Janet Murray, "Games as Joint Attentive Scenes"

(In Worlds in Play)

- Problem of rapid development of human cognition and culture
- Understand others as intentional agents (basis of culture)
- "Joint attentional scenes," participants both understand the other as an intentional agent, framework for understanding intentionality and cultural transmission
- Why are games pleasurable if they limit the explorative freedom of play? Perhaps they are joint attentional scenes
- Shared focus, intentionality, symbolic communication
- Understand self as agent, shift perspective, teach/learn
- Games as foundational element of culture, first representational media
- Play as communication (pre-linguistic)
- Games organize behaviour, serve as practice
- Similarity to and separateness from others
- Intrinsically social (spectatorship and performance)
- Unseen intentions -> sense of cause and effect -> narrative sequences
- Link between games and stories at the earliest moment of human consciousness (symbolic communication leading to language, media)
- Episodic culture -> mimetic culture -> mythic culture -> theoretical culture (all endure in one form or another)
- Dance Dance Revolution as mimetic joint attentional scene between human and machine
- Mythic culture: heroic narratives of many games
- Joint attention -> language -> writing
- Ritual -> myth -> theory
- Games (and stories, presumably) as driving force of cognitive/cultural evolution? (Or are they simply a product/side effect?)
- Digital game as mediated consciousness of an implied human programmer
- Both embodied opponent and created (art) object
- Digital games socialize pople into cyborg order, new "symbolic language of interaction"