The “Oasis” Of Video Game : Through The Screen Into The Wonderland Of The Interactive Metaphors

Video games are, nowadays, among the most influential and spread entertainment media around the world. The growth that the incomes of the video game industry has seen is only equal to the number of players that spend hours every day playing their favorite titles, interacting with other gamers around the globe, and watching streamers play the most successful video games of the moment on Twitch or YouTube (ISFE, 2022). These numbers represent a growing concern among parents, teachers and, in general, adults with educational roles who often get in touch with the video game medium only in situations of conflict (with their children/students) or through a misrepresentation that other medias often offer: the recreational nature of video games is, in fact, often negatively connoted and stereotyped. Often considered as a sterile entertainment tool or as a useless excessively seductive distraction, the video game contains a complexity and a variety in terms of quality of experiences, aesthetic languages, values and representations proposed to players that lead it to be a medium extremely rich in pedagogical potentials for the development of the children. Aim of this study is to analyze and propose a reflection on video game as medium with educational and transformative potentials, which can activate processes of structuration and resignification of the experience in the subject­player (Gottschall, 2012). The contribution aims to provide interpretative tools necessary to understand specific languages and dynamics implied in the relation with this medium – from the most problematic ones to those that instead represent a true pedagogical opportunity for today’s schools – trying to propose useful markers for teachers and educators who want to orient themselves more consciously in the world of video games with the intention of nurturing “a video game culture in tomorrow’s citizens” (Council of Europe, 2021). The most relevant and meaningful video games will be analyzed to underline the transformations of narrative styles and iconographic languages by examining the most significant metaphors used by the producers and exploring changes in the dynamics of interaction that videogames have adopted over time. Through two different analytical approaches, one related to media education and the other to children’s literature and imaginary studies, the authors propose a reinterpretation of the video game as a poietic and aesthetic experience: a threshold towards another dimension, an “oasis” (Fink, 1957), where divergent ways of thinking can find a shape, and from which the player can regain possession of the re­creative instances of the art of narration.