Gestures are at the heart of cooking: cooks draw on embodied routines to produce food, and that production is itself seen as a gesture: of love, of competency, of self-expression. Gestures are also at the heart of the Cooking Mama series of games for the Nintendo DS handheld console: the player taps the screen to chop carrots, drags ingredients from benchtop to bowl, and describes circles with the stylus to mix ingredients together.
This paper examines the encoding of gesture into Cooking Mama. It argues that Cooking Mama is well situated for assessing the place of code in our life with media. It raises concerns about the encoding of techniques into an ever-finer array of technologies, and a simultaneous expansion of gaming into ever-wider arenas of everyday life. These games are situated within a history of cultural technologies through a reading of Luce Giard, in which the cybernetic flavour of Giard’s conception of knowledge and routine is enhanced. They also need to be understood, however, in context of the Nintendo DS platform and its specific affordances of touch and gesture. An analysis of the design and operation of the DS’s touchscreen interface complicates divisions between gesture and signal, and between bodily routines and computational codes. At the same time, the dependency of code upon an executor, whether human or non-human, complicates questions of determinacy.
Bringing together a platform analysis of the DS interface with culturalist accounts of practice and habit, I hope to show the usefulness of Cooking Mama for thinking of our life in and with media. The term “gestural economy,” ported from phonetics discourses, is proposed to account at once for the formal simplicity of Cooking Mama’s gestures and their abstraction from the familiar routines of everyday life.
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The Gestural Economy of Cooking Mama
1. THE GESTURAL ECONOMY
OF COOKING MAMA
Luke van Ryn
School of Culture and Communication
University of Melbourne
l.vanryn@student.unimelb.edu.au
@myspaceghost
27. THE GESTURAL ECONOMY
OF COOKING MAMA
Luke van Ryn
School of Culture and Communication
University of Melbourne
l.vanryn@student.unimelb.edu.au
@myspaceghost
Hinweis der Redaktion
Situate Nintendo DS as one of many technologies of gestureSpeak to Nintendo DS’s affordances and technicityCooking Mama and its gestural economy
cooking is “a language in which each society codes messages which allow it to signify a part at least of what it is” {Lévi-Strauss, quoted in \de Certeau, 1998 #362@180}.In using the word “gesture” Giard hopes to describe the activity of both the body and the mind, in a similar way to the way we think of Bourdieu’s habitus. Cooking is a mental process, but also one performed by the whole body.
Important to note that there is no evidence that one of these was every sold.This is the point to talk about Luce Giard: women feel that their work is being replaced by machines
The space of action is minimised: it is precisely between these two plates that play happens.
Open-and-shut gameplay, casual.
Thefranchisability of Cooking Mama relates to programming on the DS itself.We can easily substitute the sprites of cooking for gardening, crafting, camping and so on.
A gesture is a “typical movement trajectory,” which helps M move beyond thinking of phonology in terms of a “place of articulation” (1). Nick Clements also discusses linguistic economy, but in teams of “feature economy” (2003). Clements argues that “feature economy is a basic organisational principle of sound systems” (2003: 287). Languages tend to maximise the number of sounds that can be derived from their features (288). This economy need not be based on “parsimony,” the minimising of features (291). Nor is it the same as “representational economy,” which suggests that sounds should be active or distinctive to justify their place in a language (292).
Flusser: the “transfer of existence to the fingertips” (2011: 29).
Mention Ned: disciplining of workers.Chun: there is meant to be no gap between the instruction given and the action performed.
The encoding of gestures into Cooking Mama is economical. Secondly, gestures are not present in the game only to not be used. Lastly, and perhaps more critically, Cooking Mama’s economy reduces many different kinds of gestures into contacts with a two-dimensional plane across time. Cooking Mama could really be “Anything Mama” and play in the same way: simply by swapping the in-game images of food for some other context the game becomes about doing laundry, or writing a conference paper, or doing open-heart surgery.