Of Associated Milieus

Recently as I was strolling through my neighborhood in Montreal, I came across a toy I saw that kids played with in the 1980s: the Cozy Coupe car with a bright yellow body and a red foot-powered chas-sis, a popular toy around that time. I remembered how the car’s cockpit allowed interfacing with familiar surroundings while giving a first sense of leg-powered, seated motility outside the house.In a contemporary videogame, by contrast, motility is delegated through the interface to avatars. One would be quick to think that the issue of delegation or that of the materiality of the interaction through the interface has gone from physical, bodily affect (rep-resented by the 1980s Cozy Coupe, among other toys) to that of an increasingly dematerialized network of programmed bodies in games. But the transition can’t be so easily reduced to this. For example, Ingmar Riedel-Kruse and his team at Stanford University have designed a new set of videogames, this time involving the use of living microorganisms instead of electronically programmed sprites or avatars.