Design research gameplay. A technocultural approach to design research through game-forms and play.

This thesis aims to contribute to the understanding of video games from the perspectives of Design Cultures and Sciences. The purpose is to bridge design research with research on video games through their respective languages, practices, and theoretical-interpretative models. I analyze video games as artifacts that represent the convergence of an advanced industrial productive system, the modes of production, exchange, and consumption of digital capitalism, and the expressive forms of contemporary technoculture. In other words, I look at video games as a paradigmatic form of commodity, the Game Form, which characterizes the artifacts of contemporary digital society. I also describe the game-exchange as the emerging model of value exchange that defines the power relationships between producers and consumers. In the first part of the thesis, I develop a three-layered analysis—productive-economic, socio-political, and cultural—offering a phenomenological and critical account of power and cultural dynamics mediated and amplified by the video game system. In the second part, I provide a classification of what I define game-forms, paradigmatic instantiations of the Game Form which articulate the double dimension of game as commodities and as epistemic artifacts. This classification is adopted to bridge the gap that emerges in the Italian academic context between the technical discipline of Game Design, the humanistic perspective of Game and Play Studies, and the field of Design. Lastly, I use the developed theoretical and practical frameworks to understand Design Research as a gameplay dynamic in which designers manipulate game-forms, apply and experiment on and through game technologies, and, more broadly, develop a playful/gameful approach towards building design knowledge. Design Gameplay is therefore defined as the dynamic creative negotiation among subjectivities, material and immaterial networks and practices, and scientific and non-scientific modes of inquiry for the generation of design knowledge through the experimental affordances of video games.