Digital Interfacing by Daniel Black

Author:Daniel Black [Black, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Media Studies, Computers, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Design; Graphics & Media, General
ISBN: 9780429757204
Google: b5V2DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-10-26T03:43:03+00:00

Conclusion

Far from being particular to digital simulations of space, questions about how human–machine interfaces can allow technological devices to fundamentally alter our sense of who and where we are have been lurking in the background throughout human history. When Galileo put an eye to a telescope, did he have an experience of being a human being with radically different perceptual powers standing on the earth, or of being a human being with unremarkable perceptual powers floating in space above the moon, seeing its features close at hand? (see Ihde, 2011a, p. 81).10 Or of simply being a man looking at a representation of the moon in a glass lens? By integrating external artefacts into our sense of our bodily boundaries in such a way that we feel ourselves to be sensing and/or acting at a location beyond the skin, interfacing necessarily alters our perception of space. But it is perhaps easier to consider these questions using video games because the representational regime of the video game requires that some of this complexity be managed by identifying the player’s capacity for action at a distance with a separate and fictitious game body, making this spatial distribution clearer. The third-person game is analogous to Galileo putting an eye to his telescope and having the uncanny experience of seeing a double of himself floating far away in space, sharing his close vantage point on the moon.

The third-person video game makes visible the multiplication and distribution of perception and action that takes place when experiencing a digital simulation of space by introducing another body—that of the game character—whose confusing relationship with the game player literalises the way in which a close engagement with an artefact can change our relationship with space. Does the game player feel that she ‘is’ the game character, ‘inside’ the simulated space of the game? And, if so, how does the technology of representation on which the game depends enable such an experience?

Video games have demonstrated an ability to create a sense of immediacy and involvement in players, which suggests that a sense of involvement in their represented events and agency in their simulated environments is a key part of their appeal. At the same time, however, to suggest that players experience games in the same way that they experience embodied everyday activity, or that the simulated characters and events of games can swamp their existing subjectivity or embodied experiences, is implausible. Like any media form, the video game creates new experiences by producing another layer of embodied experience that articulates with the foundation of embodied experience that is with us all the time, creating novel combinations. But how can video games do this? A naïve (but common) answer would be through their simulational realism. Certainly, the creation of greater representational realism (e.g. more convincing facial expressions or more true-to-life water movement) has been a key concern of the video game industry. But this goal is founded on the idea that human action and perception is a stable, ‘natural’ thing,

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