Gaming Gender

Virtual Embodiment as a Synaesthetic Experience

Abstract

Cultural and Post-Colonial Studies have long identified ocularcentrism, or the privilege of vision in culture and thought, as one of the prime causes behind the tendency to manipulate and categorize matter, bodies and meanings. This paper examines the power of computer-generated images to produce a kind of digital interaction which upsets gendered visual and listening conventions, such as those traditionally experienced in cinema. The article will take into consideration Valve’s Portal (2007), a first person videogame which proposes a ‘topological’ way of seeing relying on the synaesthetic working of the human sensorium. Images do not simply represent objects and places, but allow for countless configurations of space. The visual effort to confront with images of pure potential brings about an affective intensification of sensory faculties, especially of the senses of touch and hearing. As a consequence, images are endowed with tactile qualities which make possible the absorption and propagation of sound stimuli. In the game, the ‘haptic’ quality of images works together with acousmatic resonances of female voice in order to recreate a hybrid embodied condition which dissolves the male-female binarism and, in so doing, challenges gendered cultural assumptions and established spectatorial positions.