The GTA Project: Games and Transgressive Aesthetics

Digital games are often criticized for their many and exaggerated portrayals of violence, and also for their stereotypical representations of gender. But how are such descriptions experienced while playing? How violent or gender stereotypical can a game situation be before players find it speculative or tasteless? And when are game situations experienced as satire or parody? What is appropriate to include in a digital game, and what does the activity of play and the game situation do to the interpretation of controversial content? The project Games and Transgressive Aesthetics explores controversial game content theoretically and through empirical studies that stress how such content is experienced while playing games. Finding an explanatory framework that focuses on the player?s experience of controversial content in digital games is central to the project. How does playing transform the experience of controversial game content? When is game content perceived as unproblematic for players, and when does it transgress the border into the speculative or repulsive? And in what situations is such content seen as challenging and critical? Questions such as these connect the project to debates about subjective perceptions of aesthetics and taste, games as art and medium, ethics and freedom of expression. The hypothesis of the project is that controversial content often is accepted in games because the content is being re-negotiated in a playful context. At the same time the game-oriented attitude may risk collapsing if players experience the content as too problematic. The results show that players relate to video games as a medium of expression similar to film and literature, and for this reason there are situations in which the player experiences that video games provoke or evoke emotional discomfort. In such contexts, players may choose to activate different mental techniques in order to tackle the discomfort, or they may choose to quit playing. The project confirms the hypothesis that the gaming context may mitigate the sense of discomfort of difficult content. Discomfort is mitigated when the player experiences a sense of control of the in-game situation, and many situations makes it possible for the player to ignore that which is scary or uncomfortable by focusing on the challenges of the game. In other situations, the fictive context of the game may mitigate discomfort, for instance through a humorous or exaggerated context.

The project has introduced the concept of transgression into game studies as a perspective on which to understand both norm-breaking game practices and game content that provides an alternative to psychological effect research. The project has opened up for research into the different ways that games and play can be transgressive, and what this means both for players and for society. This has impact upon the field of game studies, but also on how games are discussed in other fields such as media studies and social psychology. The project also has impact upon how games are talked about in the general public and may also have an impact on the regulation of games and media. Our research has reinforced the idea that games must be understood as a medium of expression and that they for this reason also have a role in modern democracies. Thus, the research is also relevant for game developers who explore games as a medium of expression.

This project is a study of the relationship between transgressive game content and the experience of playfulness and asks what happens when transgressive game content is framed by playfulness, and what happens to playfulness when encountering transgressive game content? This project seeks an approach sensitive to the players' experience and sense of aesthetics to understanding transgressive content in games, and offers thus an alternative paradigm to effect studies for understanding controversial content in games. By combining quantitative and qualitative research methods, the project will create an empirically based theory that explains the relationship between transgressive content and playfulness in games. The results will have implications for the censorship and regulation of games, and will contribute to understanding digital games as a cultural form. The project consists a core group consisting of a project leader, one researcher and a PhD student. The core group will be supported by two active partners, a group of associate partners from Norway, and an international advisory committee. The project will result in one anthology, one monograph, and 9 journal publications, 3 master theses, 1 PhD candidate, and yearly research seminars and an international conference.