Видеоигрите: архаика и авангард
Videogames: Between Archaic Epic and the Avant-garde

Summary/Abstract: In this essay, the aesthetics of video games is examined in terms of various aspects of temporality. With literature as a point of reference, the analysis foregrounds the strange overlap of video games and ancient and Medieval epic. Archaic conceptions of temporality, furhtermore, are revealed as subtending video games, which might be considered as science fiction or avant-garde. Should we be surprised that games are swarming with monsters? As I will try to show, the „monstrous“ encounter that Derrida set decades ago as the task of thinking – the encounter between machine and “organic” performativity – is not only the material framework of the player's interaction with the game's algorithm, but it is also the generator of plots indicative of contemporary crises of temporality and ontological ruptures which – before and after psychoanalytic filters – are the true source of a monstrosity no longer imminent, but, perhaps, already happening.

• Details
• Contents