The strongest and most persistent of my pulls. It keeps appearing in my reading notes long before I recognised it as a position.
Use a cultural symbol people already know as the occasion for the experience to begin — for instance, a game controller as the device that drives the visuals.
— my own note while reading Tangible Affect (DIS ‘24)
A passport and a horse are universally legible cultural markers.
— my own note while reading A Fair Game? (TEI ‘24)
What is actually being claimed
A game controller is not a neutral input device. It arrives already carrying a set of expectations about what one is supposed to do with it: press, aim, move, compete, win. Handing someone a controller in a gallery does a lot of design work before any rule has been stated.
That places it in the same family as the passport and the horse in A Fair Game?, or the rope you have to pull — objects whose cultural legibility is the mechanism, not the decoration.
Where it connects
- Matches embodied metaphors as a design method — reasoning backwards from the sensation you want to the bodily action that produces it.
- Distinguishes my position from GAPPP: they ask how an instrument becomes a controller; I ask how a controller becomes an instrument. See game-engine-as-instrument.
- Alive in Phosphor, where the gamepad is the only thing a performer touches.
Not yet resolved
If the controller’s familiarity is the entry point, does that familiarity also cap the experience? An audience that knows what a controller is for may never discover what this one is for.