Technological advancements continue to redefine the ways we engage with others and the world around us. As Kiri Miller suggests in her ethnography, Playable Bodies: Dance Games and Intimate Media, technology has a lasting visceral effect on human experience. Miller's term “intimate media” expresses this complex relationship between technology and humans. Miller engages a posthuman lens that gives credence to technological and human roles and their overlap, paying close attention to two dance video game series: Just Dance and Dance Central.
Miller describes the effects of the games’ technological designs on players’ dance experiences. For example, Just Dance uses the Nintendo Wii video game console and tracks movements based on players’ manual control of the Wii Remote. Such movements are limited to the upper body. Additionally, the Just Dance screen characters are voiceless, nameless, and “depicted with blank faces, promoting players to imagine they are occupying the screen dancers’ silhouettes” (14). Dance Central, on the other hand, functions through the Xbox Kinect interface, which uses a motion-sensing camera to track the player's movements. Because of the ability to assess the player's full body (albeit mainly frontally oriented), Dance Central advertises itself as creating a more “authentic” dance experience. Dance Central also displays “realistic” dance characters on screen with names and detailed physical features.
Outside of these differences, Miller articulates their two important similarities: “There are no conventional avatars” (14) and “These games evaluate players on the basis of their actions in the actual world, not the virtual world” (15, italics in original). In other words, the screen characters are separate from the players. Players are not represented on screen as avatars; instead, technology captures and assesses their actual movements. Such a dynamic raises questions as to who is controlling what, and vice versa (45–46). In typical video games, humans manipulate technology and screen characters. Just Dance and Dance Central flip the script, placing the game in the position of guiding the player.
Miller delves into issues of surveillance and spectatorship to better understand this technology-to-human training system, sparking larger questions about the role of “failed” dance as both embarrassing and fun. It requires courage to attempt new dance choreography. Although these games provide the opportunity for dance and play in private, they foster group participation. Players can take turns attempting the dance moves and even play side-by-side. Miller explains that a player typically faces the screen and dances while a group of friends observe the attempt. The possibility of failing, usually described by the gamers as “flailing” one's body around, creates a space of vulnerability (36). While this might cause humiliation, it offers a type of social bonding as well.
Interestingly, some players have expanded this bonding experience past their own living rooms, enlarging the game's communality. Players committed to refining their dance skills or showing their virtuosity will record themselves playing the game and post the video to YouTube. Miller looks at the virtual discussions such videos prompt and the nature of “public privacy,” the “ability to hide in plain view,” on which this practice thrives (55). Technology generates both distance and proximity, and dance video game players take advantage of this range to explore movements they might otherwise feel uncomfortable trying in a traditional dance class or out at a club.
This leads one to consider why a movement may or may not feel comfortable. Miller points to a relationship between one's comfort level and one's perception of the appropriate body type for a particular style of movement. A main component of these games allows players to embody movements that do not necessarily align with their self-identified gender or race (63). For instance, some male players complain about having to perform “girly” movements, while others take on the feminine repertoire as a challenge. Yet, outside of a handful linking their poor dance skills to “whiteness,” many players seem less inclined to mention issues of race regarding Just Dance and Dance Central (70–71). Miller, however, articulates the games’ highly racialized designs at different moments throughout the book. She shows the games’ ties to “African American, Latin Caribbean, and/or queer club cultures” via movement, music, voices, phrases, movement labels, and screen characters (65). She analyzes how the gaming systems stream these cultural resonances through a multisensory experience, one that “privilege[s] the idea that there are actual human bodies at the beginning and end of the chain of technical mediations” (149).
From a dance perspective, Miller's deconstruction of this human-technology-human chain is possibly the most fascinating part of her text (mainly chapters 4 and 5). Here, she considers the interconnectivity of archival practices, embodiment, dance pedagogy, choreographic labor, and dance copyright laws. Donning LED-covered suits, hired choreographers create steps and movement sequences for electronic screen dancers. Miller argues that the screen dancers act as the choreographers’ digital archives. She relates this idea to Harmony Bench's claim that “motion capture is inherently nostalgic, resolutely oriented toward the archive” and connected to “a rhetoric of loss” (Reference Bench2009, 35). However, through interviews with Dance Central choreographers Marcos Aguirre and Chanel Thompson, Miller reveals a “focus on transmission” rather than loss or nostalgia (170). Dance games archive the choreographer's expression of embodied movements with the goal of transmitting those experiences to others rather than saving them as memories. Aguirre and Thompson describe the process as a way to “choreograph-at-a-distance” (171) and share their dancing as a type of “gift” (173–74). Miller notes, “While this gift paradigm does not resolve the thorny questions about appropriation and commodification that dance games raise, it does shed light on how choreographers imagine their own positions in this process and their relationships to players” (174). Technology mediates the relationship between the choreographers and players on multiple fronts, including the actual games and social media. In addition to posting videos of themselves dancing to the games on YouTube accounts, fans follow dance game choreographers on Facebook and Twitter. These connections allow the choreographers to witness how players appreciate their “gift.” It also highlights the games’ pedagogical capacities.
Miller investigates the pedagogical aspects of Just Dance and Dance Central to decode what type of dance these games teach and exactly how they teach it. Part of the method, Miller claims, involves the “aural/kinesthetic experience of music” (93). Miller is an ethnomusicologist at Brown University and dedicates chapter 3 and some of chapter 4 to music's role in dance video game marketing and instructional practices. She posits that dance games teach players to listen to music like a dancer or choreographer (93). Players begin to encounter music in a new way, which brings up complex layers of embodiment: how music embodies cultural meaning, how dance embodies music, how players embody movements, how movements embody cultural meaning, how technology facilitates this process, and how game designers utilize this to create successful games and turn a profit.
Miller's analysis of embodiment practices inclusive of technology is incredibly rich throughout the entire text. This scholarly commitment to materialized lived experience resounds in her methodology as well. I recommend Playable Bodies to anyone looking for a solid model of virtual ethnography, which values one's interaction with technology as a complex embodied experience. With help from Tom Boellstorff (Reference Boellstorff2008), who wrote about the online virtual world Second Life, Miller disrupts the binary between “virtual” and “real” (21). Miller's DIY/DIA approach—“Do it yourself, and do it again”—prioritizes understanding the sensation of an activity through multiple attempts (22, italics in original). This works to dissolve the separation between virtual and real because it articulates the repetitive practices that turn the virtual into the visceral over time (22). Following the playful approach of Miller's final chapter, I will finish by writing: #technologydance #virtualtovisceral #embodiment #playablebodies #greatread.
