AWESOME PHYSICS: technologies to tear the body apart
Abstract for paper at Septembers Brunels Postgraduate Digital Games Conference
There is a connection between technologies and rhetoric’s of bodily prosthesis by way of boundary extension and the algorithmic body at play is this prosthesis, it is the coded delimitation of physicality. George Simmel speaks of a body that is always actively involved in its own technological evolution. That is a body that labours to its own eminence and in play, a body that works beyond its own boundaries. One may break enemy bodies and perceive of their insides, one may, in emergent instances, actively seeks their own demise in curiosity of the newly shifted physical limits.
The technologies of violent games hint towards notions of an avoidance of death, whilst the mechanics conversely suggest a direct indulgence in it. From the carnage of violent games comes their allure, as the bodies within act and react in physically satisfying ways that provoke an uncanny interest. The possibilities and subsequent playability of these bodies is inextricably linked to their technologies. Looking specifically at the ‘frag’ moment, this paper will examine the sensational software’s of the body that facilitate the moment and enhance its experience. This moment has a long and diverse history rooted in technology. As we progress from ‘gibs’ and ‘ragdolls’ to procedural animation and automated bodily bits the movement of the moment becomes increasingly felt. The sensation and spectacle of this moment posits a phenomenology at work in the bits that break out of the fragged body, a bodily logic and disorder that only its technology could allow.
