A1 Vertaisarvioitu alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä lehdessä
An enactive account of the autonomy of videogame gameplay
Tekijät: Vahlo Jukka
Kustantaja: Game Studies
Julkaisuvuosi: 2017
Journal: Game Studies
Tietokannassa oleva lehden nimi: Game Studies
Vuosikerta: 17
Numero: 1
ISSN: 1604-7982
Verkko-osoite: http://gamestudies.org/1701/articles/vahlo
Regardless of its significance in gaming cultures and the game industry, the concept of gameplay has remained elusive in academic research. In this paper, the phenomenon of videogame gameplay experience is analyzed from the framework of phenomenological enactivism as an account for social cognition. Enactivism is an interdisciplinary program of cognitive science that focuses on investigating the dynamics of couplings between embodied social agents and their environments. From the enactivistic stance, gameplay is argued as being the achievement of dyadic and reciprocal coupling between a player and the game. In this reciprocity, gameplay arises as autonomous organization that is both self-sustaining and precarious. Coordination and exploration are offered as constitutive principles of videogame gameplay. If either of these interactive principles is lost, then the autonomy of the gameplay is destroyed. This article also aims to showcase that the enactivistic second-person approach to gameplay may provide important new insights on the constitution of gameplay as both a subjective and social phenomenon.