3 thoughts on “Urban Codemakers: Decompiling the Player”

  1. Thanks for the comment and link Tommi.

    That was an interesting read, the main problem with Jonne’s thesis is that, even in relying on phenomenological authors (explicitly Gadamer, but also Ricoeur and through these implicitly Heidegger), the notion of ‘meaning’ is one of mental abstraction and representation, as if I need to hold a representation of everything in my head as I play.

    But we don’t do that all the time when we play. When I become really good at a game, really used to a control interface, really adept at kicking a football, I don’t have to engage in a process of mental representation: meaning is incorporated, literally, becoming embodied in my fingers, my legs, my ‘gut feeling’. I make moves and gestures without engaging in conscious circumspection; like a golf swing ‘just feels right’, and the tool (the golf club, foot, game controller etc.) becomes a transparent extension of my sense of bodily space – again, the tool is literally incorporated into my senses.

    That’s where I’m trying to move (and perhaps I can speak on behalf of Troy too here), really beyond an old-fashioned Cartesian dualism towards an incorporated notion of body and mind that began with the phenomenologists and really hit its stride with Heidegger’s philosophical demolition of Descartes.

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