![]() Wolf claims that abstraction can provide an important, if neglected direction for game design, given how technical processes of abstraction are intrinsic to digital media. Yet, the abstractions of modernism were often attempts to inscribe and represent motion, 6 not efforts to reduce empirical experience to phenomenal essences, or to produce alienating works of art that provoke self-reflexive knowledge. Rather than celebrating an affective linkage between self and other, Worringer was arguing for the necessity of forms that were alienating, in ways that resonate with similar contemporary critiques of empathy from phenomenological philosophy, and with other defenses of modernist aesthetics such as those of Theodor Adorno. To use the German terms on which Worringer relied, empathy is a translation of Einfühlung-literally, “in-feeling.” 4 Worringer’s book, however, was a rejection of a now neglected strain of German aesthetic theory that emphasized this in-feeling as an absolute aesthetic value, instead arguing for the necessity of abstract forms that characterized the emergence of modernism. Empathy, on the other hand, involves the projection of similarity onto another, what we would now conceive of as an affective connection that bridges the divide between subject and object. 3 Abstraction, for Worringer, is a reduction that leads to the transcendental, though one that is related to an inner turmoil and a distancing from the world at large. Wolf has framed this tendency through Wilhelm Worringer’s 1908 Abstraction and Empathy. Yet, while technical limits of games in the past would seem to privilege abstraction, game history has nonetheless perpetuated a drive towards more realist forms of representation, perhaps because of the emphasis on qualities of “immersion” that emerge from emotional connections to game characters and a game world. The history of games-because of the technical limitations of personal computers and gaming consoles until the last decade or so-stresses more abstract forms of representation rather than realistic imagery. 2 Instead of saying that digital images lack the physical trace of reality in their representations, I claim there is a specific form of gestural inscription made with digital animation and motion capture-a kinesthetic index-which cannot be framed, as games often are, as a playable simulation of reality. ![]() And third, games require an expanded definition of the index that stresses motion rather than a privileging of the trace-“trace,” here, referring to the quality identified by André Bazin that sees in photography and film the capacity to physically “embalm time” and objectively capture reality through a photographic image, a belief that has often been used to differentiate digital representations from analog images. 1 Second, realism in games has long relied on the inscription of embodied motion. ![]() First, digital images are condensations of specific-if multiple-bodies that persist as representations that have some link with the physical world. In making this argument, I demonstrate three things. This involves numerous questions about realism, indexicality, and affect, which I aim to intertwine and unfold below. While the visual presence of a human body may no longer be a coherent source of any link between a representation and physical reality, motion brings together digital images with the reality inscribed into media. In reviewing the history of this genre, I contextualize some early attempts to use motion capture and rotoscoping to incorporate human bodies into games, arguing that representation in games and other forms of digital media should be conceived not as deferring to the visual, but as reliant on the kinesthetic. ![]() In this essay, I present a history of the graphic adventure genre of video and computer games and its attempts at achieving a kind of cinematic realism through the registration of the body. ![]()
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