A Play of Bodies by Brendan Keogh

Author:Brendan Keogh [Keogh, Brendan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: posthuman; cyborg; phenomenology; embodied textuality; gamers; gaming; virtuality; embodiment; video game; experience; game feel; technicity; textual analysis; Tearaway; kinaesthesia; postphenomenology; postphenomenology; mobile media; hybridity; vituality; Angry Birds; attention; game pad; controller; embodied literacy; dressage; habitus; competency; synaesthesia; perception; kinaesthetics; performance; Dressage; narrative; hacker; gender; game industry; materiality
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2018-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

4

To Feel Sights and Sounds

[Playing in the] mud is a more important game to study than chess.

—David Kanaga, “Music Object, Substance, Organism” (2014)

Maybe the point was just to have your part in creating the noise?

—David Sudnow, Pilgrim in the Microworld (1983)

Four and a half minutes into Fatboy Slim’s song “Right Here, Right Now” (1998) the pace slows; music and vocals alike fade away as the song heads toward its second and more pronounced crescendo. In Dylan Fitterer’s videogame Audiosurf (2008), this fadeaway is rendered as a spatial journey up a slow hill, the track painted in cool blues and purples as my spaceshiplike avatar slows its ascent to match the pace of the music. For several beats, the song’s volume is reduced to almost silence, and the track curves upward, almost vertical, and gives me the distinct feeling of being on the precipice of a roller coaster’s plunge. A moment later the drum rolls, and as the beat and rhythm and lyrics come rushing back, I plummet down into a tunnel of bright reds and yellows. Through it all, I must flick the computer mouse left and right, quickly and precisely, to avoid and collect the various blocks that begin to congest the road as the music intensifies.

In Audiosurf, I “play” music in a most literal sense, with songs translated into videogame spaces, sights, and actions. This translation in itself is not significant; no shortage of “rhythm games” translate music into videogame play, such as Rez (United Game Artists 2001), Amplitude (Harmonix 2003), and Rock Band (Harmonix 2007). However, whereas these videogames consist of a finite and predetermined number of songs, each with a visual component carefully crafted by a designer, Audiosurf algorithmically generates its tracks from any MP3 file it is given. No designer created the track for “Right Here, Right Now” with its hills and plunges associated with the flow of the music; Audiosurf pretranslated the digital data of the music being played—the song’s tempo, rhythm, melody, and volume—into a videogame space that can be played. To play a song in Audiosurf is to experience that song’s texture through senses other than listening; it is to see the song, to traverse it, to touch it.

In addition to the act of contorting hands and fingers at an input device, the acts of looking and listening are themselves vital components of the experience of videogame play. In the embodied textuality of videogame play, the moment-to-moment feel of a videogame through my perceptual apparatus distributed across worlds is meaningful. How the videogame looks (how I view), sounds (hear), and feels (touch) creates the foundation through which I perceive the videogame as a world and interpret its systems, rules, and themes. Whereas chapter 3 explored this relationship through the embodied literacies of a player wrapped around an input device and the incorporation of tangible buttons, thumbsticks, and springs into the player’s body schema, this chapter is concerned with the irreducible symbiosis of this gestural signification with audiovisual engagement.

The particular literacies demanded of

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