Playful Attitude and the Semiotics of Identity: Kinetic Tactility in Video Games ; Attitude ludique et sémiotique de l’identité : la tactilité cinétique dans les jeux vidéo

International audience ; In this paper, our aim is to analyze the role of tactility in video games and its contribution to the construction of their meaning dynamics. In the first part of the paper, we will discuss the concept of ludic attitude described by Jacques Henriot and Sébastien Genvo. This attitude is not an ontological property of objects, although games are certainly predisposed to encourage it: singing into a fork during a meal, for example, transforms it into a simulacrum of a singing instrument, and thus encourages other individuals to recognize and adopt the same attitude. In the light of the semiotics of practices, we will define the ludic attitude as the particular inflection of a semiotic practice that, by summoning models of schematization and accommodation from another semiotic situation, duplicates identity roles while maintaining alive the co-structuring transduction between the two situations. This will enable us, on the one hand, to distinguish this attitude from the regime of belief of fiction and, on the other, to shed light on the identity work at the heart of all semiosis. In the second part of the paper, we will analyze the particular tactility deployed by video games. Drawing on the sensible fields identified in the semiotics of the body – in particular, sensori-motricity, the field of intimate intransitive movements, and the transitive field – we will examine how these fields contribute to the figural syntax of video games. Our thesis is that videogames impose considerable restrictions on the wider domain of ludic practices, and configure a particular kinetic tactility: access to video game experiences involves the realization of movements on an interface and the transformation of these movements into movements in the digital worlds. A discussion of the articulation and the limitations of this tactility will enable us to examine how the ludic attitude is realized in video games through a constitutive correlation between mechanisms of kinetic immersion and mechanisms of reflexive ...