A play of bodies : how we perceive videogames / Brendan Keogh.
2018
GV1469.34.P79 K46 2018eb
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Details
Title
A play of bodies : how we perceive videogames / Brendan Keogh.
Author
Keogh, Brendan, author.
ISBN
9780262345439 (electronic bk.)
0262345439 (electronic bk.)
9780262037631 (print)
0262345439 (electronic bk.)
9780262037631 (print)
Published
Cambridge : The MIT Press, 2018
Language
English
Description
1 online resource (248 pages)
Call Number
GV1469.34.P79 K46 2018eb
Dewey Decimal Classification
794.8
Summary
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.
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