Embodied Metaphors: Exposing Informatic Control Through First-Person Shooters

Abstract

This article argues that the game player’s epiphany when regaining control after an aporia is similar to the metaphorical awareness of the connection between representation and meaning in other art forms. The player may experience what the article calls an embodied metaphor, a heightened sense of the linkage between two different orders of reality, real physical gesture and its on-screen representation. Beyond the aesthetic, this metaphor may also increase the player’s sensitivity to broader informatic or protocological control outside of the game world, a concept Alexander Galloway develops from Gilles Deleuze’s Societies of Control. The embodied metaphor attaches a kinetic materiality to the abstractions of contemporary informatic organization, making them, at least momentarily, concrete and tangible.