Digital games are a critical form in which makers express models of play that create meaning beyond entertainment. Game culture is pervasive and amidst a wider technological context that invites all our active participation provides one setting for creative self-expression. Games collapse
the distance between makers and players in a uniquely active manner and whilst this paper centers on possibilities for game making, all players co-create their own gameplay experience, which holds potential for enacting individual agency. Based on experience introducing game design and development
education at an art and design university over the past decade as part of the Digital Futures programme, this paper develops some early discussions around the concept of game sketching to both pedagogic and research-creation ends.
To date, games studies (the academic field that analyses videogames from a humanities perspective) has drawn from the fields of play theory, psychology, sociology, film studies, cyber culture, literary and media theory as well as visual anthropology to map its roots. This paper adds the field of performance theory to this family of disciplines in order to better understand the emergent and interdisciplinary field of games studies. These disciplines have hinted at the connection between the discourses surrounding play and aspects of performance and performativity. However, scholars have been less forthcoming in acknowledging the role of performance in play as a subject in its own right, worthy of study.As a starting point to frame the phenomenology of digital play it is useful to look to core elements of a play experience. On the highest level these can be understood as the game object (which consists the game world and its rules), the player subject and the play act (the unifying action that creates a particular performance).
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