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In conversation with James Ash, Pasi Väliaho discusses the relationship between video games, politics and the turn to affect for thinking about mediated experience. In doing so, both authors consider the promises and problematics of utilizing neuroscientific concepts for understanding modes of power that operate through the knots of image and sensation that make up contemporary media culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the industrial art of videogame design and production as an exemplar of what could be termed affective design. In doing so, the article theorizes the relationship between affect and attention as part of what Bernard Stiegler calls a ‘retentional economy’ of human and technical memory. Through the examination of a range of different videogames, the article argues that videogame designers utilize techniques of what I term ‘affective amplification’ that seek to modulate affect, which is central to the commercial success of these games. The article considers how the concepts of amplification, modulation and bandwidth, developed through this example, inform and expand understandings of this retentional economy by analysing the ways in which affective design attempts to transmit and translate the potential for affect through a range of technical systems and environments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper I develop the concept of 'technicity' to theorise how technology shapes spatiotemporal perception. This concept of technicity is applied to the development of skilled play in the fighting videogame Street Fighter IV. Drawing upon a larger research project consisting of participant observation, interviews, and video ethnography with professional and nonprofessional competitive players, I develop an in-depth analysis of how information about the animation system for the game is compiled and used to develop new sensitivities to time. In doing so, I argue that this is one example of the ways in which a variety of technologies shape users' capacities to sense space and time through the habitual development of skill. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While videogames have been a popular form of entertainment practice for a number of decades, it is only recently that they have been paid much attention by academics. Although there is a burgeoning body of scholarship that deals with videogames in new media and games studies, human geography is only just beginning to offer its own take on the medium and the practices associated with it. This essay outlines ways in which scholars (both within geography and beyond) have traced out the geographies in videogames (in terms of the representations and politics within videogames), the geographies of videogames (in terms of the production and consumption of videogames) and videogames as a cultural geographical practice (in terms of the technocultural practices through which videogames and videogamers are produced). We argue that approaching videogaming as a (techno)cultural practice can enrich the cultural geographies in and of videogames. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I develop the concept of ‘teleplastic technologies’– technologies that pre-shape the potentials and possibilities for human action, movement and sense – through the example of videogaming. I develop a case study of videogame users through which I unpack the characteristics of teleplastic technologies and the ways in which they operate to reorganise the capacities and capabilities of users’ bodies through spatial means. In the first section I argue that teleplastic technologies should be understood from a spatial/ethological perspective and show how ethologically limited videogame environments encourage users to act and move without conscious thought in response to various inhibitors and disinhibitors designed into that environment. In the second section I show how the somatic techniques users develop in response to these worlds reorganise the cardinal orientation of users’ bodies and, thus, how the ‘geography’ of teleplastic technologies shape the potential and possibilities for spatial sense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we attend to an emergent practice of visualising GIS data in physical geography using the graphics engine of a videogame, Crysis. We suggest these modes of image-making aid the possibility of imagining and disseminating complex geographical data differently by re-contextualising seemingly abstract mathematical information within a human horizon of embodied meaning. Furthermore we argue these ways of imagining are closely linked to the technology and phenomenology of screens which make the presentation of these images possible. We close by reflecting on the possibility that these technologies are shifting the grounds of vision and the geographical imagination of users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I develop a nonrepresentational spatiality of screened images, in which space does not refer to the way space is represented in images or the spaces in which images exist, Instead it focuses on the spaces that images themselves produce. Drawing upon the technology of the screen as a contemporary site at which images are experienced, I argue for a dual conception of the 'space' of screened images: an existential space constructed through the background context of a user's relation with an image; and an ecological space constructed through the expressive relationship between body and screen. I use video games as an exemplar of these spaces to show how screened images reconfigure the relationship between touch and vision and how this alters users' spatial awareness of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]