A Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Videogames - Paperback

$63.00

A Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Videogames - Paperback

Name: A Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Videogames - Paperback
Brand: BooksCloud
SKU: 9780262055819
Price: 63.00 USD
Availability: InStock

by Brendan Keogh

$63.00

Book Overview

An investigation of the embodied engagement between the playing body and the videogame: how player and game incorporate each other.

Our bodies engage with videogames in complex and fascinating ways. Through an entanglement of eyes-on-screens, ears-at-speakers, and muscles-against-interfaces, we experience games with our senses. But, as Brendan Keogh argues in A Play of Bodies, this corporal engagement goes both ways; as we touch the videogame, it touches back, augmenting the very senses with which we perceive. Keogh investigates this merging of actual and virtual bodies and worlds, asking how our embodied sense of perception constitutes, and becomes constituted by, the phenomenon of videogame play. In short, how do we perceive videogames?

Keogh works toward formulating a phenomenology of videogame experience, focusing on what happens in the embodied engagement between the playing body and the videogame, and anchoring his analysis in an eclectic series of games that range from mainstream to niche titles. Considering smartphone videogames, he proposes a notion of co-attentiveness to understand how players can feel present in a virtual world without forgetting that they are touching a screen in the actual world. He discusses the somatic basis of videogame play, whether games involve vigorous physical movement or quietly sitting on a couch with a controller; the sometimes overlooked visual and audible pleasures of videogame experience; and modes of temporality represented by character death, failure, and repetition. Finally, he considers two metaphorical characters: the "hacker," representing the hegemonic, masculine gamers concerned with control and configuration; and the "cyborg," less concerned with control than with embodiment and incorporation.

ISBN	9780262055819
Author	Brendan Keogh
Publisher	MIT Press
Genre	Gaming, Self-help & personal development, and Technology
Format	Paperback
Published	October 2025
Language	ENG- English
Pages	248
Weight	1.0 lb
Target Audience	Adults
Print Size	Standard Print

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