The medieval-themed video game as a sensitive experience

GERARDO FABIÁN RODRÍGUEZ; LIDIA RAQUEL MIRANDA

Budapest

Conferencia; Online Conference ?The Middle Ages as a Digital Experience?; 2022

Universidad del Centro de Europa

The aim of this paper is to underline the sensitive reasons (sensory and emotional) for the success of video games, which range from issues of an artistic nature, related to the quality of their production, to reasons linked to gameplay and immersion, since the experience of capturing the gamer’s attention involves all the senses and promotes the most varied emotions.This intersensory experience refers to the holistic condition of the five senses, that is, to the interrelation of all of them at the moment of subjects’ perception which often generates the synaesthesia phenomenon. Etymologically, the word ‘synaesthesia’ derives from the Greek syn (union) and aesthesis (sensation), literally the joining of the senses. Synaesthesia is an involuntary joining in which the real information of one sense is accompanied by a perception in another one. Besides, this additional perception is considered by the synaesthete as real, frequently outside the body, instead of imagined in the mind’s eye. Starting from that, synaesthesia can be defining in several ways: the secondary or associated sensation that occurs in one part of the body as a result of a stimulus applied to another part of it; the subjective image or sensation, typical of a sense, determined by another sensation that affects a different sense, and, regarding the rhetorical device, the joining two images or sensations coming from different sensory domains, such us “silent sun” (like in Dante’s Inferno), “tasting the rainbow”, “watching the music”, among many other examples. We believe that all of these meanings of synaesthesia may be recognized in the gamers’ experience. In fact, the immersive experience achieved explains, in part, the success of video games, since players feel and are moved beyond the physical senses involved: just by playing, they can perceive the stench of death, the sordidness of the plague, the incessant bustle of wars, the silence of scriptoria (beyond the soundtracks), the tactile materiality of the constructions (roughness, porosity) or get emotionally involved with the situations experienced, which range from the acceptance to the absolute rejection, manifested in both verbal and bodily expressions.In this work, the study of the sensory and perceptive configuration in the video games La abadía del Crimen (1987) and A Plague Tale: Innocence (2019) will allow us to investigate how the above described gamers’ sensitive experience affects the recreation of the Middle Ages, at the crossroads of playful space and symbolic imagination provided by this type of historically based entertainment.