Bodies, rhythms and digital games
by Dan Dixon
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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, ...
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.
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julianevarez
Dionysus looks more like a gamer than apollo
Introduced in the Birth of Tragedy
Intertwined but separate
Not simple, equal, binary opposites
Described variously as principles, urges, attitudes not properties
Movement is an intrinsic part of thinking about play, one that is often ignored when discussing computer games.
Pathways and patterns in rhythm action games, 2D shooters, platform games, etc.
Gaming is the pleasure of figuring out rules, understanding the system, the enjoyment of information and knowledge, the pleasure of mathematical beauty
Interestingly narrative is part of the Apollonian element and complex narrative is a new comer to games, really only emerging with computer games.
Apollonian is probably most evident in PC based RPGs, especially the turn based RPG where the flow of action is, or can be, interrupted by the player.
Fuzzy areas
Flows/Flux from Marx.
Marx is economics/politics, big power
Influenced by Bergson, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Marx.
Bear in mind that this is French philosophy. So we’re not going to get definitional here.
Rhythm is a "movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions." While rhythm most commonly applies to sound, such as music and spoken language, it may also refer to visual presentation, as "timed movement through space. (WIkipedia, 2010)
it is musical
utilises repetition and difference
not simply mechanical but also organic
cyclical and linear
at once continuous and also discrete
unites the quantitative and qualitative
Bergson’s duration... goes on to Lefebvre’s moment
Waves on the Mediterranean
From the massive scale of galaxies, suns, planets, down to the scale of cells, molecules and atoms
Not afraid to bring in some scientific metaphors or similes
Linear come from the social (not the internal biologically human)
Isorhythmia - in frequency
polyrhythmia - many rhythms going on at once
Eurhythmia - symphonic rhythms - the body - the rhythms working together
Arrhythmia - rhythms breaking down
Maybe to all social and psychological investigators
Sense through using eurhythmia and arrhythmia
Data from all the senses
Must step outside the experience and evaluate
Again metaphors of organs, to society.
The rhythms of dressage are not the totality of rhythms
The game designer is a rhythmanalyst. Tying into our rhythms.
Game play is choreographed
Controller dances, popular dance form
But also explore and play with those rhythms.
In many cases they need to inflict dressage to get you to play
In other cases they need you to break out of the cultural dressage, cf Garfinkel’s breaching experiments.