June 15, 2005
Gaming Mind, Gaming Bodies:
Mind-Body Split For the New Millenium
"Abstract: The role of the body while playing a First-Person Shooter (FPS) may seem simplistic at first glance. We are sitting in front of the computer or TV and playing a game. However, the fact that we, as players, have another body within the game complicates this. Further complicating things is the fact that, like our bodies in the physical world, in a FPS we rarely see our virtual bodies. Therefore, the seemingly simple question of “Where is the body when we play a FPS?” in not one that can easily be answered. Unlike some types of videogames, such as older games like Pac-Man or Dig Dug, that only allow the player to move in specific directions such as up, down, left or right, in a FPS, the player, as in real life, is not confined to predetermined, limited set of movements but can turn, weave, walk in one direction while looking in another and so on.
Because the movements aim to replicate those of an able-bodied person, what happens while a person plays the game is that once the control system has been mastered, one tends to forget that they are controlling another body at all and become sutured into the world of the game. Essentially, when the game is going well, we as players have two bodies, one inside the game, and one outside.
Many scholars have argued that the dream of cyberspace is to leave the body behind and become pure thought. It is true that while playing a First-Person Shooter, the physical body is made absent. When I play one of these games, my own body is not what I am concentrating on. While playing I may physically sit in a chair, typically, I am not conscious of that sitting, nor am I aware of what my legs or feet are doing. This is why while playing a FPS, the physical body recedes away.
However, far from being a dream of disembodiment, FPS games are masculine embodiment writ large in which the entire point is the body. As depicted within the games, players are nearly always overly muscled, heavily armored men with hugely phallic weaponry. While it may be true that FPS games are all about the body, in a FPS, things are not as simple as they appear because the nature of a FPS, in which players see through the eyes of the body within the game, causes a further erasure to occur.
It seems that while playing a FPS game, not only is the player’s attention not dwelling on one’s embodiment, there seems to be another type of embodiment that is going ignored. Because players see though the eyes of the character, we do not see the that characters body and, for all intents and purposes, the player is the character. While it may seem that this is simply inserting the body into a virtual world, it does not do this at all. It creates a second body, which the action and pace of the game then serves to render invisible. At least for the experienced player, while the physical body is not the object of experience, neither is the virtual body. Thus, it seems that in a FPS, not only is a player not aware of one’s embodiment, they are similarly unaware of their disembodiment. In this way, it not only mirrors the invisibility of the physical body but also serves as a naturalization of that invisibility. The game causes us to forget about both bodies but still behave as if we were the hyper-masculine ideal. Thus, players are leaving behind the body, but taking the “meat” of the body with them. In this way, it seems that playing a First-Person Shooter is a way for society to further render the body invisible.
Drawing on Randy Martin’s Performance as Political Act and Drew Leder’s The Absent Body as tools to help understand both the disappearance of the body as well as the ways in which our body appears – or dys-appears, to use Leder’s terminology – when we stumble or are in physical pain, I argue that in some ways playing a First-Person Shooter is an attempt to gain a virtual form of embodiment in a type of body that society deems as the ultimate in masculinity. This attempt is less than successful, however, due to the very nature of the physical body in that it typically goes ignored unless something is wrong with it. In this way playing a First-Person Shooter causes the Cartesian mind/body split to be made literal with the mind in the physical world, a the body in the virtual world and a physical body that is nowhere to be found.
As noted, Drew Leder calls the negative appearance of the body that happens in situations such as when our bodies hurt or we trip a dys-appearance. Building on this, I call what occurs when a player becomes aware of their disembodiment as in a situation when a player’s fingers hit the wrong key or encounters a bug in a game, a dys-embodiment. These dys-embodiments call attention to the bodies of the game and the fact that while playing a FPS, the body within the game is not the same as the body outside of the game.
In this paper, I will show that questions such as, “What is the role of the body while playing videogames?” or “Where is the body located? Is it sitting in a chair in front of the monitor, or is it in the game running and shooting?” are not easy to answer. By problematizing our conception of the body and exploring the ways in which First-Person Shooters complicate notions of embodiment and disembodiment, I will show the form of the games themselves can have just as large a role in influencing our conception of self as the content of the games. “There is more than meets the eye” is not just a saying when it comes to First-Person Shooters." From Gaming Mind, Gaming Bodies: Mind-Body Split For the New Millenium (.doc) by Bryan-Mitchell Young, DiGRA Conference proceedings.
Posted by jo at June 15, 2005 10:53 AM
