Transitional areas of digital game art

Abstract

Digital games, which constitute a part of new media studies, offer different reality experiences and new expressive environments to a player with multimodal interactions and hybrid reality practices offered by game engines. The alternative environments offered by digital game art create a kind of ‘transitional space’ in the participant’s experience process with ambiguous structures such as reality-fiction. The phenomenon of the transitional area, discussed by Donald W. Winnicott, is the cultural manoeuvring space in which the subject experiences both internal and external reality while constructing the initial fiction of the self, and is closely related to Jean Baudrillard’s concept of simulation in which fiction and reality are mixed. In contemporary art, where the artistic image becomes a virtual reality, phantasmagoria, in which meaning and reality are reconstructed and staged in new media works referencing digital game practices, takes place in the transitional areas that Winnicott sees as a dynamic and experiential playground. This research focuses on digital game art works of different artists such as Olafur Eliasson, Hesam Jalili, Theo Triantafyllidis, Ian Cheng, and Joon Yong Moon, who create a transitional space in their work with practices such as ‘gamification of space’ and ‘counter gaming’.