Gaming Encounter in the Age of Digital Reproduction

Abstract

The article suggests to interpret the gaming activity within the location-based mobile game Ingress the Game as a technically mediated gaming encounter (E. Goffman). This means that players significantly determinate the situation of encounter due to the selective elimination of irrelevant circumstances of external context beyond the game world. Through technical and digital means (primarily due to a mobile phone/tablet and access to the Internet) players carry out assembling scattered game and non-game fragments in a gaming reality that allows continuously to maintain a potential entanglement in gaming activity. In turn, continuity of the gaming activity causes loss of significance of opening and closing markers in gaming encounter. Endless, competitive and without a winner, Ingress the Game experiences tension associated with the interpretation of its rules by players. Foremost this fact is linked with that the players do not start to arrange the futility of the three-year confrontation between the two factions which receives no expression in the promotion of the game narrative and determining the winner. In this connection, different game logics arise within the Ingress application that go beyond setting originally pledged by developers. We offer an analytical opposition «game - puerilism» as a theoretical framework for the consideration of the following extensions of game logic. Unlike the gamification project it 73 allows to describe game activity «inside» in terms of the game itself.