Patrick Fiorilli Dissertation Defense: "Imagined Fortresses: Video Games as Language"

Defense Announcement:

Title: "Imagined Fortresses: Video Games as Language" 

Date/Time: Thursday, March 31 at 10AM Eastern Time

Location: Virtual in Zoom

Zoom Link: https://gatech.zoom.us/j/95203282017?pwd=Ryt3UUMwYmIrNWJnaHpEdGtkdUdDdz09

Zoom Meeting ID: 952 0328 2017

Zoom Passcode: 743734

Committee: Jay Bolter (chair), Gregory Zinman, André Brock, Ian Bogost (Washington University in St. Louis), and Deborah Goldgaber (Louisiana State University) 

Abstract: This dissertation argues that video games, as virtual worlds, are composed and experienced as language, and that they function as textual and philosophical machines essential to understanding virtuality, language, and finitude in today’s world. To this end, I describe how language manifests variously as material for video game design and play. In one regard, I argue that worlds emerge from the prescription of certain linguistic limits: the nonsensical, the inexpressible, or the impossible. Far more than agency and immersion, delimitation within the constraints of a video game’s language world defines the act of play. “Can I jump up there? Can I pet this dog?” In these cases, either the language of the game world holds the answers to these questions, and it will reveal them in turn, or it takes the questions themselves to be meaningless. The ledge is too high. You see a dog, but you cannot pet her. Traversing these limits, players paradoxically attempt to use language to escape language. As part of my comparative method, I locate a literary precedent for this paradox in the fiction of Mallarmé, Borges, Lispector, and Calvino. Mirroring the theoretical preoccupations of their poststructuralist counterparts, these postmodern authors reveal the implication of language in compounding formal and material spheres. Thus, this dissertation concludes that video games are virtual worlds in language which reveal their own enclosure and explore the very nature of delimitation.