Terminology Analysis of Digital Games, part 8

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.

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:

1. One's perceptual experience of their body.
2. One's conceptual understanding of the body in general (includes mythical and/or scientific knowledge).
3. One's emotional attitude toward their body. (Gallagher "Body Schema and Intentionality" The Body and the Self (1995) pg. 226)

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...