The Computer Game as a Somatic Experience

Abstract

This article describes the experience of playing computer games. With a media archaeological outset the relation between human and machine is emphasised as the key to understand the experience. This relation is further explored by drawing on a phenomenological philosophy of technology which sketches the relation as founded on the player´s embodiment in-the-world. Through the framework of somaesthetics, three different, yet intertwined, embodied relations are outlined as facilitating somatic experiences revolving around the experiential, the representational, and the performative which displace the player´s habitual engagement with the world.