diff --git a/_bibliography/references.bib b/_bibliography/references.bib index 7109f91..30e0ece 100644 --- a/_bibliography/references.bib +++ b/_bibliography/references.bib @@ -469,3 +469,23 @@ year={2006} } +@book{campbell2012video, + title={Video game engagement and pathology: Relationships between gaming habits and gaming experience, psychopathology, and personality variables}, + author={Campbell, John Adam}, + year={2012}, + publisher={The University of North Dakota} +} + +@book{neisser2014cognitive, + title={Cognitive psychology: Classic edition}, + author={Neisser, Ulric}, + year={2014}, + publisher={Psychology press} +} + +@book{anderson1980cognitive, + title={Cognitive psychology and its implications}, + author={Anderson, John Robert and Crawford, Jane}, + year={1980}, + publisher={wh freeman San Francisco} +} diff --git a/_posts/2022-07-23-embodying-the-avatar-in-video-games.md b/_posts/2022-07-23-embodying-the-avatar-in-video-games.md index 22c61c3..c02b0fc 100644 --- a/_posts/2022-07-23-embodying-the-avatar-in-video-games.md +++ b/_posts/2022-07-23-embodying-the-avatar-in-video-games.md @@ -6,11 +6,9 @@ date: 2022-07-23 00:00:00 permalink: embodying-the-avatar-videogames/ categories: programming author: Mahdi -bibliography: -- report-draft.bib --- -Videogames are a pervasive part of lives of children and adults alike, with 73\% of Americans older than 2 years engaging with them {% cite npd2019videogames}. Playing videogames can be seen as an activity that is done through our fingertips and with our visual apparatus focused on a screen, without involvement of the rest of our body, and it is usually considered as such from a cognitivist point of view {% cite campbell2012video %} {% cite gee2003video %} {% cite klimmt2006effectance %} however this raises the question of whether videogames can alternatively be thought of as an embodied experience, and if so, how can we formulate them as such, and what factors are at play? +Videogames are a pervasive part of lives of children and adults alike, with 73% of Americans older than 2 years engaging with them {% cite npd2019videogames %}. Playing videogames can be seen as an activity that is done through our fingertips and with our visual apparatus focused on a screen, without involvement of the rest of our body, and it is usually considered as such from a cognitivist point of view {% cite campbell2012video %} {% cite gee2003video %} {% cite klimmt2006effectance %} however this raises the question of whether videogames can alternatively be thought of as an embodied experience, and if so, how can we formulate them as such, and what factors are at play? Virtual reality videogames are more commonly studied from an embodied perspective, since they lend themselves to the framework more easily by being more engaging to the whole body and by the fact of their immersive experience, however the same question can be asked for non-virtual reality games, with keyboard and mouse or the controller, and the screen. @@ -18,7 +16,7 @@ Videogames are a pervasive part of lives of children and adults alike, with 73\% # Did Somebody Say Embodiment? -The question of whether we can think of playing videogames as an embodied experience is quite puzzling, and it requires unraveling questions that are unanswered about what embodiment means, how do we distinguish it from else, and how does something like playing videogames fit into this picture. There are different accounts of embodiment, and they stand in contrast to cognitive psychogolical accounts. Cognitive psychology accounts study mental processes, which are usually associated with the brain, and where the body is thought of as an input and output interface with the world that is controlled by the brain. {% cite neisser2014cognitive, anderson1980cognitive %}. There are numerous accounts of embodied experience, we will review some of them and lay out our understanding of embodiment, one which allows us to discuss videogames in its light. +The question of whether we can think of playing videogames as an embodied experience is quite puzzling, and it requires unraveling questions that are unanswered about what embodiment means, how do we distinguish it from else, and how does something like playing videogames fit into this picture. There are different accounts of embodiment, and they stand in contrast to cognitive psychogolical accounts. Cognitive psychology accounts study mental processes, which are usually associated with the brain, and where the body is thought of as an input and output interface with the world that is controlled by the brain. {% cite neisser2014cognitive %} {% cite anderson1980cognitive %}. There are numerous accounts of embodied experience, we will review some of them and lay out our understanding of embodiment, one which allows us to discuss videogames in its light. {% cite thelen2000grounded %} gives an account that focuses mostly on the fact that our experiences arise because we have a particular kind of body @@ -130,7 +128,7 @@ To summarise what we mean by embodiment as we talk about it here: This is not a simple question, and our discussion here is not to be taken as granted, of course. There are many complexities involved with attributing something as complex as "embodiment" to an activity as complex as playing videogames. This is a puzzling notion, but nevertheless, it is worth considering and thought. - Given the framework described, we can now formulate videogaming as an embodied activity. A more trivial example of what we are trying to formulate is driving cars, which is a common example used when talking about embodiment in cognitive science. When we drive a car as a proficient driver, we manoeuvre by considering what we want to do, and acting towards that direct goal without focusing on how we do this by using the gears, the clutch, the brake, pedal and the wheel, etc. We might be taking 3 to 4 actions at the same time, e.g. when reverse turning: brake in, clutch in, wheel to one side, change gears to reverse, look in the mirrors, however we are mostly thinking about where we want to go, not all the details and specifics of our interactions with the car's interface. Similar to the example of the blind man and the stick, the apparatus has become transparent and now our body schema includes the car. We decide we want to reverse and turn to one side, and given our new intentional stance towards the world that is limited and extended using the car, we consider our self to be capable of doing so. The way we question and talk about the world changes, too, we ask "do I fit here?", wondering if we can pass through a narrow passage with the car, we are now embodying a new intentional stance towards the world, and this new body schema is what gets attribution for our action. +Given the framework described, we can now formulate videogaming as an embodied activity. A more trivial example of what we are trying to formulate is driving cars, which is a common example used when talking about embodiment in cognitive science. When we drive a car as a proficient driver, we manoeuvre by considering what we want to do, and acting towards that direct goal without focusing on how we do this by using the gears, the clutch, the brake, pedal and the wheel, etc. We might be taking 3 to 4 actions at the same time, e.g. when reverse turning: brake in, clutch in, wheel to one side, change gears to reverse, look in the mirrors, however we are mostly thinking about where we want to go, not all the details and specifics of our interactions with the car's interface. Similar to the example of the blind man and the stick, the apparatus has become transparent and now our body schema includes the car. We decide we want to reverse and turn to one side, and given our new intentional stance towards the world that is limited and extended using the car, we consider our self to be capable of doing so. The way we question and talk about the world changes, too, we ask "do I fit here?", wondering if we can pass through a narrow passage with the car, we are now embodying a new intentional stance towards the world, and this new body schema is what gets attribution for our action. Videogames are similar, with the difference that instead of sitting inside a car that moves spatially in the world, our human body sits in one place, but we still go places in the game-world. A proficient gamer is not concerned with the buttons they press or how they move the mouse, for example, they are directly concerned with what they do in the game-world. A new intentional stance arises towards the game-world, that is defined by the avatar that we embody in the videogame. @@ -154,7 +152,7 @@ interactions with the interface that connects us to our extended body in the game-world (e.g. the game controller, or the keyboard and the mouse) and visual and proprioceptive feedback might be the key to creating a strong sense of ownership of actions. -{% cite martin1995bodily } {% cite tsakiris2005experimenting %} +{% cite martin1995bodily %} {% cite tsakiris2005experimenting %} Besides the notion of embodiment that we have been discussing so far, there are other kinds of embodiment. Social embodiment seems to be a @@ -295,19 +293,19 @@ also allows panning of the camera across the world. (Figure In these videogames you are allowed to look at the world and your avatar from any place, and given our framework, the camera is now a novel extension to our body-schema. Most embodied activities exhibit the same synchrony of vision and body, like walking, swimming, driving a car, and in most cases of playing videogames too, however in this case, we have a new range of intentional acts available to us, through movement of the camera around the world. Our body-schema now includes a different apparatus to work with, it's as if our vision is no longer limited to our body, but rather there is a drone above us that we can see from. - This opens up the possibility of a new kind of vision interaction with the world. When the stakes are high, as is the case with e-sports, players strive for the ultimate proficiency with their new body-schema, and the result is ways of using vision that are not usual and can sometimes be cryptic for us. Camera movement of professional players tends to be very fast, and sometimes outright chaotic to an untrained eye since they want to optimise being able to scout for information while still keeping an eye on their avatar, since the avatar is still the most important part of the game, and the free-form camera movement is mostly used similar to a binocular: to scout for information. +This opens up the possibility of a new kind of vision interaction with the world. When the stakes are high, as is the case with e-sports, players strive for the ultimate proficiency with their new body-schema, and the result is ways of using vision that are not usual and can sometimes be cryptic for us. Camera movement of professional players tends to be very fast, and sometimes outright chaotic to an untrained eye since they want to optimise being able to scout for information while still keeping an eye on their avatar, since the avatar is still the most important part of the game, and the free-form camera movement is mostly used similar to a binocular: to scout for information. # Further Questions There is a question to be asked here about how much this technical camera-avatar independence leads to actual camera-avatar independence: do players actually end up with their camera away from their avatar much, or is the camera still in synchrony with the avatar for the majority of the time, but in a manner directly controlled by the player rather than automatically. - Does the camera-avatar independence affect the embodied experience of playing this videogame, perhaps by making it more difficult to be proficient in the game, it is initially harder to extend your body-schema with this new form of vision, but what happens once you are proficient? +Does the camera-avatar independence affect the embodied experience of playing this videogame, perhaps by making it more difficult to be proficient in the game, it is initially harder to extend your body-schema with this new form of vision, but what happens once you are proficient? - Competitive e-sports increase the stakes and are motivation for players to strive for utmost proficiency in a videogame, this usually leads to players being very creative and highly skilled in using the interface available to them (e.g. mouse and keyboard or a controller). In case of MOBA games with independent cameras, players reach very high action-per-minute numbers, in the last game of the largest competition for Dota 2, The International 10, the players averaged 303 actions per minute, which is about 5 actions per second, not including camera movements (camera movements are fluid and continuous and are not considered as discrete, hence their exclusion from a numerical value). {% cite dotabuff-true-sight %} +Competitive e-sports increase the stakes and are motivation for players to strive for utmost proficiency in a videogame, this usually leads to players being very creative and highly skilled in using the interface available to them (e.g. mouse and keyboard or a controller). In case of MOBA games with independent cameras, players reach very high action-per-minute numbers, in the last game of the largest competition for Dota 2, The International 10, the players averaged 303 actions per minute, which is about 5 actions per second, not including camera movements (camera movements are fluid and continuous and are not considered as discrete, hence their exclusion from a numerical value). {% cite dotabuff-true-sight %} {% cite dolezal2009remote %} considers the question of action-ownership and stakes with regards to telesurgery and embodiment. She stresses the importance of a feeling of agency towards the task at hand, and proposes that high-fidelity technologies could help induce a sense of agency and ownership of action. - There is a place to ask a similar question about videogames, when the stakes are high, such as competitions with millions of dollars at stake, do players think of the actions they take in the game as their own, do they feel complete agency towards their actions in the game? What factors are at play here? +There is a place to ask a similar question about videogames, when the stakes are high, such as competitions with millions of dollars at stake, do players think of the actions they take in the game as their own, do they feel complete agency towards their actions in the game? What factors are at play here? There is a place to ask a similar question about video-games, when the stakes are high, such as competitions with millions of dollars at stake, @@ -318,8 +316,8 @@ they feel complete agency towards their actions in the game? Videogames are usually formulated under information-processing cognitive models when studied in cognitive science, however on a closer look, they can be considered an embodied activity given the right framework. Here we consider Merleau-Ponty's intentional stance and body schema as a framework to formulate how a videogame might be considered an embodied activity. - Camera-avatar relations are an important factor affecting our intentional stance in a videogame, and they lend us different body schemas, from first-person and third-person camera views to an independent isometric camera that is controlled by the player. Independent cameras in videogames allow for a novel extension to our body-schema, an apparatus for vision that can move independent of the body. +Camera-avatar relations are an important factor affecting our intentional stance in a videogame, and they lend us different body schemas, from first-person and third-person camera views to an independent isometric camera that is controlled by the player. Independent cameras in videogames allow for a novel extension to our body-schema, an apparatus for vision that can move independent of the body. - There are still many questions left to be explored on the topic, and rightly so, as the notion of videogames as an embodied activity is fairly perplexing and requires a lot more exploration and study until we reach a more holistic understanding of it. +There are still many questions left to be explored on the topic, and rightly so, as the notion of videogames as an embodied activity is fairly perplexing and requires a lot more exploration and study until we reach a more holistic understanding of it. {% bibliography --cited %}