tailieunhanh - Toward a (Kin)Aesthetic of Video Gaming - The Case of Dance Dance Revolution

Conceived of a relation between thought and object, involvement is opposed to aboutness, the alleged distinguishing mark of mental states to concern entities to which they are not causally related (cf. Brentano 1874). Supposedly, aboutness is necessary for explaining how thought can be about non-existent entities, but as Section 3 will make clear, this simply is not true. There are other ways of explaining this, which means that a major reason for assuming aboutness has disappeared. | Toward a Kin Aesthetic of Video Gaming Games and Culture Volume 2 Number 4 October 2007 335-354 2007 Sage Publications 1555412007310810 http hosted at http The Case of Dance Dance Revolution Bryan G. Behrenshausen Kutztown University of Pennsylvania Against the hegemony of ocularcentrism currently pervading video game theory the author situates the practice of video gaming for further inquiry by performance studies to account for it as a wholly embodied phenomenon. Personal narratives of players engaging in performances of the game Dance Dance Revolution indicate the necessity of accounting for both the intersubjective and interobjective elements of video game play. The performativity of video gaming insists on a consideration of its material and discursive dimensions that not only refuses to metonymically reduce the gamer s body to a pair of eyes but also complicates popular dualistic understandings of the player-game relationship. Keywords video games performance performativity aesthetics embodiment materiality intersubjectivity interobjectivity Not long ago Espen Aarseth 2004 issued a challenge to others in the discipline of game studies. Aarseth notes that the fledgling field of video gaming risks colonization by other disciplines anxious to stake a claim in a still-emergent media form. Colonization jeopardizes the potential richness and variety possible in a theoretical space not fully developed. Specifically Aarseth calls for attention to key aspects of the video game that set it apart from other visual media such as film and television not least of which is a kinesthetic dimension so essential to characterizing the medium as a locus of symbol and action and of image and embodied motion. In answer to this call Atkins 2006 admits that amid the next-gen console wars of flashier on-screen representations and graphic realism it is almost possible to forget that video games involve their players doing something and not .