Expanded Game Art and Neurointerfaces as Means of Produsage

Abstract

In the center of the following inquiry stands the structural coupling of play and prosume in very actual forms of Augmented Realities, AR and neurogames. The term prosumer is a portemonteau of the terms production and consumption and finds a correspondence in the technological features of augmentation in a mixed reality, where real world and virtual world elements converge. In Augmented reality games codes call up virtual information, which is usual displayed on everyday mobile technologies as smart phones or tablets. The very latest addition to this already established technosphere of mobile devices and play worlds are biometrical interfaces. Such interfaces, like wristbands, clocks or counters and sensors are embedded or extensions to the mobile gadgetry and ubiquitous computing devices of everyday use. The most spectacular kind of such interfaces are those that claim to measure the states of our very inner selves, brain interfaces. The convergence of play principles and neurointerfaces takes place in a multi layered world of virtual information superimposed to the everyday processes of self-measurement for health improvement and self-optimization. The augmented virtual worlds in health Apps are gamifying life routines, from eating, walking to sleeping. The corresponding interfaces, like wrist bands containing Gyro sensors for movement detection and EEG take our actual personal conditions into account, when productivity and consumer potential is measured. Most directly the required information is gained through the form of consumer neurointerfaces, which are entering the end user market since the last few years, offered by companies with poetically promising names such as Emotiv EPOC and Neurosky. The epistemic promise these interfaces give is to enhance life through better control of the self in playful ways—far beyond gamification play principles are deeply embedded into the use of such tools as social feature. This is crucial to spot here a new form of play produsage: the final product is the healthy and better self. Art games allow a controlled shaping of investigations as artistic research—in sciences.