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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