Programmed Moves: Race and Embodiment in Fighting and Dancing Videogames

UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Programmed Moves: Race and Embodiment in Fighting and Dancing Videogames Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5pg3z8fg Author Chien, Irene Y. Publication Date 2015 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Programmed Moves: Race and Embodiment in Fighting and Dancing Videogames by Irene Yi-Jiun Chien A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Film and Media and the Designated Emphasis in New Media in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Linda Williams, Chair Professor Kristen Whissel Professor Greg Niemeyer Professor Abigail De Kosnik Spring 2015 Abstract Programmed Moves: Race and Embodiment in Fighting and Dancing Videogames by Irene Yi-Jiun Chien Doctor of Philosophy in Film and Media Designated Emphasis in New Media University of California, Berkeley Professor Linda Williams, Chair Programmed Moves examines the intertwined history and transnational circulation of two major videogame genres, martial arts fighting games and rhythm dancing games. Fighting and dancing games both emerge from Asia, and they both foreground the body. They strip down bodily movement into elemental actions like stepping, kicking, leaping, and tapping, and make these the form and content of the game. I argue that fighting and dancing games point to a key dynamic in videogame play: the programming of the body into the algorithmic logic of the game, a logic that increasingly organizes the informatic structure of everyday work and leisure in a globally interconnected information economy. Games make bodily habituation to new forms of digital technology both intelligible and pleasurable by investing players in familiar racial, sexual, and national identifications. Programmed Moves explores how the bodily mastery cultivated in fighting and dancing videogames relies on and reproduces figurations of gendered and racialized technological mastery. The first half focuses on fighting games, beginning with how the earliest martial arts videogames emerge in the 1980s with the rise of Japan as a global economic power and game industry giant. I proceed in the next chapter to examine how videogames featuring transnational kung fu star Bruce Lee ambivalently figure Asian/Asian-American masculinity. In the second half of my dissertation, the focus shifts to dancing games. I critique how dance games that discard traditional game controllers in favor of full-body interfaces propel players into racialized physical motion. I end by showing how mobile, touchscreen rhythm games for the iPhone both recall and disavow the Chinese female factory laborers who touch each device before it is offered up for western consumption. My investigation of how racial difference becomes embodied in gameplay goes beyond critiques of racial stereotypes to understand how videogames produce politically urgent racial formations through actions and processes rather than just images. Programmed Moves thus points to the connections between technological and racial coding in videogames. 1 For Ben i Contents Acknowledgments iii Introduction iv 1 Mastering Moves in Early Martial Arts Videogames 1 2 Playing Bruce Lee 30 3 This Is Not a Dance 60 4 Nimble Hands, “Digital” Labor, and the Rhythms of 80 Touchscreen Gameplay Conclusion 98 Notes 103 Bibliography 118 ii Acknowledgments Thank you to my dissertation committee, Linda Williams, Kristen Whissel, Greg Niemeyer, and Gail De Kosnik, for their astute and generously shared guidance and encouragement throughout the highs and lows of the writing process. Thank you to my parents Jang-Yuan and Yin-Ling Chien, to my brother MinPont Chien, and to my parents-in-law Jim and Chris Coleman for their unconditional support. Deepest thanks to my partner Ben Coleman, whose indefatigable love, kindness, and patience made this possible. Thank you also to my children Winslow and Harriet for their boundless capacity to play. iii Introduction Writing in 1974, film scholar Stuart Kaminsky linked fighting and dancing when he called martial arts cinema a “ballet of violence.” For Kaminsky, the fighting in kung fu films was comparable to the dancing in musicals because both combat sequences and musical numbers dispense with editing and narrative in order to focus on the raw spectacle of bodily movement. The primary appeal of both martial arts film and musical is the fighter or dancer’s kinetic virtuosity, what Kaminsky calls the “myth of skill” embodied in the “agility and grace of the performer.” This arouses a bodily identification in the spectator “that is so strong that the myth persists often into the private life of the viewer,” who goes on to practice the cinematic performer’s infectious moves on street corners and at home. Kaminsky’s references to African-American youth adopting the kung fu moves of Asian film star Bruce Lee and to white Hollywood stars like Fred Astaire performing dance numbers in yellowface and blackface point to the volatile cross-racial identifications activated by fighting and dancing bodies onscreen. Fight scenes and dance scenes in cinema make the hyperbolically “superhuman” abilities of racialized bodies in motion visible and desirable.1 Videogames operationalize this “myth of skill” by allowing players to directly control the movements of the fighting and dancing bodies onscreen, transposing the skills of the dancer and fighter onto their own, and the computer’s, technical abilities. As in cinema, fighting and dancing in videogames foreground the prowess of racialized bodies in motion. But whereas the presence of the cinematic apparatus is suppressed in Bruce Lee and Fred Astaire films in order to focus the spectator’s attention on the “authentic” body of the performer, the presence of the computational apparatus in fighting and dancing videogames is actively called out as the co-producer of the sensational onscreen moves, both in the sense that the bodies on the screen are computationally rendered graphics rather than live bodies captured on film, and in the way that the player must skillfully operate the game controller in accordance with the game program in order to execute these moves. Insofar as cinema’s bodily responses seem to be involuntarily jerked out of spectators, cinematic bodies seem to act on us, forcing us into a visceral response. Videogames, on the other hand, while perhaps driven by the compulsion to imitate what is seen on cinema screens, are understood as equipping players to achieve bodily mastery. Players cultivate control over their bodies as they learn to master the moves required to succeed in the game. Fighting and dancing videogames train players to move with an agility and grace that directly equates the movements onscreen with the movements of the player, revealing at once the choreographic power of digital technology and the technicity of bodily movement. Identification with the computer technology itself becomes inserted into the play of cross-racial identifications, so that performing as an Asian fighter or black dancer is also performing as an Asian fighting machine or a black dancing machine, and racialized styles of movement register as routines which can be programmed, transferred, acquired, and executed. Programmed Moves examines the intertwined history and transnational circulation of two major videogame genres, martial arts fighting games and rhythm dancing games, as they have emerged in relation to but significantly distinct from iv cinematic genres. It argues that fighting games and dancing games are fundamentally linked by their translation of bodily movement into computer algorithm, so that the mastery of bodily movement exemplified by the martial arts and by dance becomes translated into technical mastery of the game program. Like all videogames, these games create a cybernetic circuit between player and computer. They require players to program their movements according to the structures of the game algorithm. But fighting and dancing games, with their virtuosic flying kick attacks and frenetically gyrating players, specifically foreground bodies, both onscreen and off, as the agent and instrument of this informatic technical proficiency. They strip down bodily movement into elemental actions like stepping, kicking, leaping, and tapping, and they make these both the form and content of the game. Fighting and dancing videogames position the player’s body as “in control” of the game machine and subject that body to discipline and control through the technological interpenetration of the player’s body with the algorithmic rhythms of the game machine. At the same time, the racialized bodies in these game genres operate as guarantors of authenticity against the dissimulations of computer-mediated experience. Fighting and dancing videogames show us the extent to which the pleasures of videogame play are founded on a bodily absorption of the increasingly informatic structure of our everyday lives. And they make bodily habituation to new forms of information technology pleasurable by enlisting familiar racial fantasies and desires while at the same time reconfiguring race and technology in relation to each other. The “peak flow” state of being so immersed in gameplay that we internalize its patterns and “become” the machine is experienced by players as both omnipotent control over the game and absolute submission to its logic.

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