A Play of Bodies

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.