Doing, re-doing and undoing: engaging dance as a context for game design

This practice based research project explores dance as a knowledgeable practice and methodological intervention within digital game design. Despite dance’s increasing prevalence within wider games culture, methods for approaching dance as a social practice remain conspicuously absent from game design research. Within the genre of dance videogames, the emphasis on archiving existing movement presents dance as primarily choreographic: inadvertently erasing the subjective, inter-embodied processes of expert dance practitioners. Within game studies, the readiness to understand play through a romanticised idea of dance muddies the specificity of dance when it does arrive within game practices. By embedding game making practices within ethnography, the collective embodied knowledge of expert dancers is foregrounded, allowing new games to be constructed from the discursive, imaginative and sensory practices through which dancers navigate, conceptualise and communicate their phenomenological experiences. These shared experiences coalesce in a style of gameplay I refer to as bodily adventures, which both represent and re-enable expert dance sensory practices and co-production. With an emphasis on dance as process — rather than performance or choreography — bodily adventures aim to make our relationship to our bodies, the bodies of others, and our sensory experiences in the moment visible and playable, allowing them to be generative of new dance exploration. Through this research, ethnography is presented as a critical approach to generating multiplayer, digital games through expert embodied practices that open game making to new lines of inter-embodied inquiry and account for complex and fleeting moments of collective sensory experience. The contributions of this research are broader than dance or ethnography, with the key areas of focus that emerged through practice revealed for fellow designers to attend to within their own game making. This approach cements the articulation of collective practice, expertise, and bodily ways of knowing as independently valuable to future game making practices.