(Video)Game Phenomenology: Game instinct vs games of the imaginary or prolegomena to a (quest) theory

[ensaio submetido a uma revista internacional da especialidade para referee e a aguardar resposta]

Abstract
This article looks at games as a cultural and phenomenological point of view, in the framework of a new scientific discipline (although its roots date back to the 1930s): Game Studies (Teixeira, 2005). While games, and specially vídeo or electronic games, with the mediation of a machine, are often studied in the light of semiotics, ethics, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, politics, economics, sociology or even gender studies, we intend to analyse games in a more general and encompassing fashion, as something fundamentally associated to humans, and which is constitutive of his way of thinking and being. In that sense, in this paper, we focus on imaginary faculty and in the figurative and mimetic fabrication, which is present in aesthetical judgement, and, more closely, in the Schiller’s notion of the ‘instinct of game’, in relation to the aesthetical entertainment and the category of Beautiful, continue to the discussion of kantian ‘faculties game’ and end up in Goethe’s notion of ‘metamorphosis’. Finally, we turn to issues of language and the neo-pagan proliferation of images associated to sentient machines. This lads the cultural industries into making the imaginary of games correspond to our games of imaginary.

Keywords
Gameplay, Ludology, Phenomenology, Imaginary, Simulation, Aesthetic

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