an exploration of the video game as architecture using phenomenological methodology

Phenomenology is an attempt to make rigorous accounts of subjective experience. One way of briefly illustrating the problem is by considering the following quote attributed to musician Fats Waller regarding what Jazz is;

"…if you hafta ask, you ain't never gonna know!"

Phenomenology attempts to offer a rigorous approach to getting answers to such questions without resorting to mysticism or metaphysics on one hand or reducing experience to the denigrated status of qualia. Qualia is term used to refer to experience as a minor phenomena produced by the physical universe.

When we play a video game, if it is successfully executed, we become immersed in a two dimensional representation of a two or three dimensional space. We may become a medieval Persian prince as in the game Prince of Persia, even though we are female. We may become immersed as an acrobatic Asian female leaping across the roof tops of a futuristic Tokyo, as in the game Mirror's Edge although we are clumsy, Caucasian males.

Our identity then becomes briefly mirrored on either side of the screen. Within that screen we have both landscapes and and architecture, whether it is the expansive worlds of games such as Myst or the multiplayer online worlds of games such as Second Life or World of Warcraft.

And at what point does the game itself become an architecture? We experience moving through an environment that we interpret as "Bricks and Mortar" even as we sit on a couch or perhaps perform the "Wii dance" as they simulate riding a snowboard, fighting monsters or bowling. Is this an essentially architectural experience albeit a virtual one?

The Polish Philosopher, Roman Ingarden offers a perspective in his book "The Ontology of the Work of Art". As a phenomenologist, he is interested in how we consciously experience phenomena, in this case specifically architecture. As an psychologically interior experience how does "brick & mortar" differ from pixels on a screen? Both are intended structures; That is to say a creative vision went into their creation. The individual encountering them treats them as objects with mass, oapacity and presence.

Are video games art?

The placement of video games in relation to other disciplines raises several problems. In a post on this topic, Brett McCallon, writes about the The High Art of Bioshock.

"Any person can read a novel, listen to a hip-hop album or watch a movie, if he has even a shred of interest. But comparatively few have the equipment and know-how needed to complete a top-tier video game."

This reveals a failure to understand that reading is interactive. This does not undermine his arguement that video games can be evaluated as high art. However, it does raise the question of specific modes of critique for discrete genres and of more broadly applicable critical approaches.
Gonzalo Frasca argues for specific modes of criticism in his essay "Simulation versus Narrative". Ludology, or the study of games and video games in particular persues an alternative semiotical structure of simulation in contrast to narrative. While he allows that both simulation and narrative share common elements, Frasca argues that video games 'are a just a particular way of structuring simulation, just like narrative is a form of structuring representation'.
The popular critic, Roger Ebert, dimisses the possibility of a fine art interpretation of video games.

"Ebert, himself not a gamer, bases his argument on the fact that games are interactive. To paraphrase his point: because games require input from a player in order to move forward through their narratives, player actions necessarily subvert authorial intent."

Ebert fails to realise that the subjective intentionality of the audience always subverts authorial intent to some extent. "The Death of the Author" an essay by Roland Barthes forcefully argues that no interpretation or appeal to authorial intention is possible.
In his story Sarrasine, Balzac, speaking of a castrato disguised as a woman, writes this sentence:

' "It was Woman, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive fears, her unprovoked bravado, her daring and her delicious delicacy of feeling" Who is speaking in this way? Is it the story's hero, concerned to ignore the castrato concealed beneath the woman? Is it the man Balzac, endowed by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman? Is it the author Balzac, professing certain "literary" ideas of femininity? Is it universal wisdom? or romantic psychology? It will always be impossible to know, for the good reason that all writing is itself this special voice, consisting of several indiscernible voices, and that literature is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin: literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.'

We always interpret, even if the text is simple.

Bibliography
Barthes, Roland, "The Death of the Author", in Aspen #5-6, Fall-Winter 1967,Roaring Fork Press, NYC. downloaded 15/09/2008
Frasca, Gonzalo, "Simulation versus Narrative" in The Video Game Theory Reader, Wolf, Mark J.P. & Bernard Perron, eds. Routledge, New York, 2003