Jogos eletrônicos: ficções e playgrounds filosóficos?.

Abstract

This thesis combines methods of comparative literature and literary theory in order to analyze the link between literature and video games. It hypothesizes that video games are fiction, and, as such, they re founded upon a many-centuries old tradition, including rhetorics seen as a combinatorial machine, the carnivalesque, dialogical fiction, and the speech for speech s sake in Antiquity s sophistry. This genealogy is validated and justified based on research by Barbara Cassin, Mikhail Bakhtin, and on Plato s, Aristotle s, and Gorgias works. The thesis also relies on Roger Caillois and Johan Huizinga s books on games, play and the ludic, authors who have associated these human penchants to the history of culture and many cultural phenomena. It also takes a page from René Girard s theory on mimetic desire/violence as the foundation to human culture. It traces phenomenological parallels between video games and literature by coordinating literary theory tools (such as Wolfgang Iser s reader-response theory) and electronic gaming theories such as Ian Bogost s and Janet Murray s, which regard video games as fundamentally procedural works (i.e., made up of processes). This work contends that the interaction between player and game can and should be analyzed as a cybernetic system. The mental images generated through procedural interaction can have an impact on the mental attitude of a player as much as the reader s mental images do during the reading of literary fiction. This work concludes with a theory about how procedurality and fictional elements are present in social networks, forums and message apps, and discussing what influence video game culture could have had on this current context of fake news, bots, and minorities being persecuted on the Internet and other online meeting places.