Deconstruction of the Gamer’s Body: Developers’ Experiments with Interfaces and Game Controllers

Abstract

In the modern gaming industry, control over the player's body is transitioning into a post-disciplinary regime, as data about their actions is collected during gameplay using artificial intelligence technologies and sensors embedded in gaming peripherals. This analysis serves as the basis for altering gameplay in real-time modes. In fact, gaming systems must predict the player's actions so that buttons are pressed in advance, before the desires are clearly articulated and conscious decisions are made. The player's embodiment is subjected to pre-calculation and captured in interfaces. However, gaming fan culture often deconstructs normative gameplay and disrupts control practices. In this article, we turn to the experimental work of game designers and engineers with gestures and the player's body, to the projects, where the normative embodiment shaped by conventional interfaces and controllers is critically analyzed, ridiculed, and deconstructed. Primarily, we examine how indie developers and artists use interfaces to analyze and convert digital embodiment. An illustration of this is found in the games of Pippin Barr and Bennett Foddy, who problematize the gestures used in games through interfaces. In avant-garde games and artistic projects, there is a focus on un-institutionalizing gaming bodies. Through complicating controls and inventing unconventional interfaces, engineers and developers create glitch bodies and transform gamer embodiment with carnival-like ease. In the article, we explore a number of such authorial and festival projects that question gamer embodiment and invent new ways to derive pleasure from games.