Start Date: Monday 17th May, 2010 – 09:30
Location: Pervasive Media Studio, Bristol

Bodies, rhythm and digital games.

This talk will cover Henri Lefebrve’s rhythmanalysis technique and discuss how it may be applied to digital, non-digital and pervasive games. As well as his methodology, his work on bodies, gestures, traffic, exchanges and daily rhythms all bring insights to the practice of game playing.

Rhythmanalysis, in its original formulation, can be used to describe the way games fit into society and the larger patterns of how play fits into everyday life. It is also well suited to explore the lower level detail of gameplay itself in a physical and embodied manner. Because of this it gives a tool that can describe gaming from the second to second button-mashing dance of gameplay, though game structures, to play sessions and ultimately how games fit into the wider, cultural and societal cycles of our lives.

Many discussions of gaming describe it as a break in the everyday or an escape into an alternate world of fantasy and the virtual spaces of digital games make this separation appear more stark. However the fundamentally physical, repetitive and rhythmic characteristics of games are intrinsically a reflection of their quotidian nature. Exploring the interactive eurhythmia that games create through the specific linear and cyclic rhythms of gameplay opens up these cybernetic texts to a physical and embodied analysis. It provides a way to understand certain game patterns in ways that narrative and ludological approaches cannot.

I wanted to go into a bit of detail about Michel de Certeau as I’ve been thinking through his Practice of Everyday Life quite a bit recently. As it emerged from the seminar, so had quite a few other people.

The short version of my argument is that de Certeau is important for understanding games and game-like activity, through his concepts of strategy and tactics. He says that there is an everyday art to the tactics one employs to negotiate the overarching strategies. If so, then I say there is an aesthetic experience of those practices and that aesthetic experience is related to the experience of game play. Hence many everyday practices seem related to games in the personal aesthetic experience of them, i.e. navigating the city, personal relationships, finding a car park, getting a good cup of coffee on the way to work, etc. At the end I also raise a question about the claims made by many that we are living in a Ludic Age, that there has been a Ludic Turn. There is no real proof that we are, besides manifesto style claims by gamers, game researchers and game designers. But if we are, then I think we ought to be re-interpreting de Certeau, who was writing in an era of resistive thinking, rather than in a possible Ludic era.

Slides here

Jaakko Stenros has another brief review of events over on Pervasive Games.

Graeme Kirkpatrick keynoted and touched on many of the same things I did. Sort of felt like he had stolen my thunder, but I had some good feedback on my talk. He’s also thinking about the aesthetics of games and gameplay and pointing out that the physicality of gaming is not considered seriously enough. I think that my application of the Dionysian principle provides some theoretical background to his discussion.

Slides are on slideshare.