Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

How To Do Things With Videogames. Ian Bogost.

2012; Oxford University Press; Volume: 27; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/llc/fqr053

1477-4615

Ken S. McAllister,

Digital Games and Media

When John Langshaw Austin delivered a series of lectures at Harvard in 1955 on the idea that all utterances do real work in the world, he could not have imagined what such a concept would someday mean for scholars of consumer electronics. In How to Do Things with Words—the printed collection of those Harvard lectures—Austin famously proposed that statements do not merely describe the world, but directly alter it. Early in the series, Austin suggested that only certain kinds of statements do this sort of work, declarations such as ‘I declare this park open for play!’ or ‘For reasons of safety, this building is hereby proclaimed condemned’. By the end of the lectures, however, Austin had elegantly argued that all statements—even so-called constative ones such as ‘The arroyo is dry’—are as performative as more overt proclamations. The gist of Austin's reasoning for this conclusion is that statements are locutionary (they say something), illocutionary (in their saying, statements propagate a transformative force), and perlocutionary (they have effects). Thus, even a descriptive statement such as ‘The arroyo is dry’ could imply ‘It must be safe to cross’, ‘I'd better fire up the well pump’, or ‘If you play down there, watch out for rattlers’, depending on the context in which it is performed. The way to do things with words, then, is simply to use them; they are transformative all the time, whether we realize it or not.