Monday 14 April 2014

The Place of Art among other Modeling Systems.
Between Semiotics and Game Studies it had been a love at first sight. Different scholars used Pierce or Greimas, Eco or Morris to approach videogames and playfulness. Then come the struggle between narratologists and ludologists and Game Studies grew more and more independent and mediacentric. But for someone, as my-self, who want to approach play and games in a wider way semiotics is still the better tool to do it.
Between the forefathers of semiotics one stands alone, forgotten by the games scholars: Jurij Lotman. Even if the Russian scholar was passionate of cybernetics he never wrote anything on videogames, but he did wrote something on play. The title of his article is kind of misleading: “the Place of Art between other Modeling Systems”, where is play in all this? Well, in fact most of the 1967 article is exactly about play, that for Lotman is the simultaneous assumption of a conventional (thus fictional) behavior and a practical (thus real) one. Play as half-real than, as Jasper Juul said some decade later!

I found this article very interesting (far more because I was expecting some boring talk about art...) and therefore I warmly suggest to read it to any semionerd!



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