The London Consortium
Static. Issue 09 –Buttons.
Rob Gallagher
Pressing Concerns: Comedy, Interactivity and Buttonless
Videogame Interfaces
Pressing Concerns: Comedy, Interactivity and Buttonless Videogame Interfaces
What follows is an attempt to better understand the expressive potential of videogame
interface technologies. Motivated by the rise of ‘buttonless’ motion control systems, it is not,
however, a panegyric to the humble button. Nor is it a lament regarding the failure of
motion controls to live up to advertisers’ promises. Instead, it centres on the question of
how different kinds of interface can be used to create comedy. If, as Jeff Rush suggests, game
interfaces can be understood in terms of ‘embodied metaphor’[1] then, ideally at least, they
quickly become dead metaphors. Becoming accustomed to the fact that Y means jump, we
cease to think about it. As Rush notes, however, interesting - and amusing - things can
happen when these metaphors spring back to life. In exploring this potential I’ll be
considering various games. Some are highly complex, others are barely more than one-note
interactive gags. Certain of them set out to make the player laugh while in others humour
seems incidental to - or, indeed, totally at odds with - what the game is ‘really’ about. All
however raise questions about comedy and its capacity to make us reconsider the stakes of
interface design.
First, however, a sketch of the recent history of videogame interfaces is in order. A few years
ago videogames seemed to have fallen out of love with buttons. The success of Nintendo’s
Wii had ushered in the era of motion control interfaces, which, by tracking players’ gestures
and translating them into in-game actions, promised an experience at once more intuitive
and more immersive than old-fashioned, joypad-based gaming. Returning to Rush’s
conceptualisation of the interface as metaphor, we might say that the Wii, the Playstation
Move, Microsoft’s Kinect and their ilk represented attempts to close the gap between the
metaphor’s tenor and its vehicle: rather than arbitrarily assigning a button to an action,
these interfaces have players perform gestures that somehow resemble, or at least connote,
the actions they wish their avatars to perform. In the terms of C.S. Peirce’s oft-cited
taxonomy of signs, we might say that where buttons operate at the level of the symbolic,
gesture-based systems shift gamic control into an iconic register, with some form of
similarity or likeness underwriting the relation between offscreen input and onscreen
output.[2] Appealing to novice players intimidated by the complexity of conventional
controllers, these systems also courted ‘hardcore’ gamers with the promise of stripping back
the interface that notionally stands ‘between’ them and the gameworld.
In reality, buttonless interfaces turned out not to differ too dramatically from traditional
control schemes: whether it is a semaphore-like system of gestures, a lexicon of taps, swipes
and pinches or a palette of button cues, there is still a system of signs subtending the
interface and players still have to learn how to signify their intentions to the game. The
‘immediacy’ of contemporary gestural interfaces proves more rhetorical than actual: as
Gregersen and Grodal note, while playing tennis in Wii Sports (2006) might feel more
‘natural’ than non-gestural tennis games, players are still using the ‘vision for perception’
system located in the brain’s ventral region rather than the dorsally-sited ‘vision for action’
system that comes into play in a real tennis match.[3] Indeed, for Gregersen and Grodal
the forms of embodied metaphor Wii games use may make for a less immersive experience
than traditional, joypad-based games by virtue of inconsistencies in the way that the illusion
of in-game presence is created. If anything, then, gestural interfaces underlined the fact that
button-based systems remain, for many purposes, superior to higher-tech solutions.
Rumours of the button’s impending death turned out to be largely ill-founded. Nonetheless,
the emergence of alternatives invites us to reassess the nature and affordances of the button
– and, I think, to consider whether, how and why different game interfaces might be able to
make us laugh.
My approach to these questions draws on Henri Bergson’s essay on laughter, first published
in 1900. While Freud’s celebrated account of jokes, published some five years later, focuses
on the immaterial stuff of language and the individual psyche, Bergson is concerned with the
visible, the tangible and the social, with materiality, mechanics and mimicry. For Scott Lash
and Celia Lury this renders his theory of comedy felicitously applicable to contemporary
animation. I would argue it is still more applicable to videogames - which are, from one
perspective, little more than a form of interactive animation or puppetry.[4] Indeed,
Bergson’s relevance to videogames has recently been demonstrated by Graeme Kirkpatrick,
whose analysis of game interfaces also informs the essay.[5]
The Comedy of Buttons (or, DO NOT PUSH)
As Steven Connor observes, it was in the 20th century that buttons began ‘steadily taking
over from switches, levers and knobs’.[6] Needing ‘only to be pressed’ the button rapidly
‘became the image of the convertibility of scales, the possibility of setting in train or
discontinuing a massive, complex and ramifying set of operations by a single elementary
motion’.[7] The comedy of buttons is, as this account would suggest, based on
disproportions and mismatches, on skewing the relationship between expectation and
outcome, stimulus and response, cause and effect. It is the comedy of the black
box. Examples of classic comic buttons include the suburban doorbell that plays the Queen
of the Night aria, the button on the fighter plane’s joystick that, rather than releasing a
missile, triggers the ejector seat, and the mysterious ‘big red button’ rendered still-more
tempting by an Edenic prohibition.
This concern with occulted mediation, with the inability to infer the nature of the output
from the nature of the input, differentiates button comedy from other sorts of machine-based
humour. It is very different, for example, from the comedy of Rube Goldberg’s ridiculously
overcomplicated cartoon mechanisms - which, as Alexis Madrigal argues, can in fact be read
as nostalgic paeans to the pre-button era.[8] For Madrigal, Goldberg’s popularity among
early 20th century Americans had to do with the way he evoked a rapidly disappearing
world of pre-electrical machines which one could understand by ‘just looking’.[9]
Goldberg’s humour is founded on inevitability and inefficiency, on being able to trace every
link in a ludicrously overextended chain of causes and effects; buttons, by contrast, work to
contract and obscure the interval between input and output, ‘tapping invisible forces’[10] to
render the machine’s operation imperceptible to the button pusher.
With computer interfaces, including games, maintaining a sense of ‘real-time’ continuous
control - that is, making sure there is no humanly apprehensible ‘lag’ between a button push
and its product - means that an application must ‘respond to input within 240 milliseconds
(ms)’ and ‘be ready to accept input and provide response at a consistent, ongoing rate of
100ms or less’.[11] Beyond closing this temporal gap digital interfaces also aim, as Graham
Harwood argues, to close a conceptual gap, misrepresenting the complex array of
exchanges, conversions and translations involved in human-computer interaction (‘HCI’) as
a simple matter of a subject - the user - acting directly on objects – the onscreen
‘content’.[12] As we’ll see, when games are comic it is often because, whether intentionally
or unintentionally, they part the veil behind which mediation occurs, gesturing at the true
nature and complexity of HCI.
Press X to lol
So how do games create comedy from buttons? While it’s hard to imagine an entertaining
game where the player has no idea what their next input will do, there are nonetheless
games, or bits of games, that use comically idiosyncratic control schemes, or in which inputs
are reversed, delayed or scrambled as a joke and/or a punishment. Drink too much in Grand
Theft Auto 4 (2008) and not only do the visuals blur but your avatar will start to stagger and
teeter, responding only erratically and approximately to your commands. A somewhat
similar system is used in Minotaur China Shop (2008), in which players have to prevent the
semi-bovine proprietor of a ceramics emporium from inadvertently smashing his own stock.
The game lies in accommodating yourself to the avatar’s bulk, slipperiness and inertial drift,
in knowing when to release the button. In a medium where most protagonists are
impossibly agile or potent it’s both amusing and strangely touching to control a character
whose musclebound physique puts him at a comical disadvantage.
In QWOP (2008) the keyboard’s q, w, o and p keys are used to control the left and right
thighs and calves of a sprinter. So unusual is this system, and so unwieldy the avatar, that
it’s tough to proceed more than a metre or two down the track without collapsing in a heap something that might be frustrating if the pratfalls weren’t so hilarious. Nevertheless, it is
possible to intuit the simulation’s rules and to improve - at which point it becomes funny to
think we have become so attached to a handful of simpler but equally artificial methods of
making avatars run.
It can also be funny when avatars either refuse or prove too willing to obey ‘illogical’
commands. There’s something comically condescending about the schoolma’amish, fourth
wall-breaking ‘no’ which Tomb Raider’s (1996) Lara Croft issues if you attempt to use the
wrong key in the wrong lock - doubly so given that she has no qualms about jumping into a
bottomless pit if we bid her to. Irreverent players can amuse themselves by making avatars
endlessly repeat exactly the same action (repetition, for Bergson, is fundamentally
ridiculous[13]), switch stance with absurd abruptness or generally do things that are
irrational, suicidal, or out of character. In such instances comedy comes from what Peter
Bøgh Andersen and Jørgen Callesen call the ‘opalescence’ of the avatar, its ‘double existence’
as both a diegetic character and a button-operated virtual puppet.[14]
More straightforwardly, there is a degree of juvenile delight in the way that, in games, a
mere tap of the X button can initiate fantastic ‘reward-spectacles,’[15] triggering massive
conflagrations or superhuman acrobatics. Like a devastating bon mot, the satisfaction of a
well-timed button press has to do with the dramatic disproportion between the effort
expended and the effect achieved. Designer Steve Swink calls this ‘the amplification of
input’, describing it as ‘one of the great joys of controlling something in game’.[16]
If the disproportion between the paltriness of the player’s input and the magnitude of the
output becomes too great, however, players can start to feel disconnected. This often
happens in games that feature so-called ‘Quick Time Events’ - minimally interactive
animated sequences during which players have to respond to onscreen button prompts in
time to trigger the next action. Ideally, ‘QTEs’ let the game’s developers choreograph
situations that would be too intricate or spectacular to offer full control over while still
affording the player some measure of influence. In reality, players are often left feeling
disengaged or harried. No skill or judgement is required, merely a capacity to react
promptly to stimuli, and gamers have complained that QTEs reduce play to a matter of
‘press X to win.’ Pippin Barr offers a mordant commentary on the hollowness of QTEs in
his satirical suite of online minigames Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment (2012), in which
players have to hammer buttons to perform mythic exercises in futility: rolling Sisyphus’s
boulder uphill, reaching for the fruit above Tantalus’s head, dislodging the eagle from
Prometheus’s midriff etc.
Then there is the strain of gamic humour based on devoting a button to some useless or
gratuitous function, to what Bergson would call a ‘gesture’ (involuntary, habitual or
profitless motions) rather than an ‘action’ (conscious, purposive, productive activity).[17] In
most games, buttons are there to trigger actions: shooting, ducking, strafing. When avatars
do perform gestures, it’s often as part of ‘idle animations’ - little automated loops during
which the character might stretch, scratch, look around or, like Sonic the Hedgehog,
impatiently tap their foot. There are also games, however, in which buttons are allocated to
such gestures or indulgent flourishes. In We Love Katamari (2006) one of the buttons causes
your avatar to whistle, for no reason at all. The King of Fighters games have a taunt button,
which makes the avatar yawn, moon their opponent or pause to savour the aroma of a rose actions that serve no purpose beyond irritating the other player. In Shinji Mikami’s sci-fi
shooter Vanquish (2010), meanwhile, there’s a button which causes the main character - a
tongue-in-cheek action hero stereotype - to duck around the corner for a fag break, his eyes
narrowing in blissful contentment as the maelstrom of bullets, bodies and shrapnel rages
unabated around him. Beyond the comic value of any of these actions there is something
funny about squandering a button on what Roger Caillois calls ‘paidiac’ (unstructured,
improvisational) rather than ‘ludic’ (‘serious’, goal-oriented) play.[28]
Comedy in Motion
So, in terms of comic potential, what do games lose and gain with the shift to motion
controls? Swink argues that, lacking the ‘amplification of input’ effect, gestural commands
are often anticlimactic: ‘usually... large, sweeping inputs are mapped to what would normally
be mapped to a simple button press. The result feels profoundly unsatisfying, like lighting a
massive firecracker and having it go off with a pathetic whimper’.[19] For him this is a bad
thing, but, as we’ll see, it creates the possibility for certain bathetic effects.
Perhaps more important is the often comical fallibility of current motion control systems.
Tasked with ‘mapping a hugely sensitive movement to a binary, yes-or-no response from a
game’, [20] gestural interfaces often miss, misread or tardily implement cues. If this can be
frustrating, it can also be comic - something arguably worse in titles that attempt to
immerse players, or to maintain a particular atmosphere or tone.
The way in which motion control can render games with pretensions to gravitas literally
laughable is amply demonstrated by the Move Edition of Heavy Rain (2010), a version of
Quantic Dream’s ‘interactive drama’ retooled for Sony’s Wiimote-like Move controller. The
game borrows heavily from Hollywood thrillers like David Fincher’s Se7en (1995), following
four protagonists as they attempt to discover the identity of a serial killer. The opening
chapters, in which we literally acquire ‘a feel for’ these characters by guiding them through
various banal domestic activities, are intended not merely to teach us the controls but to
forge a kinesthetically-grounded player/avatar rapport. In one of the more successful of
them the player is cast as a divorced father worried that he is becoming alienated from his
ten-year-old son. As the evening wears on we have to make sure we find time to cook the
boy dinner, help him with his homework and talk about his day, perhaps squeezing in a
game of basketball or a spot of TV before bed. All of these activities are accomplished by
pointing, dragging, twisting and swiping the Move wand in a fashion more or less evocative
of the actions’ real world referents. There are no ‘fail states’ - if the son goes to bed hungry
or grumpy that’s simply how the evening played out - and this fact contributes to the
strained and claustrophobic atmosphere that the chapter manages to generate. What could
easily have been a mawkish or melodramatic sequence skilfully evokes the frustrations and
consolations of routine, representing domestic life as a litany of quotidian chores and rituals,
undertaken quasi-automatically. Moreover it does this as much through gamic means (handeye coordination, choice, time management, simulated 3D space) as through ‘filmic’ dialogue
and depiction, supporting advocates’ claims that gestural control can create empathy and
engagement.
More frequently, however, the motion controls jeopardise Heavy Rain’s bid to recreate the
atmosphere of filmic thrillers, pitching the game instead into the realm of slapstick comedy.
Many players have observed that the characters - rendered with nigh-on photorealistic
fidelity - sometimes look a little ‘off’, substantiating Masahiro Mori’s famous ‘uncanny
valley’[21] thesis, which argues that at the point at which automata could almost be
mistaken for living humans any telltale discrepancies become especially glaring and
troubling. But it is not just the characters’ appearances that compromise their believability;
it is also the strange way in which they respond to inputs if players fail to execute
movements in the fashion that the game expects them to. In one sequence the player
character, a laconic FBI agent, has to fasten the tie of a local police chief preparing for a
press conference. The dramatic purpose of the scene is clear: it’s meant to undermine the
vanity and ineptitude of the official to whom we’re beholden, while casting our own
character as long-suffering and capable. However, between the fallibilities of the interface
and the ambiguity of the onscreen cues, knotting the tie proves no mean feat (it took me at
least three attempts). The scene becomes ridiculous, and its awkwardness is only heightened
by the game’s refusal to acknowledge that our agent could be a dyspraxic bungler: although
there are instances in Heavy Rain where we receive an alternate outcome after missing a
prompt, here, as on many other occasions, the action simply ‘rewinds’ to the first motion cue.
While derisive claims that Heavy Rain is ‘one long QTE section’ are unfair, at such points
the sense that the player’s acts and choices have consequence is fatally, comically
compromised.
The effect is still more absurd - and incongruously amusing - in the game’s more histrionic
passages. In one particularly overwrought sequence players must bandage the slashed wrists
of a suicidal woman (draw loops with the wand to wrap the bandages), before rocking her
baby to sleep (swing the controller slowly from side to side). Its failure suggests that Mori’s
ideas might apply not merely to representational style but also to interface design - that
symbolically-coded buttons might be less prejudicial to ‘immersion’ than attempts at
hypothetically more intuitive iconic interfaces.
The unintentionally comic performances of Heavy Rain’s virtual actors bring us back to
Bergson’s theory of comedy, which proposes that laughter is a means of reasserting the
difference between persons and mechanisms, of highlighting and censuring ‘a certain
mechanical elasticity, just where one would expect to find the wideawake adaptibility and the
living pliableness of a human being’.[22] Repetition, imitation and evidence of bodily and
mental rigidity are all, for Bergson, inherently comic, and indeed, for all the ‘lifelike’ touches
that have been bestowed on Heavy Rain’s characters (from dilating pupils to sweat-slick
brows) the sequences in which we are forced to watch them repeatedly reprising our clumsy
motions seldom fail to elicit a snigger.
It is not only Heavy Rain’s avatars that can be inadvertently funny however. As Bergson
argues, if comedy entails laughing at objects that resemble humans it also entails laughing
at people who have allowed themselves to become object-like, lapsing into quasi-machinic
rote behaviours or states of rapt abstraction. Kirkpatrick applies this idea to the experience
of failing at a QTE and being reduced to laughter by the thought of his having become so
absorbed in ‘pressing a brightly colored plastic button on an infantile toy’.[23] His vision of
himself at this moment corresponds to Bergson’s account of the condition expressed by
comic physiognomies: ‘as though the soul had allowed itself to be fascinated and hypnotised
by the materiality of a simple action’.[24] If there is something ridiculous about our ability
to buy into games’ illusory simulated worlds, there is also something ridiculous about
moments when, as a result of our having failed to adapt to the simulation’s rules, the illusion
breaks down.
However, as I’ve argued elsewhere, such bathetic experiences of ‘coming to’ do not
necessarily lessen a game’s appeal, and one might in fact argue that its capacity to create
such experiences was a factor in the Wii’s popular success[25]: for Bergson, ‘laughter is
always the laughter of a group’,[26] and games like Wii Sports centre on bringing friends or
family members together to laugh at one another’s attempts to operate onscreen ‘Mii’
avatars, which mimic both the appearance and the actions of the offscreen players. Play, here
is not just about winning the game; it is also a sort of social ritual through which players can
explore the relationship between people and machines, mimicry and communication, actions
and symbols. In this instance the limits and fallibilities of the interface increase the game’s
potential to induce cathartic laughter.
Antiheroes, Anticlimaxes
Between Heavy Rain and Wii Sports it would seem that gestural interfaces are more suited to
literal broad strokes - swiping tennis rackets, hurling frisbees - than to delicacy and
ambiguity. So must we conclude that motion controls are, at best, only fitted for knockabout
fun? While hardly serious or sophisticated, No More Heroes (2008) is among the games that
suggest otherwise. Like all of director Goichi Suda’s work, the game is allusive, satirical,
self-reflexive and highly stylized, testifying to its creator’s taste for the absurd and the
wilfully trashy and abounding in references to lucha libre wrestling, B-cinema, 8-bit
videogames and 1970s punk. Players control Travis Touchdown, a videogame-obsessed
slacker who, having won a Star Wars-style ‘beam katana’ in an online auction, decides to go
into business as a freelance assassin. As the title would suggest, Travis is no saint. A
narcissistic, sociopathic geek whose spectacular killing sprees are framed as attempts to
compensate for his sexual inadequacies, he embodies the worst stereotypes of the ‘hardcore
gamer’. And yet the game also encourages players to sympathise with Travis, who is
repeatedly duped, insulted or exploited over the course of the game’s plot, and who, after all,
represents us in the gameworld, acting as our surrogate and vehicle. The game, then,
cultivates an ambivalent - even incoherent – attitude toward its own protagonist, and it is
similarly inconsistent in its treatment of the player who has given their money and time in
order to ‘be’ him. Wryly interrogating the terms of the player/avatar relationship, it also
calls into question distinctions between play and work, privilege and obligation, praise and
ridicule. And, as we’ll see, its implementation of motion control is crucial to this project.
Essentially, No More Heroes is structured around a series of assassination missions, which
both advance the plot and allow players to indulge in bouts of gleefully excessive virtual
bloodshed. To access these, however, the player has to perform various menial tasks,
working out at a gym to maintain Travis’s fitness and taking on a range of odd jobs - from
litterpicking to working at a gas station - in order to cover his subscription to the United
Assassin’s Association. Ostensibly, Travis’ responsibilities and commitments are meant to
spread out and build anticipation for the missions in which the player can finally ‘cut loose’
(as it were). The strange thing is that, in many respects, the ‘fun’ parts of No More Heroes are
no different to, and no less repetitious than, the ‘boring’ bits. What is different is the nature
of the graphical feedback the game supplies. Thus the same gesture that triggers a
spectacular wrestling move in a combat scenario, causing an opponent to explode in a
shower of guts and gold coins, might be the cue to deposit an empty beer can in a
litterpicking mission, or to wave a flag wave in the semaphore minigame. And of course, at a
mechanical level - as far, that is, as the software is concerned - there is no difference between
these actions. If they are, or are made to feel, qualitatively distinct it is because the game
visually frames them as significant, routine or ridiculous. The ‘joke’ - that play is really just
work in a glamourous disguise - is an old one, but its punchline has renewed relevance in the
‘always on’ era of ‘playbour’ and ‘weisure,’[27] in which leisure and labour are becoming
increasingly interwoven.
This joke is made at the player’s expense: we have to expend a considerable degree of literal,
physical effort to make it work, diligently performing the role of fall guy. As this suggests,
motion controls invite us to rethink the question of games, comedy and ‘distance’, to
reconsider how far barbs directed at the protagonist are meant to be taken personally by the
player. With button-based control schemes, as we’ve seen, the player need only press a
single button to have the avatar do something strenuous, spectacular or absurd. By contrast
No More Heroes’ motion controls mean there is far greater parity between the effort Travis
expends and the effort expended by the user, and this alters the game’s pragmatics, the
manner in which it addresses and constructs a position for its player.
To take an example, Travis recharges his beam katana by holding it between his legs and
pumping it as if masturbating. Were this action triggered by holding down a button, it
might be easier to laugh at Travis, not merely on account of the smuttiness of the conceit
but because his activity would be so frantic and so ridiculous by comparison with the user
command that initiated it. When the player has to perform the same movement with their
controller, however, it feels more like the game is laughing at us. We are asked to perform a
movement that is not only perversely inefficient but which also carries an obscene
connotation. This connotation is necessarily lost on the cameras, sensors and software that
register and respond to it; they do not ‘see’ us miming masturbation (indeed, they do not see
us at all, registering only the Move wand or the Wii remote), but we know – as do the
developers – what we are doing, and feel all the more ridiculous for it. Or, alternatively, we
may not know what we are doing, because we have become so accustomed to this quirk of
the control scheme that it has become a matter of muscle memory – an outcome which also
renders us laughable in its own, Bergsonian way.
Last Laughs
Embodied interfaces purport to offer increased agency and immersion, a seamless lamination
or mapping of avatar to user. No More Heroes’ alienating pranks comically undercut this
fantasy, returning us to a consciousness of our own bodies by highlighting material and
semiotic excesses, movements, phenomena and thought processes that are beyond what the
game requires or registers. In this respect it might be said to resemble motion-controlled
‘exergames’ like Wii Fit or Zumba Fitness (2010): after all, as Brad Millington asserts, Wii
Fit was designed to ‘make you aware of your body’,[28] and in particular of its shameful,
comical surpluses. Wii Fit’s attempts to help users centre their balance, meanwhile, suggest
the metaphoric nexus that connects personality to posture, articulating a Bergsonian belief
in the body’s capacity to embarrass us by manifesting, via unwilled gestures, the existence of
tendencies, leanings, orientations, inclinations and eccentricities beyond our conscious control.
On this basis we might be tempted to conclude that the comedy of buttonless interfaces is
fundamentally somatophobic, emphasising (by framing as laughable) our inability to live up
to ideals of reliability, control and efficiency. Yet one could equally argue that button-based
interfaces play on a somatophobic dream of ‘manualizing’ the body so that it is subsumed
within the hand, with its connotations of mobility, mastery, utility and flexibility. Such a
body would be all action and no gesture, a pure, obedient vehicle of intentionality rather
than a fallible aggregate of different systems and capabilities. Both conclusions are, I think,
too simplistic. Crass, smug and contrary as it often is, No More Heroes hints at how games
might remain games while also highlighting - and mining comedy from – the affordances
and limitations of different HCI technologies. Bergson’s attempts to think through the
consequences of mechanisation enable us to appreciate how such games play on - and enable
us to laugh at - our experience of adapting to wands and Wiimotes, switches, buttons and
touchscreens. In so doing they invite us to consider how gestures can evoke while also
exceeding articulable meanings, how different interfaces depend upon while also occluding
particular frameworks of corporeal legibility. And as buttons continue to be supplemented
by other, newer interface technologies these issues will only become more pressing (if you’ll
pardon the pun).
works cited
[1] Jeff Rush, “Embodied Metaphors: Exposing Informatic Control Through First-Person
Shooters,” Games and Culture, 6 (3) (Summer 2011): 246.
[2] Charles Sanders Peirce, Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler, (London,
2011): 98-119.
[3] Andreas Gregersen and Torben Grodal, “Embodiment and Interface,” in The Video
Game Theory Reader 2, eds. Bernard Perron and Mark J.P. Wolf (New York, 2009): 74.
[4] Scott Lash and Celia Lury, Global Culture Industry (Cambridge, 2007): 89-90.
[5] Graeme Kirkpatrick, “Controller, Hand, Screen: Aesthetic Form in the Computer
Game,” Games and Culture, 4 (2) (2009): 127-43.
[6] Steven Connor, Paraphernalia: The Curious Lives of Magical Things (London, 2011): 45.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Alexis Madrigal, “Rube Goldberg and the Irreducible Strangeness of Electricity,” The
Atlantic, 25 September 2010, accessed 27 June 2012,
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/09/rube-goldberg-and-theirreducible-strangeness-of-electricity/63537/.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Steve Swink, Game Feel: A Designer’s Guide to Virtual Sensation (Burington, MA, 2008):
35-36.
[12] Graham Harwood, “Human Computer Oscillation and the Need for Calories,” in
XXXXX, ed. xxxxx (Berlin, 2006): 306-308.
[13] Henri Bergson, “Laughter” in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher (London, 1984): 81.
[14] Peter Bøgh Andersen and Jørgen Callesen, “Agents as Actors,” in Virtual Interactions:
Interaction in Virtual Inhabited 3D Worlds, ed. Lars Qvorttrup (London, 2001): 151.
[15] David Surman, “Pleasure, Spectacle and Reward in Capcom’s Street Fighter Series,” in
Videogame, Player, Text, eds. Barry Atkins and Tanya Krzywinska (Manchester, 2007): 218.
[16] Swink, Game Feel: 322.
[17] Bergson, “Laughter”: 153.
[18] Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (Urbana, 2001): 13.
[19] Swink, Game Feel: 331.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Masahiro Mori, “Bukimi no Tani [the Uncanny Valley],” Energy 7(4) (1970): 33-35.
[22] Bergson, “Laughter”: 67. Emphasis original.
[23] Kirkpatrick, “Controller, Hand, Screen”: 136.
[24] Bergson, “Laughter”: 77.
[25] Rob Gallagher, “Answering Machines: Video Games and the Bathos of Machinic
(Mis)communication,” Nyx 7 (Summer 2012): 85-90.
[26] Bergson, “Laughter”: 64.
[27] PJ Rey, “Playbor vs. Weisure,” Cyborgology, 23 March 2011, accessed 27 June 2012,
http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/03/23/playbor-vs-weisure/.
[28] Brad Millington, “Wii has Never Been Modern,” New Media & Society 11(4) (2009):
635.