![]() ![]() Framed by the human-technology-world relations outlined by technoscience philosopher Don Ihde, descriptions of these intersections and crisscrosses yield interpretations of a corporeal schema with specific embodied preferences for action in various gamic spaces: a being-in-the-(game)world. ![]() The first reflection (upon “a touching of the sleek and the rough”) explores the ways in which the sensual touch of the player both intersects with a new material technology that facilitates game play (the Nintendo DS video game console) by way of a touch-sensitive interface, and “crisscrosses” with a player’s embodied sense of sight. Each of three phenomenological reflections respectively examines one of these modalities. Performative playings generate descriptive data later thematized as capta in order to synthetically produce acta, or an interpretive orientation toward the data/capta relationship. This study proceeds methodologically by way of the three-step phenomenological method outlined by Merleau-Ponty – one that necessarily entails a description, a reduction, and an interpretation. Using these modalities as frames for organizing experience, I enact performative playings of the video game Animal Crossing: Wild World by Nintendo. Merleau-Ponty’s latter work specifically details the intricacies of a body’s sense of touch, outlining three specific modalities: “a touching of the sleek and the rough,” a “touching of the things,” and “a veritable touching of the touch.” The notion of touch is also key in portraying the already-imbricated nature of player and video game. In particular, the existential phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, which emphasizes the body as necessarily enworlded, offers an insightful conceptualization of the video game player’s intentional and meaningful endeavor. As video game studies have heretofore largely ignored or presupposed a bifurcation between player and video game, a phenomenology is likewise crucial to investigating the lived experience of video gaming as an embodied activity by theoretically eschewing such subject/object distinctions and methodologically generating genuinely new, heuristic spaces for thinking about this phenomenon. Situating video games and the meaningful practice of playing video games for future study by the discipline of communication, this eidetic phenomenology centers the focus of such inquiry at the site of the body.
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