Playable Bodies: Dance Games and Intimate Media by Kiri Miller (review)

Technological advancements continue to redefine the ways we engage with others and the world around us. As Kiri Miller suggests in her ethnography, Playable Bodies: Dance Games and Intimate Media, technology has a lasting visceral effect on human experience. Miller's term "intimate media" expresses this complex relationship between technology and humans. Miller engages a posthuman lens that gives credence to technological and human roles and their overlap, paying close attention to two dance video game series: Just Dance and Dance Central.

Miller describes the effects of the games' technological designs on players' dance experiences. For example, Just Dance uses the Nintendo Wii video game console and tracks movements based on players' manual control of the Wii Remote. Such movements are limited to the upper body. Additionally, the Just Dance screen characters are voiceless, nameless, and "depicted with blank faces, promoting players to imagine they are occupying the screen dancers' silhouettes" (14). Dance Central, on the other hand, functions through the Xbox Kinect interface, which uses a motion-sensing camera to track the player's movements. Because of the ability to assess the player's full body (albeit mainly frontally oriented), Dance Central advertises itself as creating a more "authentic" dance experience. Dance Central also displays "realistic" dance characters on screen with names and detailed physical features.

Outside of these differences, Miller articulates their two important similarities: "There are no conventional avatars" (14) and "These games evaluate players on the basis of their actions in the actual world, not the virtual world" (15, italics in original). In other words, the screen characters are separate from the players. Players are not represented on screen as avatars; instead, technology captures and assesses their actual movements. Such a dynamic raises questions as to who is controlling what, and vice versa (45–46). In typical video games, humans manipulate technology and screen characters. Just Dance and Dance Central flip the script, placing the game in the position of guiding the player.

Miller delves into issues of surveillance and spectatorship to better understand this technology-to-human training system, sparking larger questions about the role of "failed" dance as both embarrassing and fun. It requires courage to attempt new dance choreography. Although these games provide the opportunity for dance and play in private, they foster group participation. Players can take turns attempting the dance moves and even play side-by-side. Miller explains that a player typically faces the screen and dances while a group of friends observe the attempt. The possibility of failing, usually described by the gamers as "flailing" one's body around, creates a space of vulnerability (36). While this might cause humiliation, it offers a type of social bonding as well.

Interestingly, some players have expanded this bonding experience past their own living rooms, enlarging the game's communality. Players committed to refining their dance skills or showing their virtuosity will record themselves playing the game and post the video to YouTube. Miller looks at the virtual discussions such videos prompt and the nature of "public privacy," the "ability to hide in plain view," on which this practice thrives (55). Technology generates both distance and proximity, and dance video game players take advantage of this range to explore movements they might otherwise feel uncomfortable trying in a traditional dance class or out at a club.

This leads one to consider why a movement may or may not feel comfortable. Miller points to a relationship between one's comfort level and one's perception of the appropriate body type for a particular style of movement. A main component of these games allows players to embody movements that do not necessarily align with their self-identified gender or race (63). For instance, some male players complain about having to perform "girly" movements, while others take on the feminine repertoire as a...