Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Prologue Conflict, Negotiation, Appropriation, and Diversity: The Challenge of European Game Studies
- Introduction Euro Ludens: On the Origins, Playing Region, and Imaginaries of the European Videogame
- Part I National Stories
- Part II Transnational Approaches
- Conclusions (for now) European Videogames, Europeanness in Videogames
- Index
8 - Existential Ludology and Peter Wessel Zapffe
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2021
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Prologue Conflict, Negotiation, Appropriation, and Diversity: The Challenge of European Game Studies
- Introduction Euro Ludens: On the Origins, Playing Region, and Imaginaries of the European Videogame
- Part I National Stories
- Part II Transnational Approaches
- Conclusions (for now) European Videogames, Europeanness in Videogames
- Index
Summary
Abstract
A relatively common approach in game studies understands gameworlds as comprising an existential situation for the player. Taking this stance, which is rooted in the European philosophical tradition of existentialism, we investigate in this chapter the relationships and similarities between our existence within and without gameworlds. To do so, we first provide a review of existing literature in ‘existential ludology’—work in game studies that considers our engagement with gameworlds from an existential perspective. In the second part of the chapter, we engage with some of the most notable ideas of the Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe. Zapffe understood human life as inherently meaningless and identified four ways in which human beings typically protect themselves from the existential panic that accompanies the awareness of that meaninglessness: isolation, anchoring, distraction, and sublimation. These four categories are used as the foundation for an examination of gameworlds as technologies for repressing existential panic.
Keywords: Existentialism, ludology, Peter Wessel Zapffe, Isolation, Anchoring, Distraction, sublimation
One would be pointing out the obvious if one were to note that digital games are produced and played within specific sociocultural contexts that, both as technological artefacts and as cultural texts, will inevitably reflect the ideologies and worldviews that structure those contexts, and that, furthermore, they can only be understood within, and in relation to, those contexts. Accordingly, if we aspire to understand the existential significance of digital games, we should always approach them in relation to the historical and sociocultural contexts within which they are developed, understanding them as products and reflections of these contexts.
In this chapter, we will consider digital games as products of the system of thought that emerged with the Industrial Revolution in eighteenthcentury Europe, a system that—as a techno-socio-cultural organisation of the world—continues to hold sway across what we call ‘the West’. The interlinked and mutually determining elements of this organisation include industrially motivated technological development, a capitalist economy, and an individualist notion of subjectivity and selfhood that finds its first thorough articulation in post-Kantian Romanticism. As products of this episteme, it is hardly surprising that digital games reflect these elements of their context. Not only are they technological products produced and consumed within a capitalist economy, but they also reproduce, and are structured on the assumption of, the liberal notion of the self that has dominated Western thinking in the era of capitalism (Möring & Leino, 2016).
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- Information
- Perspectives on the European Videogame , pp. 175 - 192Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2021