This presentation is done by remote in a system called mediasite, which has a rather successful interface, where she has her video in one window, and slides in another window. I guess it’s for distance learning, but works well in front of an audience, too. Melanie is actually sitting in a hotel room in Melbourne, and will do the q&a by webcam.

Movement in games is a neglected pleasure. The imagining and feeling of another’s movements in a game. Few people have pondered what this might mean?

References:
Benjamin,: “A glimpse into the world of Childrens’ books”
(and another by Benjamin)
Caillois, Roger. “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia”
Morse, Margaret “Nature Morte:….”
etc.

(I’d of course add my thesis: Fiction and Interaction: How Clicking a Mouse Can Make You Part of a Fictional World.

Example from Australasian visual 3d stuff
aesthetics of floatingsness
aesthetics of bouncingness

Example of a Quake-player (Martin, has perhaps written a paper called “Becoming Robotic”?) who sometimes felt as though he was moving during sleep in the same ways as the characters in Quake do. Many other similar stories.
What is going on here? How does this movemnet move us?

A theory of mimetic responsiveness: mimetic means becoming similar to (for her)
Collapsing of the distance between players and onscreen avatars.
Empathetic “being there”, being there with one’s avatar. Similar to Benjamin’s speculation on children at play. To empathise is to be in relation to (I think she said)
Benjamin’s notion of mimetic is founded on similarity.
Play is a privileged access to the mimetic.
Benjamin thought children’s play and their use of picture books were important in this. The gazing child gazes into the pictures in the picture book.

A spatial disturbance. Caillois’s phrase is “a temptation of space” ( I think she said).
Connection between this and illinx, or vertigo.
Shouldn’t be confused with jacking into the interface and leaving the flesh behind. The player is on both sides of this – the friction between the two situations is what gives the negotiation its joy and its pleasure. Also the fact that you wouldn’t or couldn’t act in the same way (jumping off a cliff, fighting, etc) in real life.

It’s a partial becoming. Becomings are in between states. Tension between different kinds of bodies.

This is an emerging capacity that we (gamers, users of digital technology) are increasingly comfortable with. Caillois ont he other hand, thought that it involved a negation of self, like schizophrenia. Not feeling as though you’re where you material body is. Both digital and material world able to affect us simultaneously.

Morse: May be more continuity between these environments, clearer identity by working across different reality and materiality statuses.

Becoming similar to, not a psychic identification, and neither a kind of confusion of identity.

Anne Rutherford, “Cinema and Embodied Affect.”