Research meeting: Dr Tom Apperley

Photo: Danny Sotzny [foto-sotzny.de] 

Dr Tom Apperley is set to join the JMRC in June and recently addressed one of the Centre's research meetings. He introduced Centre staff and HDR students, along with staff and HDR students from SAM, to his research on ethnography and digital media technologies.

Tuesday 15 May 2013, 1-2pm
Robert Webster Building 321


The body of the gamer: Game art, gesture and the 'natural' user interface
Game art explores the materiality of digital games through the subgenres of glitch and in-game performance. However, it is less successful in revealing or examining the materiality of the body of the gamer. This presents a crucial problem for game art. Through the motion sensing technologies that have been incorporated into gaming technology since the introduction of the Wii, the body of the gamer has reached an unprecedented visibility in popular culture. Increasingly popular depictions and descriptions of digital gaming included the body of the gamer in play by celebrating ‘gestural excess’. This paper argues that game art practices have difficulty documenting the fleeting styles of gestural excess. Yet these gesture styles are crucial for evaluating what is at stake in digital gaming, because while amplified by the proliferation of motion sensing technologies and the integration of gesture into gaming, they are simultaneously constrained by increasing accuracy and precision through which they are registered by the interface.