Guest Speaker: Burak Tekin

Burak Tekin from the University of Basel will give a talk to the Mixed Reality Lab on Friday 20th May.

The accountability of disciplined body in motion based video gaming activities

In this talk, I will discuss how participants in motion based video gaming activities orient to the disciplined body required by Kinect. By closely examining the naturally occurring video game playing sessions in home settings, we will be looking at how game players and audience members refer to Kinect, and how they discern and fail in certain bodily movements Kinect demands. Drawing on Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, this talk will detail the social organization around Kinect use, particularly how participants account for their orientations towards how the machine “sees” and how gamers adjust their bodies to proceed in the games.

Accountability is a central aspect in the sequential organization of human social interaction and the normative reasoning procedures inherently embedded in it. Within the social organization of Kinect use in such gaming environments, participants often account for the failing and successful movements in the gaming world. Gamers can either accept the responsibility of the failures or attribute it to the machine; likewise audience members can blame either the gamers or the system. How participants account for the movements in the game is dynamically negotiated among participants who refer to the disciplined body to justify or excuse these bodily movements required by the system. However, when it comes to successful moments, Kinect is not mentioned anymore, and the participants display that it is the gamers who achieve the disciplined body: Gamers rejoice, and audience members congratulate them. In delicate moments in the game, participants` orientations to the disciplined body also occasion the gamers to demonstrate what they have done, and the audience members to warn and instruct the gamers in situated ways. What comes out, after the examination of a large collection of instances in which participants refer to Kinect in various ways as they engage with it, is a local and practical for-all-purposes topicalization of how the machine works and fails to work and is expected to work.