Playable Bodies: Dance Games and Intimate Media [Paperback]

What happens when machines teach humans to dance? Dance video games transform players' experiences of popular music, invite experimentation with gendered and racialized movement styles, and present new possibilities for teaching, learning, and archiving choreography. Drawing on five years of research with players, game designers, and choreographers for theJust DanceandDance Centralgames,Playable Bodiessituates dance games in a media ecology that includes the larger game industry, viral music videos, reality TV competitions, marketing campaigns, and emerging surveillance technologies. Author Kiri Miller tracks the circulation of dance gameplay and related body projects across media platforms to reveal how dance games function as intimate media, configuring new relationships among humans, interfaces, music and dance repertoires, and social media practices.

Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Dance Games and Body Work
1. I See You, I See You!
2. Dancing Difference / Gaming Gender
3. Listening Like a Dancer
4. Practice, Practice, Practice
5. FTFO: Choreographic Labor
6. Intimate Media: Body Projects Megamix
Notes
References
Index

Playable Bodiesis a rigorous, innovative, beautifully written investigation of the relationship between dance, music, and the body in digital play. In addition to engaging, close analyses that are attuned to the interplay between affect, sociality, and technology, the book offers an invaluable model for digital ethnography. Whether or not you've playedDance CentralorJust Danceyou will learn something: about dance, about the body, about communities of practice, and about the social, aesthetic lives of the digital. Kiri Miller's DIY/DIA methodology alone is worth the price of the book. --Judith Hamera, author ofDancing Communities: Performance, Difference and Connection in the Global Cityand Professor of Dance at Princeton Univl“G