Communicology, Apparatus, and Post-history: Vilém Flusser’s Concepts Applied to Video games and Gamification

Abstract

Among the philosophers who undertook the task of thinking about the status of culture and the key advents of the twentieth century, the Czech-Brazilian Vilém Flusser deserves prominent recognition. A multifaceted thinker, Flusser produced sophisticated theories about a reality in which man advances towards the game, endorsed by the emergence of a kind of technical device that is dedicated, mainly, to the calculation of possibilities and to the projection of these possibilities on reality, generating a veil that conceals the natural reality and creates layers of cultural and artificial realities. This technical device, designated by Flusser as “apparatus”, being the index of a civilisatory stage where societies are characterised by the fact that they are programmed from discourses that point to a highly abstract shared language exposed through “technical images” which, just like Indian screens, are calculated and projected on the natural reality of the world, hiding and recreating it. This text explores the convergence between the main principles exposed by Flusser and that of the field which studies the theories concerned with video games, including the concept of gamification.