Technologies of Captivation

Abstract

This article analyses the skills and knowledges involved in multiplayer first-person shooting games, specifically Call of Duty 4 for the Xbox 360 games console. In doing so, it argues that the environments of first-person shooting games are designed to be intense spaces that produce captivated subjects -users who play attentively for long periods of time. Developing Heidegger's concept of attunement and Stiegler's account of retention, the article unpacks the somatic and sensory skills involved in videogame play and discusses how videogame environments cultivate a sense of captivation. In conclusion the article reflects on the politics of captivation for the bodies that engage with these games through the idea of vulnerability as an 'opening of the body's capacity for sense'.Academic writing on videogames is beginning to investigate the skills that need to be developed to use a variety of games. This, in turn, has led to a recognition that different games require very specific sets of skills and knowledges in order for users to be successful at them (for example, Millington, 2009;Reeves et al., 2009). At the same time, work on the relationship between experiences of time, space and technology has attempted to uncover the ways in which the human body is shaped on a variety of 'unconscious' levels by different technologies (see, for example, Hansen,

Being in a mediated world: self-tracking and the mind–body–environment

“…Recent work, in particular by Kinsley and Ash has put at its core a concept of 'technicity' which refers to the human-technology relationship in terms of 'the (emergent) qualities of that relationship as it is performed'. 70 While, for instance in Ash's rendering of technicity in the context of video game players, there is concern for the 'body-brain-environment relationship assemblage as they go', 71 here the reference is to the environment of the game, rather than to environment in the sense that we have developed it; that is, to refer to the ongoingly moving and emergent configurations of processes and things that constitute the worlds we are part of. Therefore, while we would agree with Kinsley that 'to study digital technologies in terms of technicity offers a means of studying contemporary socio-technical situation that recognizes the inherently material character of "virtual geographies"', 72 the example of self-tracking urges us to take a further theoretical step.…”

Share the Experience, Don’t Take it: Toward Attunement With Neurodiversity in Videogames

“…James Ash applies the concept of bodily attunement to videogames in his analysis of how users become attuned to videogame environments (Ash, 2013). Attuning oneself to a game, according to Ash, involves the self-management of an assemblage of bodily capacities and cognitive processes, which together comprise a specific affective state.…”

In the mood for disconnection

“…"[W]e are never not in a mood," Flatley (2012: 504) writes. According to Flatley (2012: 504), "moods do, however, shift and change" and even more importantly they can be invoked, directed, and designed through a process he calls "affective attunement" (see also Ash, 2013;Throop, 2017). Ahmed (2014) argues that attunement does not only deal with a response towards the other, the object, but to the feelings themselves in those encounters.…”

“…While affect is an abstract force, attunement can have a definable form and function in arranging affective forces and establishing points of contact. According to Ash (2013), our expectations and understandings toward something are impacted by somatic and analytic attunements. Somatic attunements mean that our bodies are already oriented toward particular sensorimotor responses that the object in an encounter evokes (Ash, 2013: 36-37).…”