"Gamic Realism": Player, Perception and Action in Video Game Play

This paper explores a phenomenological approach to the video game medium, in order to argue that realism in video games is dependent on the player’s embodied experience of play as opposed to mimetic representation. My paper discusses the relation of the player, and specifically the player’s body, to the idea of realism in video games. Chris Crawford wrote in 1982 that “games represent a subset of reality”. Similarly, Jesper Juul argues in his recent book that games are “half real”. I discuss this idea of half-reality through a consideration of the terms virtual reality and telepresence. Media artist Eduardo Kac distinguishes between the two concepts thus: VR presents purely synthetic sense-data lacking physical reality, while telepresence presents sense-data that both claims to correspond to a remote physical reality, and also allows a remote user to perform a physical action and see the results. Where does such a distinction leave the video game medium? I draw upon the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty in order to argue that the controller interface (keyboard, joypad etc.) in video game play create an experience different from the disinterested perception involved with experiencing non-interactive media. Through Merleau-Ponty’s notion that the body is our main medium for having a world, I argue that gamic realism is always body-subjective, and reliant not on depiction but on action. Author