Have you ever been “experienced”?

The more I’ve researched games and media, the more that term “experience” comes to the foreground.  In the title of this post, I want you to think of “experienced” not so much as an adjective describing a person, but as a verb actively influencing its subject.

In my paper I’m trying to pass through SIGDOC‘s review process, I’ve managed to sharpen some thoughts on experience as a conceptual term that can be applied to culture studies.  A 2003 article by Torben Grodal in The Video Game Theory Reader has led me to see narrative in a fashion that is a bit different from what literary studies has made of it.  Grodal posits storytelling as essentially a cognitive process composed of four elements: perception, emotion, cognition, and action.  Below is a passage from my paper in which I lay the foundation for an analytical model I’ve been working on in some fashion for about six months:

Do you suffer from “simulation fever”?

I have been slowly and purposefully plodding my way through Unit Operations: an Approach to Videogame Criticism, by Ian Bogost.  It was published in 2006, which means I’m a bit behind the times for a scholar.  But, in my defense, Bogost’s other book, Persuasive Games, has received more attention.

Unit Operations melds together a wide ranging set of technical concepts in mathematics and industrial design (the origins of the term “unit operation”) with a number of cultural/interpretive theories in the humanities.  His idea is to posit a way in which videogames can be approached critically without overtly privileging one form scholarly discourse over another (a debatable project on a number of levels).