Dr. Stephan Günzel (Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena) The Irreducible Self: Image Studies of First Person Perspective Computer Games

My thesis assumes that computer games are, first and foremost, pictorial objects, viz. images. As the initial debate on principles within the young branch of computer game studies has shown, there is a contradictory and even aporetical opposition between ludological and narratological approaches to games (Frasca 2003). To both positions – the narratological as well as the ludological – a computer game is not categorically different from what already existed before the age of computational technology: a text or a game. Computer games therefore are taken as a transformation or transposition of something old into a new medium; the text becomes an interactive text and play becomes virtual play.