When scoring doesn't matter: the aesthetics of performance in arcade games

Abstract

The tendency to consider aesthetics as a property of an individual experience of an event, object or process obscures the public and social character of much aesthetic experience. The position developed in this paper is that an important way of looking at the public aspects of aesthetics is through performance. Performance, in this context, is taken to mean the design of actions for observation by others with all the attendant interactions that this encourages. This is in contrast to the ‘performance’ of the products we are discussing.

Keywords:

• Aesthetics
• Dance
• Phenomenology
• Performance
• Observation spaces

Notes

^†It is beyond the scope of this paper to develop the point more fully but it is important to note that for Heidegger ‘mood’ and ‘state-of-mind’ are not essentially individual subjective states.

^‡This is the new genre of web applications that includes social networking sites, recommender systems, and so on, all of which share a quality of user participation and control over one's own data. For the popularity of social networking alone, see the Wikipedia list of notable sites: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites. For the definitive description of ‘Web 2.0’ see: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html