Questão de Língua Inglesa

01. The study of game aesthetics is a very 02. recent practice, spanning less than two 03. decades. Unlike game studies in mathematics 04. or the social sciences, ........ are much older, 05. games became subject to humanistic study 06. only after computer and video games became 07. popular. This lack of persistent interest might 08. seem odd, but only if we see traditional 09. games and computer games as intrinsically 10. similar, ........ they are not. We might try to 11. explain this lack by noting that games are 12. usually seen as trivial and lowbrow by the 13. aesthetic and theoretical elites ........ cultivate the analysis of artistic media objects: 14. 15. literature, the visual arts, theatre, music, etc. 16. But this does not explain the fact that 17. aesthetic studies of games are now not only possible, but even encouraged and supported 18. 19. with funding. What happened to cause this 20. change? 21. A possible explanation could be that digital 22. games, unlike traditional games or sports, 23. consist of non-ephemeral content (stored 24. words, sounds and images), which places 25. them much closer to the ideal object of the 26. Humanities, the work of art. Thus, they 27. become visible and textualizable for the 28. 29. UFRGS – CV/2015 – ING 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. aesthetic observer, in a way the previous phenomena were not. However, this sudden visibility, probably also caused by the tremendous economic and cultural success of computer games, produces certain blind spots in the aesthetic observer, especially if he/she is trained in textual/visual analysis, as is usually the case. Instead of treating the new phenomena carefully, and as objects of a study for which no methodology yet exists, they are analyzed with tools that happen to be at hand, such as film or narrative theories. Therefore we need to outline and promote a methodology for the aesthetic study of games, which, given the current nascent state of the field, will doubtlessly give way to more sophisticated approaches in the years to come. Adapted from: Aarseth, Espen. Playing Research: Methodological approaches to game analysis. Available at: <http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/dac/ papers/Aarseth.pdf>. Accessed on July 26th, 2014.