Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the sensorialities of gaming as a semiotic-material and embodied digital practice in their situated enactments at video game events. Darkness, light, and air become building materials for gaming environments, exemplifying their significance in contemporary digital culture.

Paper long abstract:

The situated interactions between gamer bodies, machines and the material world at video game events emphasise the semiotic-material and embodied aspects of digital practices. Gamers communicate with and know their machines through multi-sensory relations and interactions, combining vision, sound, smell and touch. Immersion into virtual worlds is achieved by including the body and expanding virtual environments beyond the screen. Navigating virtual spaces becomes a matter of body coordination, training, and incorporation of movement. This paper explores the sensorialities and affects of gaming in particular and digital practices in general by drawing from a multi-modal ethnography at 17 European gaming events as part of the PhD project “Embodying Gaming”.

Within the situated settings at gaming events, darkness, light, and air become mediums of the material world that shape the multi-sensory experiences emerging between people and machines. Contemporary digital technologies rely on various light interfaces (e.g. screens that utilise focused, colourful and filtered lights) that work best entangled with darkness. Simultaneously, darkness creates intimacy, shifting human perception and affording new ways of sensing the world beyond visual realms. Entangled with darkness and light, air becomes the medium that shapes gaming machines' re-assembling, forms and functions, allowing affordances for auditive and tactile ways of sensing machine environments. These embodied practices challenge conventional notions of digitality by emphasising the multi-sensory ways of knowing and interacting with machines and the significance of material environments for media practices, thus enriching our understanding of human sensory, emotional, and social experiences of digital and virtual practices.