard, in the end the object and above all machines remain as the “radical Other”: “the inhuman alterity of an intelligent device [...] artificial alterity” (Baudrillard, Jean/Guillaume, Marc: Radical Alterity, Los Angeles, CA; Cambridge, Mass.; London: Semiotext(e); Distributed by the MIT Press 2008, p. 110.
29 Butler, Judith: Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex,” Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge 2011 (*1993). Butler introduced the term “constitutive outside” to the context of the development of the medium: “The exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed thus requires the simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet ‘subjects,’ but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject.” (Ibid., p. xiii)
2 Games in the Modern Era. A Short Media History
Games are media, this much seems indisputable. Still, it is seldom attempted to situate analog or digital games in the context of the history and theory of media. Quite clearly, however, digital games are positioned in the continuity of modern audiovisuality.1 In particular, they are the latest step in the process of the steady rationalization of image and sound production aimed at perspectival realism that began in the Renaissance. As photography, film, and video did before, digital games have made this process faster, simpler, and cheaper: It started with painterly realism, moved to photorealism and now has reached hyperrealism: from Alberti’s perspectival window view—“una finestra aperta”2—, which had to be manually constructed with great effort, to analog photography, which semi-automated the production of still and moving pictures, to real-time image generation via 3D engines. Just as the industrial media of film and television did not signify a radical break from the preindustrial medium of theater, but rather continued its aesthetic interests in numerous ways on a higher technological level—for instance the optical functionalization of the gaze or the century-long striving for an audiovisual synthesis, a total work of art—, in the same way current digital forms of play are more than just distantly related to older forms of media such as theater, film, and television.
GAMES
In fact, historically speaking, games have been around far longer than all other forms of audiovisual representation. They are, as Chris Crawford argues in his “Phylogeny of Play,” older than mankind.3 Many animal species simulate real world movements and actions, such as hunting, in order to practice them in relative safety. To play in such a manner and to go beyond and develop more complex, rule-governed games appears to also be a fundamental tendency of Homo sapiens. Board games such as SENET (Egypt, 3100 BCE) or the ROYAL GAME OF UR (Sumer, 2600 BCE) belong to the earliest evidence of human culture. In 5th century BCE, the Greek historian Herodot described how, supposedly, 700 years earlier the Lydians in Asia Minor, who are also credited with the invention of money, survived long periods of starvation through the use of board, dice, and many other games and then finally, with one last game, found a solution that insured the survival of the entire community.4 The
