Esthétique du jeu vidéo: l’art de la régression

Abstract

We propose to “to do as if” video game was an art and to think of what is at play in its reception. Our hypothesis will be : the video games' pleasure is a conscious regressive pleasure, intensifying by the awareness of our becoming- a-child and the excessive and transgressive way of doing so. The player re-becomes a dreaming child, whose playful spirit would give birth to a whole fantasy triggered by the real. That is the point where psychoanalysts (Freud and Winnicott) identifies the germs of creation and creativity, when is expressing the same « omnipotence of thoughts » that art activates at an adult stage. The video games' experience would ally a double pleasure : an interactive spectacle (a neo-aesthetic) and a creative impulse (a proto-poïétic). Yet, is such a regressive way of reaching infantile creative stages enough to make it an art?