Playable Bodies

Playable Bodies

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  • Author: Kiri Miller
  • Publisher: Oxford University Press
  • ISBN: 0190257857
  • Category : Music
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 257

What happens when machines teach humans to dance? Dance video games transform players' experiences of popular music, invite experimentation with gendered and racialized movement styles, and present new possibilities for teaching, learning, and archiving choreography. Drawing on five years of research with players, game designers, and choreographers for the Just Dance and Dance Central games, Playable Bodies situates dance games in a media ecology that includes the larger game industry, viral music videos, reality TV competitions, marketing campaigns, and emerging surveillance technologies. Author Kiri Miller tracks the circulation of dance gameplay and related body projects across media platforms to reveal how dance games function as intimate media, configuring new relationships among humans, interfaces, music and dance repertoires, and social media practices.


Playable Bodies

Playable Bodies

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  • Author: Kiri Miller
  • Publisher: Oxford University Press
  • ISBN: 0190257849
  • Category : Music
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 257

Playable Bodies investigates what happens when machines teach humans to dance. Dance video games work as engines of humor, shame, trust, and intimacy, urging players to dance like nobody's watching--while being tracked by motion-sensing interfaces in their living rooms. The chart-topping dance game franchises Just Dance and Dance Central transform players' experiences of popular music, invite experimentation with gendered and racialized movement styles, and present new possibilities for teaching, learning, and archiving choreography. Author Kiri Miller shows how these games teach players to regard their own bodies as both interfaces and avatars, and how a convergence of choreography and programming code is driving a new wave of full-body virtual-reality media experiences. Drawing on five years of ethnographic research with players, game designers, and choreographers, Playable Bodies situates dance games in a media ecology that includes the larger game industry, viral music videos, reality TV competitions, marketing campaigns, consumer reviews, social media discourse, and emerging surveillance technologies. Miller tracks the circulation of dance gameplay and related "body projects" across media platforms to reveal how dance games function as "intimate media," configuring new relationships among humans, interfaces, music and dance repertoires, and social media practices.


A Play of Bodies

A Play of Bodies

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  • Author: Brendan Keogh
  • Publisher: MIT Press
  • ISBN: 0262037637
  • Category : Games & Activities
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 249

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.


The Immersive Enclosure

The Immersive Enclosure

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  • Author: Paul Roquet
  • Publisher: Columbia University Press
  • ISBN: 0231555962
  • Category : Computers
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 368

Winner, 2023 Lewis Mumford Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Technics, Media Ecology Association Although virtual reality promises to immerse a person in another world, its true power lies in its ability to sever a person’s spatial situatedness in this one. This is especially clear in Japan, where the VR headset has been embraced as a way to block off existing social environments and reroute perception into more malleable virtual platforms. Is immersion just another name for enclosure? In this groundbreaking analysis of virtual reality, Paul Roquet uncovers how the technology is reshaping the politics of labor, gender, home, and nation. He examines how VR in Japan diverged from American militarism and techno-utopian visions and became a tool for renegotiating personal space. Individuals turned to the VR headset to immerse themselves in three-dimensional worlds drawn from manga, video games, and genre literature. The Japanese government promised VR-operated robots would enable a new era of remote work, targeting those who could not otherwise leave home. Middle-aged men and corporate brands used VR to reimagine themselves through the virtual bodies of anime-styled teenage girls. At a time when digital platforms continue to encroach on everyday life, The Immersive Enclosure takes a critical look at these attempts to jettison existing social realities and offers a bold new approach for understanding the media environments to come.


Dance, Performance and Visual Art

Dance, Performance and Visual Art

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  • Author: Linda E. Dankworth
  • Publisher: Springer Nature
  • ISBN: 3031690842
  • Category :
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 204


The Oxford Handbook of Video Game Music and Sound

The Oxford Handbook of Video Game Music and Sound

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  • Author: William Gibbons
  • Publisher: Oxford University Press
  • ISBN: 0197556167
  • Category : Computers
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 977

Bringing together dozens of leading scholars from across the world to address topics from pinball to the latest in virtual reality, The Oxford Handbook of Video Game Music and Sound is the most comprehensive and multifaceted single-volume source in the rapidly expanding field of game audio research.


Fifty Key Video Games

Fifty Key Video Games

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  • Author: Bernard Perron
  • Publisher: Taylor & Francis
  • ISBN: 1000596230
  • Category : Games & Activities
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 349

This volume examines fifty of the most important video games that have contributed significantly to the history, development, or culture of the medium, providing an overview of video games from their beginning to the present day. This volume covers a variety of historical periods and platforms, genres, commercial impact, artistic choices, contexts of play, typical and atypical representations, uses of games for specific purposes, uses of materials or techniques, specific subcultures, repurposing, transgressive aesthetics, interfaces, moral or ethical impact, and more. Key video games featured include Animal Crossing, Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, The Legend of Zelda, Minecraft, PONG, Super Mario Bros., Tetris, and World of Warcraft. Each game is closely analyzed in order to properly contextualize it, to emphasize its prominent features, to show how it creates a unique experience of gameplay, and to outline the ways it might speak about society and culture. The book also acts as a highly accessible showcase to a range of disciplinary perspectives that are found and practiced in the field of game studies. With each entry supplemented by references and suggestions for further reading, Fifty Key Video Games is an indispensable reference for anyone interested in video games.


Systemic Dramaturgy

Systemic Dramaturgy

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  • Author: Michael Mark Chemers
  • Publisher: SIU Press
  • ISBN: 0809338327
  • Category : Performing Arts
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 292

Working theatrically with technology Systemic Dramaturgy offers an invigorating, practical look at the daunting cultural problems of the digital age as they relate to performance. Authors Michael Mark Chemers and Mike Sell reject the incompatibility of theatre with robots, digital media, or video games. Instead, they argue that technology is the original problem of theatre: How can we tell this story and move this audience with these tools? And if we have different tools, how can that change the stories we tell? This volume attunes readers to “systemic dramaturgy”—the recursive elements of signification, innovation, and history that underlie all performance—arguing that theatre must be understood as a system of systems, a concatenation of people, places, things, politics, feelings, and interpretations, ideally working together to entertain and edify an audience. The authors discuss in-depth the application of time-tested dramaturgical skills to extra-theatrical endeavors, including multi-platform performance, installations, and videogames. And they identify the unique interventions that dramaturgs can and must make into these art forms. More than any other book that has been published in the field, Systemic Dramaturgy places historical dramaturgy in conversation with technologies as old as the deus ex machina and as new as artificial intelligence. Spirited and playful in its approach, this volume collates histories, transcripts, and case studies and applies the concepts of systemic dramaturgy to works both old and avant-garde. Between chapters, Chemers and Sell talk with with some of the most forward-thinking, innovative, and creative people working in live media as they share their diverse approaches to the challenges of making performances, games, and digital media that move both heart and mind. This volume is nothing less than a guide for thinking about the future evolution of performance.


Qualitative Communication Research Methods

Qualitative Communication Research Methods

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  • Author: Thomas R. Lindlof
  • Publisher: SAGE Publications
  • ISBN: 1483323501
  • Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 712

Qualitative Communication Research Methods, Fourth Edition introduces you to qualitative research in speech and mass communication. Award-winning scholars and authors Thomas R. Lindlof and Bryan C. Taylor guide you through every step of the qualitative process, from developing research topics and questions through writing a final report. You are given numerous examples of work in the field to illustrate how studies are designed, carried out, written, evaluated, and related to theory. In addition to covering the theories and methods currently used in qualitative communication research, the authors also discuss important trends influencing the future of that research, helping you make informed judgments about the significance and consequences of recent trends. New to the Fourth Edition: A new chapter titled “The Diversity of Qualitative Research in Communication Subfields” provides readers with a complete guide to the field’s distinctive subfields and enables you to identify the research agenda that best represents your own interests.Two rising subfields— Political Communication and Communication Activism— have been added, resulting in 13 subfields covered. Two major phases of data analysis have been split into separate chapters, enabling you to concentrate on the initial steps of analysis before moving on to the interpretation phase of analysis. Discussions of important intellectual and institutional trends currently reshaping the landscape of qualitative research, including Materialist Theory, Big Data, and Open-Access publishing, provide you with cutting-edge knowledge and skills that affect what you study and how you study it. An analysis of new developments in media and technology shows you how social media networks and other digital platforms are not only topics of research, but also the means for collecting and analyzing data.


The Bloomsbury Companion to Dance Studies

The Bloomsbury Companion to Dance Studies

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  • Author: Sherril Dodds
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
  • ISBN: 1350024473
  • Category : Performing Arts
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 527

The Bloomsbury Companion to Dance Studies brings together leading international dance scholars in this single collection to provide a vivid picture of the state of contemporary dance research. The book commences with an introduction that privileges dancing as both a site of knowledge formation and a methodological approach, followed by a provocative overview of the methods and problems that dance studies currently faces as an established disciplinary field. The volume contains eleven core chapters that each map out a specific area of inquiry: Dance Pedagogy, Practice-As-Research, Dance and Politics, Dance and Identity, Dance Science, Screendance, Dance Ethnography, Popular Dance, Dance History, Dance and Philosophy, and Digital Dance. Although these sub-disciplinary domains do not fully capture the dynamic ways in which dance scholars work across multiple positions and perspectives, they reflect the major interests and innovations around which dance studies has organized its teaching and research. Therefore each author speaks to the labels, methods, issues and histories of each given category, while also exemplifying this scholarship in action. The dances under investigation range from experimental conceptual concert dance through to underground street dance practices, and the geographic reach encompasses dance-making from Europe, North and South America, the Caribbean and Asia. The book ends with a chapter that looks ahead to new directions in dance scholarship, in addition to an annotated bibliography and list of key concepts. The volume is an essential guide for students and scholars interested in the creative and critical approaches that dance studies can offer.