Martti Lahti, "As We Become Machines: Corporealized Pleasures in Video Games"

(In The Video Game Theory Reader)

- William Gibson's concept of cyberspace has become a privileged metaphor, emerges from video games, not the Internet
- Video games exemplify cyborg relationship (esp. fast action-based games)
- New, complex relationship between body, technology and subjectivity
- "Corporealization of the experience of playing"
- Anchored in the body, not transcendent
- There is always a bodily dimension to immersion
- Early games: screen demarcates the entire world; later games: screen represents how much the player can see (point of view); 3D games: moving "into" the computer/the space beyond the screen
- FPS games encourage players to imagine bodily presence/sensations via sound effects and visuals for body damage, gun-hand, etc. (what about the presence of the avatar's gradually-more-bloody face in Wolf 3D and Doom? A graphic, visceral but "other" representation of the avatar)
- Far Cry 2 uses bodily damage in a similar way to encourage embodiment (pulling bullets out of arms, etc.)
- "Fully subjective" experience
- Camera angle control mitigates the mapping of subjectivity onto an avatar (Grodal would disagree, first-person identification can occur even in a third-person game)
- FPS games erase the boundary between the real and virtual worlds -> delirium (in the sense of intense excitement and engagement, presumably) stands in for actual movement
- Tactile interfaces (rumble packs, joysticks, etc.) and computer set-ups extend the computer, which surrounds us (these ideas evidently anticipate the Wii)
- Real bodily experience
- Virtual mobility + sensory feedback + incorporation into a larger system = cybernetic loop
- In-game affect extends into player's space (moving your body while playing a driving game, for example)
- Virtual and physical corporeality are "continuous and complimentary"
- Seeing the avatar in cut scenes acts as both a mirror to let us visualize our virtual "selves" and as ideological positioning ("That is me on the screen")
- Cyborg envy - desire to merge with the machine, with the avatar
- Female avatars are less frequent in first-person games (to-be-looked-at-ness)
- Character selection screens present a "supermarket" of aestheticized bodies divorced from their real-world contexts
- Is Deus Ex really any different than other games that allow you to customize your character/abilities, just because in the fiction of the game upgrades are cybernetic?
- "Games commodify our cyborg desires," mechanization of the body as in industrial capitalism (repetition of actions and pursuing/earning unlocks, progression, cutscenes)
- Safe way to transgress gender/race without acknowledging or contemplating real world power relations and ideology
- Disjuncture between avatar as exotic fantasy self and a truly subjective perspective (being someone else vs being yourself)
- Lahti wants to re-materialize and re-activate theories of media spectatorship/engagement by reincorporating the body and contexts of play
- "We remain flesh as we become machines"