I’m not so sure how it happened, but while writing my thesis today I somehow ended up arguing that primarily the prevailing visualist approach to understanding the experience of gameplay is in a sense an embodied account, in the wider sense that it pertains to how we experience our lifeworld, i.e. that we primarily think about our interaction with videogames as being about what’s on-screen. Not really sure if it will still make sense to me tomorrow though, not that it does particularly now really. Freaked myself out a bit actually.

Also unexpected, but pleasantly so, was the discovery that my DiGRA 2007 paper Notes Towards a Sense of Embodied Gameplay was used as an optional reading for a MSc (Media Technology and Games) course on Game Culture at IT University of Copenhagen taught by T.L. Taylor. Not that I’m bragging mind, it was just nice to think that my work is being used to teach students at arguably the best university for game studies in Europe.

I’ve used the phrase ‘intentional stance’ a few times in the chapter I’ve been writing, and I wasn’t really sure of where I had gotten it from, or if it was something I had come up with. So i decided to google it, and it seems like it was a lucky thing I did, seeing how its the name of a “theory of mental content proposed by Daniel C. Dennett” according to wikipedia.

Anyway a clarifying footnote later, the actual theory itself piqued my interest, as it seems to have some fleeting resonance with the layered model of the interface I developed in my DiGRA 07 conference paper . The crux of the theory is that things can be explained firstly by anthropomorphising them, in the sense of treating them as a rational agent, and then considering it at different levels of abstraction, from the most concrete physical stance, through the function and purpose orientated design stance, to the titular intentional stance that is concerned with thinking and intent.

Whilst the theory seems, at least from what I can glean from its wikipedia entry, to be concerned with things work, i.e. make predictions, rather than the with the different levels at which we actually interact with things, in the case of my paper, the interface, there is something to the most abstract layer, the intentional stance, which I think may help we elucidate the most abstract level of my model, which I termed the conceptual level for lack of anything more effectively descriptive. Perhaps what I was trying to get at with that layer is that our use of the interface, both in its physical and software manifestations, is not just arbitrary but directed and meaningful at a higher level, that it is intentional. Might be some lucky timing as I will probably need to revisit the paper in my thesis writing sometime soon.

There’s nothing quite like the prospect of waiting for a delivery to turn up, particularly when you’re given the very convenient window of sometime between 9-5. Given the weather outside its not such a bad thing to stay indoors for a bit longer, hopefully it arrives closer to 9 than 5 though.

I played quite a bit of Assassin’s Creed over the weekend, and I can get why some people have a problem with it – I only completed a couple of missions and there’s really not any variation. However I was quite happy just to leap through the cities, Parkour style, and having epic sword fights anyway.

Interestingly I don’t recall hearing anything about the game’s meta-narrative, so I was quite surprised very early on in the progression of the game when you find out that your avatar isn’t actually a 12th century assassin, but rather his 21st century descendent who being forced to relive his ancestor’s life through the quite Lamarckian notion of genetic memory, so effectively you’re playing a character who is playing a character.

The game manual, set out in part as an instruction manual for using the genetic memory accessing apparatus, the so-called ‘animus’ , even makes reference to this strange twist, stating that the system became much more useful after switching to a videogame style controller set. This is interesting in itself as the control design of the game diverges from the norm in its ‘free running’ mode, where the player has to only hold down two buttons to move rapidly through the environment, scaling walls and leaping gaps, rather than the more usual approach of requiring the player to accurately time these actions.

In a way this approach kind of makes sense within the conceptual context of the game, the player is ’steering’ rather than controlling their character, and as it results in no jumping puzzles I quite like it. Interestingly the game refers to the in game interface that your actual avatar uses as ‘contextual puppeteering controls’, with the four face buttons assigned to the head, each hand, and legs of the avatar. This is interesting in terms of embodiment, however it’s implementation is a little quirky. For instance the weapon hand is assigned to the left most button, even though the avatar wields his weapons with his right hand. Another unrelated quirk is that while playing scenes which revert back to the player’s immediate avatar the game remains in a third person view when perhaps a first person one, effectively what the player is experiencing narratively during the main part of the game, would have made more sense.

In any case its an interesting game because of both the narrative and the control design in terms of embodiment, specifically because of its blending of first and third person perspectives, and in terms of what Hirose describes as embodiment as a process, rather than a static state.

I didn’t get much writing done last week, as in addition to the public holiday on Monday, I was busy preparing for my candidature review on Friday. Returning to writing this morning it seems that I’ve completely forgotten the tack my argument was taking, though to be honest It had gotten bogged down last week as well. The crux is a synthesis between the concept of affordances and Merleau-Ponty’s conception of habits, but the argument itself seems to be stuck in a kind of vortex, spinning around repeating itself whilst being sucked into the void, or perhaps rather a knotted piece of string that needs untangling.

The review itself went well, though there were some important issues with structure and scope that were raised by the panel, so I’m not really sure if its worthwhile pushing on with the chapter I’m writing as it stands, as it will most likely have quite a different form within a few weeks, but move on to another area instead to at least get my thoughts clearer. Of course that might just add another string to the tangle as well.

My paper, Playing for Keeps: A Game of Marbles and the Materiality of Gameplay has finally been published in Refractory’s special issue on Games and Metamateriality. Thanks to Christian McCrea, Darshana Jayemanne, and Tom Apperley for editing the issue.

I’m particularly interested in reading Eugenie Shinkle’s paper Digital Games and the Anamorphic which discusses the physical and embodied nature of videogame interfaces

I’ve added a photo of myself to my ‘about’ page. No particular reason for it, I needed a photo for a staff profile on the course I’m teaching blackboard page, so I thought I might as well put it up here as well. It is in sepia tones, but this is more to hide the fact that it was taken using my housemates MacBook Pro under fluorescent lighting, and I looked a bit like a zombie with normal colours.

I’ve just about finished reading Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, being into the final chapter. Its taken me a while, as I’ve generally been reading it on the train too and from Uni everyday, and the trip itself is usually only about 15-20 minutes or so, so I don’t get through much in a day unless there are delays or cancellations, which are, admittedly, quite frequent. And it is quite a dense book, even the copy editors have missed a few spelling mistakes in the edition I have.

I’ve been wondering if I should move next to Heidegger’s Being and Time, I mean, its only another 550 or so pages of complex, foundational philosophy to read. Despite my reluctance, It did feel quite awkward trying to write about Heidegger in relation to Merleau-Ponty, when I’m only drawing upon Dourish’s briefest of accounts, and a few other mentions of his work in a couple of other texts. There is a book I’ve come across called Phenomenology and Existentialism by Robert Solomon, that seems to be a fairly collection of essays and excerpts on, well, existentialism and phenomenology that I was thinking of ordering from Readings, that includes sections by Heidegger, and also another on Heidegger’s approach to the concept of the tool. Maybe I should put some of those hard earned tutorial dollars to work.

I’ve become increasingly aware over the last few months about the differences between the different tendencies in phenomenology thanks to Max van Manen’s Phenomenology Online and Sobchack’s overview as I mentioned in an earlier post. The problem now is more a question of how to draw them together within my thesis, for instance Merleau-Ponty’s embodied body-subject and Heidegger’s accounts of tool use. Though Merleau-Ponty does use the example of the blind man’s walking stick at several points in “The Phenomenology of Perception”, he characterises the example as one of bodily extension, of the body increasing its contact with the world. Conversely, for Heidegger the hammer is something we relate to in our course of action upon the world, though not strictly an ‘object’ (unless broken), it has a meaning for us. Furthermore many artefacts can be used ‘to hammer’, why does the specific tool take our attention first, preceding, say, a flat rock?

Differentiating between microperception and macroperception, Don Ihde provides a possible solution in “Postphenomenology: Essays in the Postmodern Context” (p.74). Simply put, Ihde describes the microperceptual as referring to bodily dimensions of perception (i.e. motility, synaesthesic relationship of sensory modalities), while the macroperceptual relates to hermeneutic and cultural dimensions (i.e. meaning, knowledge, and interpretation). I like the way he characterises this as a kind of gestalt, that is, as a figure-ground relationship:

“there is no bare or isolated microperception except in its field of a hermenuetic or macroperceptual surrounding; nor may macroperception have any focus without its fulfillment in microperceptual (bodily-sensory) experience”(p77)

Just finished teaching my first tutorial class for an introductory media and communications class and they seem like a good group, mostly journalism and professional communication students. Hopefully i haven’t confused them on what they need to do for their tutorial presentations, we’ll see next next week when each group reports on their approach and focus.

I’ve been reading Sobchack’s “The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. The first chapter has a useful discussion of the phenomenological method, particularly Merleau-Ponty’s ‘radical reflection’. Thankfully she sets it out much more clearly than Merleau-Ponty does in the preface to “Phenomenology of Perception”, which lost me at first with its untranslated german philosophy terms such as the “Wortbedeutung of conciousness” (xvii).

Sobchack’s differentiation between the transcendental and the existential and hermeneutic variants of phenomenology are also quite helpful. Though my thesis uses phenomenological concepts somewhat heuristically as part of a wider theoretical framework my research method seems to tend towards its process somewhat, and I feel that i’ll need to include a section on what type of phenomenology is primarily informing the process behind my writing.

I’ve just finished reading Pavel’s Fictional Worlds, and apart from giving me a better grounding in possible world theory, particularly the logic of the philosophical model than I was previously aware from reading Van Looy’s application of the theory to videogames, Pavel makes several points about the boundaries between the fictional and actual world that are of interest to my own research.

More specifically Pavel writes on page 89 –

“In order to make fiction function smoothly, the reader and the author must pretend that there was no suspension of disbelief, that travel to the fictional land did not occur, and that the fictional egos have in a sense always been there, since phenomenologically they came to life together with the imaginary realm.”

I think this short quote raises an interesting question on the problem of immersion, or at least its garden variety suspension of disbelief form. To paraphrase Pavel, he is essentially arguing that the player and the game author(s) have to pretend that they didn’t pretend to be transported into the game-world. Leaving aside the figure of the ‘fictional ego’, might it be that the player, rather than performing these mental acrobatics, experiences this phenomena of transportation or presence as the result of some process other than immersion? Undoubtedly, many players do feel drawn into the fictional world of the game that they are playing – its an interesting problem that I may include in my thesis chapter that expands on my IE2007 paper.

While there sounds like some interesting papers at the International Conference for Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI) which was held last month in the Canary Islands, i’m particularly interested in the Tangible Play Workshop from last years conference in Honolulu (what is it with HCI conferences and island paradises?).

I’ve only had a brief look through the proceedings thus far, but there seems to be a strong emphasis on collaborative games, often based around interactive tables such as Philip’s Entertaible. Lots of good examples of, and articles about tangible games that for some reason have not found much prominence the more general game studies literature.