Continued from part 8.
As previously examined, the algorithmic coupling of player and technology integrates the avatar into the player's body schema after adaptation to the mappings between physical and logical interfaces. As such, "the avatar... is a tool that extends the self toward the game world via active remappings of the body's boundaries" (Bissonnette 2019 pg. 213).
Continued from part 7.
CYBERKINAESTHESIA (cont.):
Previously, I wrote about the adaptation needed for algorithmic coupling between a player's body and their virtual avatar/point of view in a digital game.
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| Mark Hansen Bodies in Code (2006) |
Sylvie Bissonnette posits that our body image and body schema are keys to understanding the biofeedback system we enter when we interface with a digital game (2019 pp. 209-13), echoing Mark Hansen's "body-in-code" theories (Hansen Bodies in Code (2006)).
Philosopher Shaun Gallagher wrote to clarify the meanings behind body image and body schema.
BODY IMAGE: is the mental construct of one's own body. It consists of at least three parts:
It is "a conscious image or representation... and appears to be something in-itself, differentiated from its environment" (Gallagher "Body Image and Body Schema: A Conceptual Clarification" The Journal of Mind and Behavior (1986) vol. 7 no. 4 pg. 541). When first
BODY SCHEMA: is the nonconscious control of body posture in order to facilitate perception. It is "pre-personal, functions holistically, and is not something in-itself apart from its environment" ((1986) pg. 541). It involves "an extraintentional operation carried out prior to or outside of intentional awareness" ((1995) pg. 228).
Body image and schema are the conscious and nonconscious (or "prenoetic," as Gallagher calls it ((1995) pg. 226)) factors of the bodily experience. As Gallagher describes, body image allows one to consciously raise their hand with their perceptual attention focused on that action, but in that movement, the body schema will enact certain postural adjustments of the body that serve to maintain balance that are not under conscious control ((1995) pg. 229). The body image is a conscious perception of the body as an object while the body schema is the preintentional performance of the body, organized in relation to its environment.
Parts of the environment, such as tools, may be incorporated into the body schema. "The carpenter's hammer becomes an operative extension of the carpenter's hand" ((1986) pg. 548). After becoming skilled with a tool, the object becomes part of the body schema, even though it exceeds the body image. The tool is not part of what we consciously understand as part of our body, yet it becomes implemented into the body's sensorimotor and perception systems.
Philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes a blind man using a cane to navigate as an example of extending the body through an external object:
The cane is no longer an object that the blind man would perceive, it has become an instrument with which he perceives. It is an appendage of the body, or an extension of the bodily synthesis (Merleau-Ponty Phenomenology of Perception 1945, trans. 2012 pg. 154).
Gregory Bateson uses a similar example to explain that there is not point where the body's "self" ends and the integrated tool begins:
Consider a blind man with a stick. Where does the blind man's self begin? At the tip of the stick? At the handle of the stick? Or at some point halfway up the stick? These questions are nonsense, because the stick is a pathway along which differences are transmitted under transformation, so that to draw a delimiting line across this pathway is to cut off a part of the systemic circuit which determines the blind man's locomotion (Bateson Steps to an Ecology of Mind 1972 pg. 324).
[Update 1 Dec 2022]
Philosopher Andy Clark describes this grafting of environmental objects to the body schema as a "fluid mesh:"
What we are witnessing... [is] the remarkable capacity of the human brain to learn new modes of controlling action and to rapidly reach a point where such control is so easy and fluent that all we experience is a fluid, apparently unmediated mesh between will and motion... The expert car driver, golfer, tennis player, or video games player... have reached a point where aspects of the apparatus (the clutch pedal, the racket) become transparent in use (Clark Natural-Born Cyborgs 2003 pg. 120).
[End update 1 Dec 2022]
[Update 5 Dec 2022]
N. Katherine Hayles refers to augmentation to the body schema as "proprioceptive coherence" and ties it directly into the formation of virtual subjectivity:
Proprioception is the sense that tells us where the boundaries of our body are. Associated with inner-ear mechanisms and internal nerve endings, it makes us feel that we inhabit our bodies from the inside. Proprioceptive coherence, a term used by phenomenologists, refers to how these boundaries are formed through a combination of physiological feedback loops and habitual usage. An experienced tennis player, for example, frequently feels proprioceptive coherence with the racquet, experiencing it as if it were an extension of her arm. In much the same way, an experienced computer user feels proprioceptive coherence with the keyboard, experiencing the screen surface as a space into which her subjectivity can flow (Hayles "The Condition of Virtuality" The Digital Dialectic 1999 pg. 88)
[End update 5 Dec 2022]
Mark Hansen follows Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological concept of embodiment (and body image/body schema) in that it allows for technical extensions of human movement and bodily habit (Hansen (2006) pg. 39). This forms the basis of Hansen's "body-in-code" theory of integrating with digital media to utilize the excess of body schema over body image and create a body "submitted to and constituted by an unavoidable and empowering technical deterritorialization -- a body whose embodiment is realized, and can only be realized, in conjunction with technics" ((2006) pg. 20 (emphasis in original) and Bissonnette 2019 pg. 210). This same body-environment coupling with the body schema is how we integrate with our avatars in virtual environments, what Bissonnette calls algorithmic coupling (2019 pg. 214).
Andreas Gregersen and Torben Grodal draw upon Gallagher's and Merleau-Ponty's concepts for their own similar theory that "video games may lead to a sense of extended embodiment and sense of agency that lies somewhere between the two poles of schema and image -- it is an embodied awareness in the moment of action, a kind of body image in action -- where one experiences both agency and ownership of virtual entities" (Gregersen and Grodal "Embodiment and Interface" The Video Game Theory Reader 2 2009 pg. 67 (emphasis original)). They note that the effect is, of course, temporary, that "once the player stops acting in relation to the game system and pays conscious attention to his or her own embodiment, this effect subsides in favor of a more regular body image" (Ibid.).
To be continued...
Continued from part 6.
CYBERKINAESTHESIA (cont.):
In the last post, I reviewed how Silvie Bissonnette posits that a digital game player enters an algorithmic coupling of their physical body to their digital avatar (Affect and Embodied Meaning in Animation (2019) pg. 203). The player's sensorimotor skills adapt to the mappings between the physical and logical interface and even complex actions within the virtual environment can be enacted, seemingly without even thinking.
That coupling can take practice and work on the part of even an experienced game player, as each game has its own distinct schema that requires time for adaptation. Game scholar Soraya Murray describes the disorientation she sometimes feels before she has fully adapted to a game's spatiality:
"That brief disorientation I experience could be thought of as a mere behavioral quirk, or a moment of indecision, but I think it points to something else: a momentary disjuncture between the spatiality presented by the game and my personal spatial orientation. In that moment, I graft my sense of spatiality onto that of the game. But that means there exists a difference between the two. That difference appears as an ideological gap that must be bridged, in order for me to give sense to the space as a player who finds herself 'out of place' in a social construction inconsistent with her own. That gap has been an object of discomfort, a turbulence in the otherwise smooth transition of mapping one's self onto the technological space of a game" ("Coda: Disoriented in the Field of Play," Video Games and Spatiality in American Studies (2022) pg. 275).
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| Sudnow Pilgrim in the Microworld (1983) |
Author David Sudnow wrote the pioneering early work Pilgrim in the Microworld (1983) in order to record his strategies and experiences adapting his mind and body to the virtual space of Breakout (1978) for Atari 2600. Early in his experience with the game, Sudnow describes adapting to the mapping between the its physical and logical interfaces:
"At first it felt like my eyes told my fingers where to go. But in time I knew the smooth rotating hand motions were assisting the look in turn, eyes and fingers in a two-way partnership... So too with sight reading music at the piano for instance, where you never look ahead of what you can grasp and your hands’ own sense of their location therefore instructs the gaze where to regard the score. So too again with typing from a text, where if your eyes move in front of where your fingers are, you’ll likely make an error, and thus hands and gaze maintain a delicate rhythmic alignment. And so too here, you’d have to sustain a pulse to organize the simultaneous work of visually and tactilely grasping the ball, your hands helping your look help your hands make the shot" (1983 pp. 40-41).
In each of these comparisons, the user's perception (reading sheet music or text) must align with the inputs the user is giving to a machine (playing piano or typing) in order to produce the desired result (play music or copy the original text). In a digital game, the user's perception is their avatar or their point of view on the environment (the virtual "self" (Ellis "Nature and Origins of Virtual Environments: A Bibliographical Essay" (1991))) and the user must adapt to the mappings between that perception and the inputs they give to the game machine.
[Update 3 Dec 2022]
Researcher Ulf Wilhelmsson calls this connection between human and virtual environment the "Game Ego presence."
"The Game Ego is a bodily based function that enacts a point of being within a game environment through a tactile motor/kinesthetic link. Computer and video games typically allow the game player to establish a virtual proprioceptive chain based on sight, hearing and tactile motor action adding up to a tactile motor link and kinesthesia, i.e. a sensory awareness of the position of the body within the game environment. In turn this may result in a strong performative experience of interaction, interactabillity and being. The player does not only see and hear but is enacting a point of being" (Wilhelmsson "Game Ego Presence in Video and Computer Games" Extending Experiences 2008 pg. 61).
The Game Ego's focus is the player avatar, or the point-of-view self of Stephen Ellis' definition of a virtual environment. It is a connection through an embodied interface, a proprioceptive bond that leads to cyberkinaesthesia.
"The player incorporates the Game Ego function, which serve[s] as an instrument for controlling the game environment. The exertion of control is an extension of the player's sensory motor system via a tactile motor/kinesthetic link. The end outcome of this control is not only the controlled and perceived motion on the screen but also, and more important, the experience of locomotion within an environment" (Ibid. emphasis added).
[End update 3 Dec 2022]
To be continued...
Continued from part 5.
As this series of blog posts continues, it becomes less and less about the terminology in Boellstorff's Coming of Age in Second Life.
CYBERKINAESTHESIA (cont.):
Continuing to look at Silvie Bissonnette's Affect and Embodied Meaning in Animation (2019), she states that players enter an "algorithmic coupling" of the player's body with their avatar (2019 pg. 203). They achieve perceptual symbiosis with their avatar, but must establish a form of algorithmic synchronism with the interface and physical mastery of different mappings in order to achieve success in a game with more complex moves (pg. 203).
Continued from part 4.
CYBER: Previously, I mentioned that Boellstorff sees "cyber" as a term that is roughly equivalent to "virtual" and "online" in many cases. He states that "cybersociality," "online culture," and "virtual world" are all interchangable (2010, pg. 17). "Cyber-" becomes just another prefix that means "related to a computer," as is common in today's vernacular, but I want to look at the roots of this term.
Boellstorff credits the coining of "cyber" to William Gibson's concept of cyberspace (first used in Gibson's "Burning Chrome" (1982) and expanded in his novel, Neuromancer (1984)) (2010, pg. 19). The "cyber" prefix has its roots in the term "cybernetics," first coined by mathematician Norbert Wiener in 1947, to give name to the science of "control and communication in the animal and the machine" (Wiener, Cybernetics (1948)) (2010, pg. 20).
From the start, cyber was concerned with control. This makes sense when looking at the root of cybernetics, the Ancient Greek kubernētikós (κυβερνητικός), essentially meaning "good at steering" (kubernáō "to steer," -tikós "skilled at").
In fact we "steer," or navigate, our way through virtual spaces constantly when dealing with digital media. Like modern-day flâneurs, we may "surf" the web through a network of hyperlinks, "scrub" the timeline to a specific point in a Youtube video, or mindlessly "scroll" through a news feed of social media updates. Similarly, one may embody an avatar in a digital game and navigate their way through a virtual world.
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| Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (2002) |
I am interested in understanding how to discuss the aesthetics of navigation through virtual space. Lev Manovich posed this same question in The Language of New Media (2002), dating from way back when digital media was still "new" media. He also terms this concept "poetics of navigation through space" and how "art history, geography, anthropology, sociology, and other disciplines" give us tools to analyze static space, we don't really have a way to discuss dynamic space or its navigability (2002, pg. 259).
[Update 4 Dec 2022]
Note that this sensation of navigating virtual space is not exclusive to digital games. It is an aesthetic of all digital media, but I argue that it tends to be especially pronounced in games, where exploring new spaces may be the player's main goal. As an example, N. Katherine Hayles compares the kinesthetic experiences of reading books to those of reading hypertext, finding that greater engagement disconnects the reader from the printed page but further connects the hypertext reader to the computer interface.
This effect marks an important difference between screen and print. Although a reader can imaginatively project herself into a world represented within a print text, she is not likely to feel that she is becoming physically attached to the page itself. On the contrary, because the tactile and kinesthetic feedback loops are less frequent, less sensually complicated, and much less interactive, she normally feels that she is moving through the page into some other kind of space. The impression has a physiological basis. The physical stimuli the reader receives with print are simply not adequate to account for the cognitive richness of the represented world; the more the imagination soars, the more the page is left behind. This difference in the way proprioceptive coherence works with the computer screen, compared with the printed page, is an important reason why spatiality becomes such a highly charged dimensionality in electronic hypertexts (Hayles "The Condition of Virtuality" The Digital Dialectic 1999 pg. 88 emphasis original).
[End update 4 Dec 2022]
From this, I've been developing a new term:
CYBERKINAESTHESIA: The embodied sense of movement through a virtual space. Cyber- refers both to the original concept of "steering" and control along with "related to a computer." Kinaesthesia refers to one's sense of body position, orientation, and movement in space - and is synonymous with proprioception.
[It is commonly accepted that the two words are equal in meaning, and I will sometimes use them interchangably, but strictly speaking, proprioception is a sense of one's body's position in space and kinaesthesia is the sense of one's body's movement in space. Proprioception has a Latin base roughly meaning "self-receiving [sense]" (prōprius "one's own," re- "back," capiō "take") while kinaesthesia is from Greek and roughly means "movement sense" (kinein "to move," -aisthesis "perception," -ia "state of being").]
As I briefly mentioned in the last post, digital games can affect a player's preconscious sense of proprioception, causing players' bodies to duck when there is an on-screen threat, lean as they take a curve in a driving game, or move their head try to peer around a corner projected on the screen. The player's conscious mind has not been fooled into thinking that they have really entered the screen space (through the looking glass, if you will), yet their body may react as if they are "in" the game. Why?
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| Sylvie Bissonnette, Affect and Embodied Meaning in Animation (2019) |
Sylvie Bissonnette's Affect and Embodied Meaning in Animation (2019) examines this same "cyberkinaesthesia," as I call it, in digital games as well as similar embodied sensations from watching animated films. As she puts it, the viewer enters a "complex perceptual entanglement with the animation apparatus" [apparatus being the screen and the technologies that produce the moving images] (2019, pg. 3).
The technical interface becomes an extension of the viewer, something that we humans have a natural knack for, according to Andy Clark. In Clark's Natural-Born Cyborgs (2003), he writes that our neural physiology is pre-adapted to be transformed by our technological augmentations. We are "cyborgs not merely in the... superficial sense of combining flesh and wires but in the... sense of being human-technology symbionts: thinking and reasoning systems whose minds and selves are spread across biological brain and nonbiological circuitry" (Clark, 2003, pg. 3).
To be continued...
Continued from part 3.
After a long, drawn out examination of "virtual," it's time to move on and examine the other terms that Tom Boellstorff posited definitions for in his book, Coming of Age in Second Life (2010).
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| Homer Simpson in the CyberWorld Intel and Pacific Data Images, "Homer³," CyberWorld 3D (2000) |
WORLD: As I mentioned before, Boellstorff refers to Second Life as a "Virtual World," following the "Synthetic World" characteristics defined by Edward Castronovo (2010, pg. 17) that assume all virtual worlds are:
Removing the "virtual" (online) aspect of this definition, we are left with Boellstorff's understanding of a world as a PLACE that is INHABITED BY PEOPLE.
I define PLACE as any space that holds meaning or use to someone. Usually, this means it is the location for an event that somebody remembers (as in, "the town where I was born," or, "under the bleachers where I had my first kiss") or makes use of ("the perfect parking spot") or is maybe aspirational ("my dream home").
Boellstorff admits that "world" is less defined than the words it is often paired with (like "cyber"). He sees world as referring to "large-scale social contexts with visual and interactive components, somewhat like 'environment' and 'space'" (2010, pg. 17). He warns against the "naturalistic metaphor" of world, which implies a self-contained entity created without human agency.
[Update 3 Dec 2022]
Game researcher Stefano Gualeni gives a phenomenological definition for WORLD.
"The term 'world' generally indicates a set composed of beings that are understood together with all their (detectable) properties and mutual relationships... a world comprises of the set outlined above as experienced by one of the beings involved in it. To be identified as a world (and thus to have the quality of 'worldliness'), such experiences need to be meaningful in the sense that they need to be persistently perceivable and behaviorally consistent (thus intelligible, to a degree) for the being experiencing them. This interpretation establishes a distinction between the experiences of virtual worlds and those of dreams or hallucinations. The virtual worlds of simulations and videogames are in fact recognized as worlds precisely because they can be accessed, experienced, and returned to at will: they emerge in ways that are repeatable and relatively stable in their mechanical and aesthetic aspects" (Vella and Gualeni "Virtual Subjectivity: Existence and Projectuality in Virtual Worlds" Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 2019 vol. 23 no. 2 pg. 131).
This definition precludes Boellstorff's need for a world to be simultaneously inhabited by multiple humans and require online connectivity. A world can be a world to just one person.
[End update 3 Dec 2022]
GAMEWORLD: is related to "world" and is a term that I've adapted, but appears to be infrequently used by others. A gameworld is the entirety of a game’s navigable space that is tangible to the player to interact with and navigate (often through an avatar) as a connected whole. A game may, and often does, feature several gameworlds divided into separate “worlds,” “levels,” or “campaigns,” depending on the game’s terminology.
A gameworld is defined by its topology, dimensionality, spatiality (continuous or discrete), and other characteristics (like, does the game have gravity?). Typically, the gameworlds of a specific game will all feature the same qualities, but not always.
Konami, Contra (1987)
Compare the images above of Stage 1: Jungle and Stage 2: Base 1 from Contra. I define the Jungle as a continuous 2-D game space with rectangular mapping and gravity downward. Base 1 is a continuous 3-D game space (also with gravity downward) in which the player navigates into the screen space rather than across the space. If not for the similarity of the main character sprites, these could be mistaken for two completely different games.
Digital games, like all digital media, are hybrid in nature. Various symbols appear on the screen, sometimes using different means of projection or perspective, yet the player views all the disparate objects as part of a cohesive whole. As we see, there may be a hybrid collection of gameworlds within the scope of a single game, requiring different rules of movement and interaction to successfully navigate those worlds. Yet, they are still part of a cohesive whole "overworld" of the entirety of the game.
Summer 2024 Review Taxonomy of Virtual Spaces Click here to play the new Taxonomy of Virtual Spaces - Expanded Edition interactive project...
