A Play of Bodies

How We Perceive Videogames

Dados Bibliográficos

ID19972749
AutoresB Keogh (0000-0003-4565-4641, autor correspondente)
Ano2018
Páginas248
Data de publicação2018-04-06
Open AccessNão
TipoBOOK
PeriódicoA Play of Bodies (SOURCE_BOOK)
EditoraThe MIT Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.7551/mitpress/10963.001.0001
OpenAlexW2991662438
Open LibraryOL27372239M
ISBN9780262345439
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas59

An investigation of the embodied engagement between the playing body and the videogame: how player and game incorporate each other. Our bodies engage with videogames in complex and fascinating ways. Through an entanglement of eyes-on-screens, ears-at-speakers, and muscles-against-interfaces, we experience games with our senses. But, as Brendan Keogh argues in A Play of Bodies, this corporal engagement goes both ways; as we touch the videogame, it touches back, augmenting the very senses with which we perceive. Keogh investigates this merging of actual and virtual bodies and worlds, asking how our embodied sense of perception constitutes, and becomes constituted by, the phenomenon of videogame play. In short, how do we perceive videogames? Keogh works toward formulating a phenomenology of videogame experience, focusing on what happens in the embodied engagement between the playing body and the videogame, and anchoring his analysis in an eclectic series of games that range from mainstream to niche titles. Considering smartphone videogames, he proposes a notion of co-attentiveness to understand how players can feel present in a virtual world without forgetting that they are touching a screen in the actual world. He discusses the somatic basis of videogame play, whether games involve vigorous physical movement or quietly sitting on a couch with a controller; the sometimes overlooked visual and audible pleasures of videogame experience; and modes of temporality represented by character death, failure, and repetition. Finally, he considers two metaphorical characters: the “hacker,” representing the hegemonic, masculine gamers concerned with control and configuration; and the “cyborg,” less concerned with control than with embodiment and incorporation

Aesthetics · Art · Cognitive psychology · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Mainstream · Perception · Temporality · Cinema and Media Studies · Computer Science · Digital Games and Media · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Psychology · Design · Philosophy · Psychological aspects · Video games