When Scoring doesn't Matter: The Aesthetics of Performance in Arcade Games

Healey, P.G. and Light, A. (2007) When Scoring doesn't Matter: The Aesthetics of Performance in Arcade Games, Proc. Affective Communication conference, Co Design suppl 1, 2007

The tendency to consider aesthetics as a property of an individual experience of an event, object or process obscures the public and social character of much aesthetic experience. The position developed in this paper is that an important way of looking at the public aspects of aesthetics is through performance. Performance, in this context, is taken to mean the design of actions for observation by others with all the attendant interactions that this encourages. This is in contrast to the 'performance' of the products we are discussing.