Terminology Analysis of Digital Games, part 7

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).

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...