| Description | "Defamiliarization," per Viktor Shklovsky's original use in "Art as Technique" (1917) and later uses in sociology, describes an opportunity for a fresh encounter with something or someone that has, with time and habit, become opaque by proximity or familiarity. This talk explores defamiliarization's possibility in what Ian Bogost, in Unit Operations, calls the "simulation gap:" the critical space between a phenomena the simulation claims to model and the experience of a player bounded by the simulation. Defamiliarization not only provides a framework to scrutinize the representations a given game simulates and its implied assumptions about human experience, but clarifies opportunities for designers to consider the simulation gap and prompt the sort of reencounters necessary for art and empathy. |
