Hearing (with) the body: enactive conception of body in auditory sensemaking in games

This paper discusses the contrast between the embodied and the representative accounts of bodily presence in the sound and music of videogames. The latter highlights the aspects of experience that are of representations instead of direct presence, such as when the pain of the avatar is interpreted from the audial cues rather than felt as such. The contemporary view of embodied cognition has questioned it as an overly mechanistic and dualistic conception of mind that neglects the bodily and active aspects of lived experience. The view of embodied cognition considers the experience of game as an inherently bodily and world-involving activity, replacing the fundamental role of mental representations with that of direct interaction between the player and the game. In this paper, we aim to provide an outline of an enactive approach to auditory experience of games focusing especially on the role of the body in experiencing and making sense of the gameworld. We relate our discussion to ideas such as player involvement in terms of immersion, the acoustic ecology of videogames and the bodily basis of sensemaking in sensorimotor contingencies between sound and action.