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A Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Videogames

Name: A Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Videogames
Brand: MIT Press
SKU: 9780262055819
Price: 35.00 USD
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Contributors:

Brendan Keogh

Publisher:

MIT Press

Binding:

Paperback

Book Category:

Computers, Games & Activities, Psychology

Book Subcategory:

Design, Graphics & Media, Video & Mobile, Cognitive Psychology & Cognition

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The product is eligible for a complimentary return within 30 days from the date of purchase. Furthermore, individual items are shipped within 24 hours of receiving the order.

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Release Date:

10/28/2025

ISBN 13:

9780262055819

Weight:

0.75 lbs

Size:

9.00 x 6.00 x 0.57 inches

Pages:

248

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Description

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.

About the Author
Brendan Keogh is a senior lecturer in the School of Communication and a chief investigator of the Digital Media Research Centre at the Queensland University of Technology. His books include of A Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Videogames and, as coauthor, The Unity Game Engine and The Circuits of Cultural Software.

A Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Videogames

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