Abstracts
James Ash - Teleplastic technologies: charting practices of orientation and navigation in videogaming
In this paper I develop the concept of ‘teleplastic technologies’ – technologies that pre-shape the potentials and possibilities for human action, movement and sense – through the example of videogaming. I develop a case study of videogame users through which I unpack the characteristics of teleplastic technologies and the ways in which they operate to reorganise the capacities and capabilities of users’ bodies through spatial means. In the first section I argue that teleplastic technologies should be understood from a spatial ⁄ ethological perspective and show how ethologically limited videogame environments encourage users to act and move without conscious thought in response to various inhibitors and disinhibitors designed into that environment. In the second section I show how the somatic techniques users develop in response to these worlds reorganise the cardinal orientation of users’ bodies and, thus, how the ‘geography’ of teleplastic technologies shape the potential and possibilities for spatial sense. Details of his research can be found on his website www.jamesash.co.uk
References
Patrick Crogan - The lively user: the Nintendo Wii system and the (re)animation of the player
This paper explores the putting into motion of the player by the Nintendo Wii console as a significant moment in the convergent spread of cgi animation to interactive virtual worlds. The greater sense of an embodied interactive experience, while not totally novel with the Wii, has become a significant phenomenon through its commecial success. It heralds a major developmental trend soon to be consolidated with the X-Box ‘Project Natal’ controller-free interface. Not only is the player now a stage director of animated sequences through his/her control input to the virtual world of the animated gamespace. The ‘blob-tracking’ technics of the Wiimote controller necessitate the becoming (re)animated of the player as provider of gestural input in response to the game challenges. The minigame packages (such as Warioware: Smooth Moves (Nintendo, 2007), Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games Sega/Nintendo, 2007), and the Rayman Raving Rabbids series (Ubisoft 2006-2007) exemplify this mobilising of a new gestural program of interaction better than the heavily promoted Wiisports and Wiifit games. The latter suggest a play experience more analagous to real life games and activities, while the minigames experiment with a whole range of new movements readable by the system. What becomes clear is the extent to which the Wii announces what media philosopher Bernard Stiegler would call a shift in the ‘grammatisation’ of contemporary technocultural practice. I will consider this shift as corresponding to the increasing reanimation of everyday life as virtual, that is, as a material consequence of the dematerialisation of ‘real’ spatio-physicality.
References
Teresa Dillon - The Extended Self
The extension of the human body across various networks has lead to new forms of perception, communication and behavior. We now have the capabilities to map and track our movements and gestures in ways previously unimagined. From the slightest human touch, to global tracking systems, our human gestures can be plotted, visualized, condensed, augmented and transformed. This extension of the human body was the starting point for establishing in 2007 the N.I.P – New Interfaces for Performance - project. N.I.P. is an independent distributed network of trans-disciplinary artists, who explore ideas of gesture and movement within their works. Methodologically the group uses various physical, visual, auditory and computer vision techniques to create live performative and interactive works. Over the last three-years, the group has performed, toured, participated in workshops and given public talks on this topic. This presentation will draw on the N.I.P. experience discussing the aesthetic qualities, production techniques and conceptual underpinnings of the individual artists work, as well as shared frameworks and values. The nature of how the group was established, the role of independent artist-lead practices and how their perspectives can contribute to our understanding of our extend sense-of-self, will also be discussed.
teresa.dillon@polarproduce.org
Dan Dixon - Bodies, rhythm and digital games
This talk will cover Henri Lefebrve's rhythmanalysis technique and discuss how it may be applied to digital, non-digital and pervasive games. As well as his methodology, his work on bodies, gestures, traffic, exchanges and daily rhythms all bring insights to the practice of game playing.
Rhythmanalysis, in its original formulation, can be used to describe the way games fit into society and the larger patterns of how play fits into everyday life. It is also well suited to explore the lower level detail of gameplay itself in a physical and embodied manner. Because of this it gives a tool that can describe gaming from the second to second button-mashing dance of gameplay, though game structures, to play sessions and ultimately how games fit into the wider, cultural and societal cycles of our lives.
Many discussions of gaming describe it as a break in the everyday or an escape into an alternate world of fantasy and the virtual spaces of digital games make this separation appear more stark. However the fundamentally physical, repetitive and rhythmic characteristics of games are intrinsically a reflection of their quotidian nature. Exploring the interactive eurhythmia that games create through the specific linear and cyclic rhythms of gameplay opens up these cybernetic texts to a physical and embodied analysis. It provides a way to understand certain game patterns in ways that narrative and ludological approaches cannot.
Mitu Khandakar - Investigating controller-evoked phenomenological embodiment
Our human experience is shaped by our very physicality in the world; we recognize the world through our ability to physically act within it. Indeed, philosophers, psychologists, scientists, and interaction designers alike are suggesting that our bodily perceptions are the “ultimate foundation of our knowledge about ourselves and the world”. Many of our experiences are now mediated, and this applies wholly of course to our experiences within traditional video games.
However, increasingly “physical” interfaces move us beyond the abstraction of the keyboard or classic controller, and bring a sense of phenomenological embodiment back to the game, via the very physicality of the interface. For example, in a game such as Boom Blox (on the Nintendo Wii), although the player is ‘disembodied’ in the sense of lacking any kind of avatar representation, the Wii Remote helps to evoke a sense of phenomenological embodiment by being able to manipulate objects at hand ‘naturally’, by either using the grab tool (and being
able to manoeuvre blocks as expected), or throwing the ball, etc. Thus, the sense of embodiment, “being able to act through one’s technologically enhanced body”, is strong, despite the lack of visual avatar representation. The embodiment is elicited through a sense of
kinaesthetic and tactile agency via the particular designed mapping between the Wii Remote and the game.
This work-in-progress research explores the way in which increasing this ‘cybernetic bandwidth’, by adding channels of information (and increasing the fidelity of such channels) to a player’s interaction via a controller may affect the player’s experience within the game. A pilot
study is to be run shortly, in order to investigate any preliminary issues and determine the best methodological practices for this kind of research.
Grethe Mitchell - Game Catcher
Grethe Mitchell talks about the research and development of Game Catcher,
part of an AHRC-funded project into children's playground games. Using Wii technology, this working prototype is both a research tool and a electronic version of a playground clapping games.
Grethe outlines the development of this project, using it as a starting point
to look at the broader technical and conceptual issues in gestural/kinaesthetic interfaces. Her paper draws upon her current research in this field as well as her previous experience in interactive performance, discussing issues of usability, representation, affordance and interaction.
Kenton O'Hara - Gesture and Performance in Public Screen Gaming
The role of body as a form of interaction, and how this relates to control, social coordination and performance drawing on examples from BBC Big Screen games. These issues will be discussed in relation to particular properties of the urban context and the impact this has on these new forms of interaction.
Mark Palmer - Immanence, Involvement and the Immaterial
Amidst the excitement of the new wave of games controller we’d do well to remember that notions of embodiment are as much a part of the problematic legacy of transcendental philosophy as that of the mind. If we draw upon a philosophy of immanence and thinkers such as Spinoza, Deleuze and Bergson we can begin to understand perception as extended and existing in the world. This poses a series of interesting questions for games.
In parallel to these theoretical issues we ought to be aware that whilst undoubtedly encouraging physical participation there are issues that we need to be aware of if we are to use this technology. There is an increasingly body of evidence that these devices cause physical injury as people strike out at ‘objects’ that lack the feedback that would contain those actions in the physical world; and allied to this the frustration that ultimately arises from the promise of an involvement that cannot be delivered.
This paper proposes that these technologies require an approach that draws upon an understanding of ‘absence’ as a form of physicality. This will be outlined through a philosophy of immanence which then also provides a means to understand gaming as an emergent and involving phenomenon. The paper will also be illustrated through existing titles and proposed projects.
Mark Paterson - Your move? Conceptualising the sense of movement and kinaesthetic flow in gesture-based interfaces
While handheld controllers do not deny the involvement of a set of wider embodied interactions, something is afoot. And our arms are increasingly waving in the air. The promise of a more multimodal HCI involving body movements and gestures in current generation consoles such as the Wii and impending implementations of technologies in Microsoft’s Natal™ and Sony’s Move™, expand upon those phenomenological concepts dealing with the body, space and movement.
The rediscovery of phenomenological themes in gaming studies has established the basis for thinking about intentionality and embodied consciousness within the human-computer interface (HCI). From Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Straus we might consider how the spatiality and motility of one’s own body and the kinaesthetic, proprioceptive and vestibular components of sensation inform the multimodal nature of gesture-based HCI. This phenomenological legacy has been applied to visceral viewing practices discussed in screen-based media (e.g. Marks 2002; Sobchack 2006; Barker 2009).
However, we need to foreground the sense of movement in gestural HCI. The analysis becomes attuned to the sensorimotor through ocular-motor saccades, arm movements and gestures that bind the bodily senses into the space of movement (e.g. Morris 2004). We do this in two ways. Firstly, from medical and neurological discoveries of the nineteenth century (e.g. Charles Bell’s notion of the ‘muscle sense’ and kinaesthesia in 1826) and twentieth century (e.g. Charles Sherrington’s proprioception in 1906) onwards, we briefly consider a history of the sense of movement such that our rich descriptions of movement and haptic activity may become even more enriched. Secondly, this is connected to recent work in the philosophy of enactive cognition which emphasises sensorimotor visuality (O’Regan and Noë 2001) or ‘action in perception’ (Noë 2006).
Elena Marquez Segura, Annika Waern and Carolina Johansson - Researching Dance as Interaction
In games, gestures have been widely used to specific actions, seeking a realistic correspondence to our every- day interaction with the physical world. In this way, technology plays an important role: if the focus in a game is on the resemblance a gesture has to its counterpart in the real world, sensors and processing capabilities provide the boundaries for the game quality. Precise, different and even a high number of sensors may be needed in order to classify movements correctly. This is not always possible and anyway, is it really needed? This is the starting point to our method for researching gesture/body as the controller play.
Inspired by Fog of War-based games, we focus on a playful context that engages the user rather than implementing high tech solutions; personal and social interpretation is preferred over technological responsiveness. As gestures not only perform actions, but also convey meaning that is socially accepted, our research method focuses on group studies in which users are engaged in common tasks. We are working with a product and platform for motion and movement-based interaction: The BodyBug, which consists of a wearable interactive
robot that can move along a string and has a triaxial accelerometer inside. The BodyBug was created as an interaction concept within Dr. Moen's doctoral project at Interactive Institute and Royal Institute of Technology (KTH). The core purpose of the BodyBug is to inspire and support interaction through dance: the users dance with the bug and each other, and the bug responds to their dance movements. Currently BodyBug supports a single-player game that already inspire movements such as jumps and turns.
Our research aims to design and create the new generation of BodyBugs, with focus on players dancing together. We report on a first workshop in which we used an inactive BodyBug to explore potential group games based on mimicry and rhythm. Focus was placed, therefore, not in what the BodyBug can measure, but in the use the group gives to this tool to express gestures that have a social meaning for them. The aim was to investigate the design of contexts around the BodyBug that provide rich interaction within the group and not only between the single player and the BodyBug, thus broadening the design scope for the next game design.
Bart Simon - The Contradictions of Control: On the Utter Failure and Promise of Gestural Games
This is not a talk about market failure but rather about a failure of control. This is not a talk about bad gesture interface design but rather why gestural game design might have nothing to with usability. This not a talk about the promise of gesture recognition on the horizon but about the relation to unrecognized 'gestural doings' in the process of gameplay. This is not a talk about the Wii, Natal or Move but rather about the perverse logic of a digital culture where the mad pursuit of control through 'embodied interaction' produces nothing but endless possibilities for its failure.
simonb@alcor.concordia.caTexts
Mark Paterson 2010
'Your Move' a PDF of Mark's Power Point presentation from the event and two accompanying documents below
Bart Simon 2009
'Wii are out of control: bodies, game screens and the production of gestural excess'
Patrick Crogan 2010
'The Nintendo Wii, virtualisation and gestural analogics'
Seth Giddings & Helen W Kennedy 2010
'"Incremental speed increases excitement": bodies, space, movement and televisual change'
James Ash 2010
'Teleplastic Technologies: charting practices of orientation and navigation in videogaming'
Elena Marques 2010
Games, Play, Embodiment and the Wii - Presentation
Researching Dance As Interaction - Presentation
Links