Valery Savchuk – computer games researcher
Abstract
The article is aimed at analyzing the possibility of using the key concepts elaborated by Valery V. Savchuk for the philosophical understanding of computer games. It is noted that V.V. Savchuk was the editor of the first Russian collective monograph on the philosophy of computer games, and his further work opened new perspectives in this field. It is argued that the experience of technology is more fundamental for modern man than the experience of his corporeality: man's bodily configuration is always given to him in the mirror of technology. All of V.V. Savchuk's work is concentrated on the comprehension of the problems of environment, communication of images, corporeality; in this sense, his studies provide answers to the key questions of modernity: about the modus operandi of corporeal inclusion in the digital, about living the digital as an environment from within the body techniques available to it, about the transformation of subject matter in the digital; in other words, they make it possible to highlight the contours of digital integration. And if the most important thing in a thinker's work is the unspoken, computer games are what pulls thought down to the point of a new beginning, which should be proposed to authors writing about computer games as a starting point for new strategies of thought. In the context of the visual ecology and body-centred topology of computer games, this article explores the possibilities of such a new assemblage of already classic concepts, and suggests options for gameanalysts and game designers. It is concluded that computer games in Valery Savchuk's philosophical work become key biopolitical and biosemiotic platforms that ground non-game interfaces, i.e. define actual modes of digital presence.
