Technology, wrote Walter Benjamin in 1939, 'has subjected the human sensorium to a complex kind of training ' (1992: 132). New technologies have the potential to reorganize sensory priorities, to augment the senses and to modify the relationships between them. The physiological basis of the human sensorium has remained more or less unchanged for millennia, however, and the following discussion looks at some of the ways that existing sensory modalities, native to all perceptual experience but typically overlooked in discussions of such experience, are brought to light in new media forms.Though cultural criticism has tended to privilege the role of vision in perceptual experience, other sensory modalities, such as touch and movement, have an important part to play in such experience. Of special interest here is the 'sixth sense' of proprioception -the sensory feedback mechanisms which determine the body's location and movement in space. Proprioception, as we will see, is intimately linked to the emotional or affective content of perceptual experience. This link is particularly clearly expressed in the medium of the video game. Emotional or affective response in gameplay is a function not just of onscreen events, but of the physical activity of gameplay itself. Taking its methodological cues from the linked domains of phenomenology and cognitive neuroscience, the following discussion examines perception and gameplay in terms of the relationship between the body, the emotions and the proprioceptive senses, sketching out some of the possibilities for emotional expression offered by a generation of videogame controllers that engage the human sensorium in a newly extensive way.
Videogames, sensory engagement and emotionVideo games are an enormously popular technological innovation with a relatively short history. Because of their spatial structure and their broadly narrative form, video games are often historically situated in relation to visual technologies such as perspective painting and cinema. Video games, however, offer a profoundly different kind of experience to the user. While perspective painting and cinema present the spectator with an illusory 3D space designed to be seen passively, from a fixed viewpoint, video games allow the user to enter and explore this space in real time. By
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