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David Parisi
David Parisi is an associate professor of emerging media in the Department of Communication at the College of Charleston. He is the author of Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) and coeditor of the New Media & Society special issue on “Haptic Media” (2017). His research on mediated tactility has appeared in a range of publications, including Game Studies, Logic Magazine, Senses & Society, Convergence, and Vice.
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Abstract
Haptics technologies, which promise to let us feel and touch in computer-generated worlds, present a seductive image of more seamless, natural, and embodied interactions with computers. Such devices, however, have been long on promise and short on delivery. After its 1997 debut in Sony’s DualShock controller, dual-motor rumble quickly became the dominant mode of adding touch sensations to computing, using vibrations sent through the hands to represent on-screen events and objects. Frequently denigrated as an imperfect instantiation of haptics that will inevitably be left behind with the rise of more robust feedback systems, rumble has nevertheless endured for more than twenty years, in spite of repeated challenges from products that offer more complex and nuanced modes of touch feedback. Consequently, I suggest that rumble represents the successful and impactful domestication of haptics technology more generally, with its stability across consoles and across successive generations of console controllers smuggling a value-laden model of technologized touch into the home. Through a look back at some of the foundational promises made around haptics, I show how rumble’s interweaving of video game history and the history of haptics implicates games in a broader set of issues around the commercialization, disciplining, and legal regulation of tactility by media interfaces.