Art Devices - Play Devices: Immersion vs. Estrangement in Art-Games

This paper examines the tension between immersion and estrangement in art-games, drawing on Viktor Shklovsky's concept of ostranenie ("making strange") and Bertolt Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt. The author argues that games focused solely on immersion risk becoming pure entertainment that treats players as spectators, while games centered only on estrangement may become too abstract or unplayable. The proposed alternative is complicity, a dialectical state in which players are absorbed in the game's fiction yet remain critically aware of its constructed rules and power dynamics, enabling games to function as participatory, political, and didactic art.

The paper situates immersion within game studies, citing Janet Murray's account of immersion as a pleasurable, all-consuming sensation and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's flow theory, while also distinguishing among types of immersion such as systems, spatial, empathic, and narrative immersion. It reframes the artistic "device" through Russian Formalism and Actor-Network Theory, arguing that a device is an active, relational system rather than a passive tool. The analysis traces how Brecht added an explicit political mission to Shklovsky's aesthetic formalism, and how relational aesthetics and social sculpture extend these ideas into interactive practice.

The paper's methodology is primarily practice-based and reflective, using two of the author's own large-scale installations as case studies: Divided, an interactive piece developed for the Deep Space 8K at the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, and The Rousseau Game, a five-zone floor installation shown at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest in 2022 and later added to its permanent collection. Observations of participant behavior and visitor interpretations serve as evidence that complicity emerges in practice, with players negotiating cooperation and conflict and reflecting on property and social contracts. The author concludes that art-games can renew the purpose of art by generating critical meaning through participation.