Computer Game's Audience as the Audience of the Artistic Text Analysis and Study of the Encounter Situation of Computer Games as Artistic Works

This paper investigates computer games and their presences in the current routines. It introduces this audio-visual medium itself, its outcomes and the effects of its appearance into the domain of our mental life. Moreover, it presents a comprehensive historical analysis in the matters of Games and Computer Sciences. Its methodology is contained by social sciences methodology, literary theory, and film critiques, but as the subject matter is an absolutely new one, a new-media discourse would be emerged by merging the named methodologies and a new jargon. The authors assumed that computer games are in the “art family” since a work which can seduce its human audiences and even gives them a virtual life; then the work could be called an “art”, conceptually. By the way, considering computer game as a media art, with regard to the distinction of representational and simulational art is in the outlines of this paper.In expressing the necessity of the research it is noticeable that according to the world marketing databases, the portion of trading computer games is equal to the great market of movie productions. Besides, as there are some great multinational corporations which are engaged in providing and disseminating of productions of computer games, the increasing importance of computer games, and their potentiality in absorption of audiences is obvious. These newfound positions of computer games make an academic necessity to conduct research on their aspects. Based on the “immersion” concept, the authors of this paper find the distinctions and similarities of two relative concepts, “the Viewer” and “the User”. They scrutinize the problematic of “the Agency of the audience” in Computer Games and present some theoretical strategies to illustrate new perspectives in order to facilitate the understanding of the true situation of the audience in confrontations with computer games.The discourse which this paper comes from, relates to a new academic discipline that its most important specificity is interdisciplinarity. The research area of new media studies has rooted in social sciences, fundamental sciences and engineering, philosophy and theory of art; and this conceptual and methodological richness, aside its newness, provoke deep lingual and thematic complications. While pioneers of new media studies assume the classic media studies as only the prerequisite for the multidimensional and difficult discussions of the discipline, but the other problem lies in the translational quality of this work. Present article in fact is a translation of the discourse of computer game studies, and at best, it can introduce a new academic discipline, with election of some scholars’ ideas. With regard to mentioned achievements, now it’s obvious that the audience of Computer Games stands far from the position of the classic viewer. But this new user/audience position has many more possibilities to research about. According to theories that are cited in this article, we can recognize this position in the contrary of the Agentship situation, or we think about it as the perfect embodiment of the Agentship concept. However current article, while proposes these two theoretical orientations, remains neutral about the subject.