Eugénie Shinkle, "Corporealis Ergo Sum: Affective Response in Digital Games"

(In Digital Gameplay)

- Game studies lacks foundations, but nevertheless has embedded paradigms
- Dominance of a limited structural/semiotic (I would add formalist) angle (taxonomies, definitions, etc.) and a visual bias
- Importance of the body - affect and phenomenology - as part of perception
- Unquantifiability of affect
- Political implications of bringing affect into the discussion of games
- The virtual is part of the real from a phenomenological standpoint
- "Eye, mind and body"
- The virtual as a field of possibility (Massumi)
- Persistance of the decorporealized subject assumed by linear Albertian perspective in digital space theory (has become normative)
- Move beyond perspective to fully-embodied perceptual experience which "cannot be reduced to one sense alone" and is made up of intensities
- Games not only look, but feel real
- Rez deals in affect and intensity rather than content and rationality
- Blur distance between surrounding world and Self (can we see "critical distance" as an ideological construct? As Eagleton notes one can be critical of something from within it.)
- Players "are the game" (not users of a tool), interesting example of Glenn Gould
- EyeToy (just before the Wii)
- Affect is historically specific based on our lived experiences in a culture, not precognitive, pure, primitive or innocent - it is simultaneous and in context
- Digital games "engage the technologized self"
- Distanciation paradigm exonerates us from responsibility, choice, reality (a politically questionable kind of freedom-from, not a freedom-to)
- Political games must challenge the construction of space, logic and not just content, producing intensities, affect "outside conventional meaning and culturally formed perceptions"
- Political change requires an understanding of the relationship between affect and ideology
- "Embodied and affective praxes [...] space for the emergence of new relations between mind, body and technology."