Experiência em jogo : rupturas liminares na interação entre o jogador-viajante e as ambiências de games locativos e de mundo aberto

Abstract

Games are cultural products mediated by digital technologies that influence relationships with people, society, space and the imaginary. Considering the experience associated with its practice, we carried out a transdisciplinary investigation that transits between the areas of Communication, Game Studies and Travel Studies, with the objective of investigating to what extent the experience lived by the player-traveler — as a player, traveler, explorer, peregrine or flâneur —, who circulates in the tangible and digital environments of locative and open-world games, would come close to an experience of reflexivity and liminal rupture. We opted to observe the individual-environment interaction in the locative and open-world games, as they favor the development of experiences within their realities (fictional or not). We conducted a theoretical review of the concepts of experience and reflexivity within the framework of the dialogic relations between the player-traveler and the ambience with which he talks to (GEE, 2016), ranging from escapism (the search for new experiences and realities through pragmatic consumption of place) to the deviant gaze (the subjective temporalities). We approached the gaze of the player-traveler to that of the flâneur (BENJAMIN, 1999; 2007), adapting it to the interstitial realities of digital games, accessed in the act of microflânerie - a micropolitical (RESENDE; RODRIGUES, c2010) and microhistorical (LEVI, 2015) act in the liminal space-time of a pause, deviation, or reverie, amidst the passage or the fabulation of ambiences. We used the methodology of the contemporary constellation (SOUTO, 2019) in order to compare experience elements of the player-traveler interaction with the environment (obtained in qualitative nature interviews). We applied the concept of spatio-temporal thresholds (RIBEIRO; CAPANEMA, 2016; MARTINO; MARQUES, 2020) and heterotopic spaces (FOUCAULT, 1967; RIBEIRO, 2021) to characterize games’ environmental elements, linking them to the passages described by the interviewees and to content collected from publicly accessible online sources. The comparison and composition of the constellar elements revealed, in some ways, issues involving the affective territories of difference, the right to the city and to freedom, and the corrosion of human heritage on the planet. Although it is not possible to generalize the results obtained, such paths would indicate that the experience of the game practice in the environments could originate an aesthetic experience of permanence or liminal rupture, which would lead to a change of posture or updating of the gaze of the player-traveler.