Carlin Wing, "Bounce: Balls, Walls, and Bodies in Games and Play" (MIT Press, 2026)

Summary

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New Books Network: Carlin Wing on "Bounce: Balls, Walls, and Bodies in Games and Play"

Host: Rudolf Inders
Guest: Carlin Wing
Date: March 11, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this engaging episode of the New Books Network’s Game Studies channel, host Rudolf Inders interviews Carlin Wing about her book Bounce: Balls, Walls, and Bodies in Games and Play (MIT Press, 2026). Wing, blending her background as a professional squash player, artist, and media scholar, discusses how focusing on the simple act of bounce allows us to draw connections across games, sports, technology, and culture. The conversation delves into the material, historical, technological, and experiential dimensions of bounce, inviting listeners to rethink the meaning of movement, play, and spectatorship.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Carlin Wing’s Background & Path to Bounce

• Carlin introduces herself as a former professional squash player turned artist and scholar.
  • She traces the genesis of her interest in bounce to her years “chasing a really small ball around a box” (01:26), which led to performance art and, ultimately, academic research.
  • Her desire to follow “the historical threads that the small rubber ball had me wanting to follow” (02:14) led to a PhD at NYU, and research that ranged from archives to sports courts across Europe.

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Why Foreground Bounce?

• Wing focuses on bounce as movement and connection, rather than play as an abstract concept.
  • “Bounce is actually…an enactment of a way that things connect to each other…a mechanism that lets me put histories next to each other.” (03:37)
  • She seeks to “think about bounce in games,” in media, and as “foundational” in animation and computing. (04:15)
  • The historical periods explored in the book are intentionally promiscuous, jumping between centuries and contexts to make room for connections across domains. (05:37)

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Following the Bouncing Ball: Rethinking Histories

• Bounce travels between sports, animation, physics, and games, revealing overlooked relationships.
  • Video game scholars and sports studies historically “[have] very little conversation between the two” (08:34). Bounce as an analytic allows one to “move across these contexts or just show how there’s core interactions that have traveled from one domain to the other.” (09:25)
  • Comparing “pong” to tennis or table tennis makes their differences and shared logic more visible. (09:12)

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Structure of the Book

The Three Kinds of Bounce

• The book is structured around three main facets:
  • 1. The Matter of the Ball
    • Focuses on materiality (e.g., rubber, surfaces) and how the properties of balls shape play and culture.
    • Example: The introduction of rubber transformed tennis, changing how bodies engaged with play (11:27).
  • 2. Virtuality of Bounce
    • Explores bounce in animation and computing; how bounce gets translated into virtual space.
    • Notably, bounce is “foundational to how movement is produced on screens” (14:17).
    • Animation figures out movement by depicting bounce; computer graphics begin by programming bounce.
  • 3. Bounded Spectacle
    • Examines contemporary digital games (EA FIFA/EA Sports FC) and the ancient Mesoamerican game Ulama.
    • Considers myth, spectacle, and how bounce mediates bodies and spectatorship across cultures (16:20).

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Juxtaposing Traditions: From Ulama to FIFA

• Bounce shapes bodies, risk, spectacle, and meaning—differently depending on the context.
  • Ulama: Played with a nine-pound solid rubber ball hit with the hip, bruise-inducing and physically transformative. “You just got used to having these supernovas on your body because the impact…You have to learn to harden your body.” (19:30)
  • EA FIFA / Sports FC: Bounce rendered through digital motion capture (mocap), with bodies hybridized—“the game will call up whatever movement is kind of most appropriate for the next move…from different bodies” (22:25).
  • Yellow tennis ball (1970s): The shift from white to optic yellow to accommodate color television is an example of bounce designed for visibility and spectatorship, not just play (26:40).
    • “It matters to spectators…we’re dealing with television broadcast…to keep eyes on the game.” (26:54)

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The Feel of Bounce: Embodiment and Game Design

• Bounce is felt bodily—through timing, resistance, elasticity—and is central to game ‘feel’.
  • Referencing Steve Swink and the notion of “game feel,” Wing notes that pleasure in games often lies in “feel,” a quality that is “fundamental no matter what activity you’re doing, whether the embodiment is stillness” or frenetic energy. (28:42)
  • Describing the challenge for students and scholars alike:
    • “It’s where you actually can’t tease apart the physiological, the physical and the feeling. Feel is feel and feelings.” (34:57)
  • The challenge of language: Describing the feel of game power or physics often puts students at a loss for words—even as these feelings are central to game experience (33:40).

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Takeaways & Future Directions

• Bounce as an analytic opens up new avenues for game studies and play research.

  • Carlin hopes readers will leave with “the complexity of play and of games and of histories that always sit next to each other” (37:36).
  • She encourages experimentation: “This is an experiment in doing a history of an interaction…what would happen if other people did their own experiments?” (39:03)
  • The meaning and materiality of play objects are entwined with histories of delight, exploitation, and global interconnection.

  Quote:

  • “The really simple object you have in your hand is both a total delight… and a heartbreaking material and a foundational material.” (38:07)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (with Timestamps)

• On following the ball:
  “I began doing writing. And the writing felt a little thin, like I felt like I had learned how to make photographs and videos. I knew how to make art objects to some degree, but I didn’t…have the training to follow the historical threads that the small rubber ball had me wanting to follow.” — Carlin Wing (01:45)

• On juxtaposing histories:
  “Bounce is actually… an enactment of a way that things connect to each other.” — Carlin Wing (03:40)

• On embodiment in Ulama:
  “[In Ulama] you just got used to having these supernovas on your body because the impact… you have to learn to harden your body.” — Carlin Wing (19:46)

• On game feel:
  “For me, the pleasure, like, where pleasure lies in games is in feel… That is kind of like the site of pleasure—this is showing you the physics of this world and that world.” — Carlin Wing (29:54)

• On the challenge of describing feeling:
  “It’s where you actually can’t tease apart the physiological, the physical and the feeling. Feel is feel and feelings.” — Carlin Wing (34:57)

• On history as an experiment:
  “This is an experiment in doing a history of an interaction.” — Carlin Wing (39:03)

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Segment Timestamps

• Introduction & Carlin’s background: 00:04 – 03:16
• Foregrounding bounce as method: 03:16 – 05:37
• Domains and histories of bounce: 07:26 – 10:56
• Book structure & analytic lens: 11:07 – 17:22
• Juxtaposing traditions—Ulama, FIFA, tennis: 19:02 – 27:37
• Feeling and describing bounce & game feel: 28:18 – 36:50
• Takeaways for scholars and designers; closing thoughts: 37:19 – 41:05

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Tone and Style

Carlin Wing’s approach is exploratory, energetic, and philosophical, often bringing in her embodied experience as an athlete and her interest in materials, histories, and sensations. The discussion ranges from technically precise to humorously self-reflexive, always committed to understanding play “in all its complexity and contradiction,” and to experimenting with new ways of writing histories.

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Recommended for:
Game studies scholars, designers, and anyone curious how a study of something as simple as “bounce” can illuminate the layered cultural, technological, and bodily histories of games and play.

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Transcript

[A]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[B]

Hi everyone and welcome back to New Books and Game Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. On this channel we explore new scholarship that unpacks what games mean, how they are designed, how they are played, and how they resonate far beyond the screen. I'm your host, Rudolf Inders, professor for Game Studies at the University of Applied Sciences, Neu Ulm, Germany. Now, before we get started, if you enjoy the show, please consider leaving us a five star review on Apple Podcasts or the very platform of your choice. It really helps others discover us. And of course, please feel free to share this episode with your community or gaming groups. And now let's dive into today's conversation. I am delighted to welcome Carlyn Wing, who joins us to talk about her book Balls, Walls and Bodies in Games and Play, published by MIT Press. Carlin, welcome to the show.

[A]

Rudolph, thanks so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.

[B]

To begin, could you please briefly introduce yourself and your research background? What sparked your interest in something as seemingly simple and yet surprisingly complex as the bouncing ball?

[A]

Well, so the background or kind of how I landed in this very strange and far ranging project is that I was originally a squash player. So it came in part from chasing a really small ball around a box for many, many years of my life and being absolutely thrilled by that. I played professionally for a while, actually including living in Holland for a couple years and playing eerie to visie and sometimes coming over your way to play some German league. And so that, that then when I went back to when I had to kind of think like, okay, what am I going to do after this career? I went back for an art degree and I started making art about this game that I played. I was doing performances, I was making photographs. And then I began doing writing. And the writing felt a little thin, like I felt like I had learned how to make photographs and videos. I knew how to make art objects to some degree, but I didn't understand how or I didn't have the training to follow the historical threads that the small rubber ball had me wanting to follow. So I got really interested in the history of the game as a British game that spread with the British Empire and that like this one interest in the game of Squad Wash and this hollow rubber ball and like, oh, how do you make hollow rubber balls? Oh, what's the material of rubber anyway? What's that history just expanded into this massive project and so I ended up going for a PhD in media media culture and communication at NYU. So the technique, the kind of formal research, background and training is from them. And they let me, yeah. Continue to wander all over the place, into archives and into court tennis courts around Europe, and slowly find my way through this project.

[B]

Great. Now, one of the book central moves is to shift attention away from play as an abstract concept and toward bounce as a concrete interaction that cuts across games, sports, media and technologies. So why did you feel it was important to foreground bounce itself as an object of analysis?

[A]

I think one reason is that one of my core interests is movement, like methods of movement and that cutting across. I'm really interested in the cutting across. I really have a deep respect for people who kind of choose a domain and kind of stick with it. I think there's something incredibly, I mean, just necessary in that type of research. And it's never been what's drawn me. I've always been interested in how does this history sit next to that history. How does, like, what does this story over here have to do with that story over there? And so balance is actually, I mean, as a mechanism is kind of like an enactment of a way that things connect to each other. So I think that's one reason that when I was kind of coming to decision points, like, am I going to do a cultural history of squash? Am I going to do a project that thinks like a genealogy of court games, which this sort of is. But it got much more expansive. I would always kind of say, like, oh, I like, I feel a little tight in here because I want to be able to include, like, I want to think about electronic games. And I don't want. I didn't want to preclude that. It made it a little. The project a little unwieldy. But let me do that kind of putting histories next to each other thing that was really at the core of the project. And let me kind of make the movement of bounce, like, bounce both as an object, obviously, in the book, it's the central object. And I use it to. I can kind of think about bounce in games. I can think of it in different kinds of media where it turns out to be really foundational, like animation and computing. And then a larger thing I draw from that is something about how we move through history and what our relationships are to it.

[B]

Yeah, perfect. I was just so. I was really stumped by this movement. We're talking out of this. This box comparison really got me. Yeah.

[A]

Oh, like. Yeah. Well, just. I mean, I think because I rely so much in my. In my book, I mean, I really. It's a Very. It used to be. The title used to be Bounce A History of Balls, Walls and Gaming Bodies. And then I got nervous about the word history because it's such a promiscuous history. Like, it's so not proper that, you know, where it's like, here I'm gonna talk about, like, the early modern era for a chapter, and then I'm gonna talk about, you know, the 20th, mid 20th century. And then I'm gonna talk about, like, late. Like late 20th into the 21st century. And that was super fun for me. And there's a real limit or there. You know, there's. There's things that. That allows me to do and things that. That gives the project that are really exciting, and there's things that. That made it really hard for me to do, which is like, stay with all of the context. So when I was writing the court, that there's a chapter on court tennis, which is the early modern era form of tennis, that the game that we're familiar with now, this is the game that kind of. It developed out of. And when I was first writing that chapter, I was just immersed in that history. Like I. The history of that era. I had to read so much. I was really aware of that I was missing languages that I should have had in order to really, like, including German. Um, that. No, it would. It would have been. You know, there was a kind of rigor that I could have brought to it that I. That I was really aware of not being able to bring to my understanding of the history because of. I wanted to not just be with that for the book, because I wanted to be with that. And then I also wanted to write about this other thing and also this other thing. So I have. Yeah, I have a lot of gratitude to the people who, like Hoerner Gelmeister, who wrote the cultural history of tennis. It's such a tour de force and like, thank God that book exists so that I didn't have to write it and so that I could write this one.

[B]

Yeah, I like that. Now, bounce takes us across a remarkable range of domain, from ancient early modern ball games to animation, physics, material science, and digital games, just as we have mentioned before. So how did you following the bouncing ball across these different contexts help you rethink the history of. Of games and play?

[A]

I mean, so one thing that it let me do, I was very aware because I was coming to this project as an athlete who was in some ways interested in a very specific bounce, like literal material bounce of a squash ball. A squash ball for those who don't know is a very small, hollow, usually black rubber ball, although white, when it's, you know, being played on a court, glass court, so that it can be visible to the players and to the television cameras. So I was really interested in this specific bouncing ball. And what I found, like, as I kind of began going into these different histories of games and play was in part, like the kind of, okay, video games are over here. Like, video game scholars have really spent very little time thinking about sport, especially before esports. Now, I would say there are many more scholars. Mia Consalvo and Emma Makowski and Henry Lowood, and many people have done great work on sport, but it's still a relatively small part of game studies. It's not really the core interest. It's not the core. It's not kind of what most video game players imagine they're up to. And similarly, sports studies is over here thinking they have nothing to do with game studies, just on their way, thinking about football, thinking about how the game relates, the games relate to nationalism, thinking about the cultural histories, the political economies, how spectacle works, how it interacts with TV broadcasts. But there was really very little conversation between the two. So one thing that following the bouncing ball did was it let me move across these contexts or just show how there's core interactions that have traveled from one domain to the other, and there's real transformation. Like, pong is a fundamentally different game than tennis and then table tennis, even though it was based on those. But I can then look and be like, okay, what was bounce? Like, what was bounce in modern tennis? Or what is it? And what's bounce in pong? And then I can kind of, in a way, begin to describe what's particular about each of these games, because looking at the two together lets me see their differences really clearly. So that's. That's one thing that it helped me. That one way that it helped me rethink the history is it helped me

[B]

kind of draw them together for our listeners. It's really a tragedy that you can't. This is not video, but the movement of your hands and arms is so vivid, and it's really great to see that there's something going on. So much energy in that. That tiny box. We talk to each other right now. It's great.

[A]

It's true. It's a box. Well, now I really wish there was video because then I could show off my ball collection, which is I pick up balls off the streets of la. Or I was. I haven't been doing it recently. It Was that was a kind of art project that was accompanying the final writing of the book. But I have these great global stress balls which I've been thinking about a lot lately. It feels these feel like real objects for our current moment.

[B]

So tell me, which country would you crush right now? That's another don't. We're not getting. No game is not there at the end, right?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So you're right. The book is structured around three different kinds of bounds. The matter of the ball, the virtuality of bounds, and what you call bounded spectacle. Could you briefly walk us through the structure and explain how these categories help organize such a wide ranging history?

[A]

Yeah, sure. Thanks for that question. Yeah, so the originally the three part structure, the original three part structure still haunts the title. It was the Balls, Walls and bodies was going to be the three part structure. And then as I was working on it, I realized that it wasn't like they weren't separating out so neatly, which of course makes sense because I argue that bounce is a property distributed amongst things that you might think it belongs to the ball. And with rubber balls it really like the ball kind of owns a lot of it or claims a lot of it, but the bounce is always distributed like that. It's always dependent on the interaction between the different components in the environment. And so I realized that I needed a different structure. And so instead of those balls, walls and bodies, I start with the matter of the ball, which is really. It's about materiality. So this section, each section has a pair of chapters. And the pairing is important. And what I do in the pairing, each of the pairs has a different relationship to each other. That lets me think about different historical relationships. So the first pair is court tennis, which I mentioned earlier, which is the early iguide Palme. It's the earliest form of tennis. And then the second chapter is about our modern form of tennis. And so there the relationship between the two chapters is a genealogical one, one game originates the other. And I can kind of think about how. So in the Matter of the Ball is about materiality. And chapter two starts with the introduction of rubber to tennis. Before the earliest version of the game, it was before there was rubber on the European continent. And so that really changes how bodies move around the ball. It really changes like what the game is. And so I think through the materiality of rubber, I also think through the materiality of the surfaces a little bit. And the idea of the matter of the ball is not just. It's like I'm a sucker for rubber. So it is absolutely about the materiality. And I'll talk, I'm realizing, I think I'll talk a little later about a little more about that later. But it is also about how that materiality matters. So there's like what the materiality is, what the ball is made of. And then how what the ball is made of matters. Like, what are the consequences of that materiality? And some of them might be kind of forward moving. Like, what does that mean for the players? What does that mean for the spectators? Like, how does it condition the game? But part of what I'm attending to is also like the conditions of production. So asking that question is how we allow in a question about the conditions of production of the materials that we play with.

[B]

All right.

[A]

Oh, right, sorry. This is the three part structure virtuality of Bounce. So the second pair of chapters is really the pivot of the book. This is a chapter on the history of bounce in animation and one on the history of bounce in computing. So this is what happens when this rubber bounce is translated into virtual space and the. And the kind of different ways that it gets taken up. And this was something that was a real surprise to me in the project. I think when I was originally starting it, I kept. I was like in a media studies department, but I didn't really understand. I was like, is this really media studies? I mean, yes, in the sense that rubber is media and bodies are media. But I think one of the things that really surprised me was to realize that bounce is actually really foundational to the domains of animation and computing. That it's at least for computing and it's the computer graphics side, but it's really foundational to how movement is produced on screens. And so it kind of became. Was almost an accident that the real center and pivot of the book is a real media studies argument about how bounce is fundamental, but in different ways. That animators start with kind of representing a ball and figure out how to get it in motion as a way. As a way to learn how to animate. And what computer programmers do is program bounce. And then you end up with a ball on the screen. So it's kind of an opposite direction. These two chapters have a chiastic relationship to each other and then finally bounded spectacle. This is about EA FIFA, these two chapters. One is about EA FIFA's. Well, now I guess it's. What is it? Sports FC. EA Sports FC? Yeah. Because FIFA and EA had a falling out. But EA Sports FC is the longest running soccer simulation. It was started in 1993. And the most profitable. So it's just this massively important object in game studies or in kind of video game history. It's the most popular and most profitable sports video game. And so I compare that to the Mesoamerican ball game Ulama, which has been around for about 3,000 years. And I make an argument that about FIFA being a kind of global spatially dominant imagination, mythological in the present, but actually so far at least fairly short lived comparatively. And then Ulama making this cosmological and kind of mythological claim across history. And Ulama is played with a solid rubber ball and you can only hit it with your hip and it's a very physical game. And so I think between the two types of bounce and feel in these games, and I'm really thinking about myth the way Roland Barthes uses the term. So thinking about the kind of cultural ideologies that are, that are, that are kind of present or being enacted in both of these forms of play

[B]

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[A]

Wow, that Might be from the book because I use FIFA a lot because I'm writing about it from before the switch.

[B]

Oh, see. So what do these comparisons reveal about how bound shapes, bodies, spectatorship and meaning? Well, that's a mean question, by the way. It's really, it's a huge one. What did I think? I'm just.

[A]

The note that I wrote, the note that I wrote was like, this is a big question.

[B]

Yeah, I just thought, wow, it's getting bigger and bigger.

[A]

It was actually really fun to think with. So I actually, I really appreciated thinking, thinking through it. Maybe I'll work backwards this time. So I'll work back from the bounded spectacle. So if I'm talking about ea, FIFA and Ulama as bounded spectacles, just in the sense that there's spectacles and they, you know, they're bounded in the sense that they're games and sports. And then there's other ways that boundary is being played with in that concept. But they, so, so how is, like how, how are the bodies at stake here? How does balance, how does the balance shape the bodies in Ulama? As I was just describing, where the ball is, a nine pound solid rubber ball, it, I mean, it can very literally. Well, it shapes your body and it will bruise you if you're learning to play. There's a really great quote I have from one of the players here in la. I was working with a team that's reviving the game here in Los Angeles and that's part of a larger network called adripeme, that's based in Mexico and Belize. So the group here is the San Fernando team. And he described, he compared the bruises that he had when he was first learning to a supernova that you just like, you just got used to having these supernovas on your, on your body because the impact. You have to learn to harden your body. In this ways, it's similar to the principles of court tennis, except there you have a racket being the wall, here your body is the wall. And you have to learn how to make your body into a really tight wall so that it won't absorb the impact of the ball. And instead it will kind of, the ball will take its own momentum back out, you know, so your, your hip will just direct the ball. It will become like a hand. That which another player said would happen over time. That was, that was, I think, yeah, that was maybe one or two sessions before I quit trying to learn myself and realized maybe my cask with this game was to write. So, I mean, so there's a Literal. I mean in sports, the way, the way bounce shapes bodies and the way the conditions of any given game shapes the body is very direct or overt. Right. Like, you know that the volleyball players at the Olympics are all going to be like, you know, however, like the tallest they could possibly be, you know. You know, like bodies are kind of like filtered and selected for their capacity for these specific set of activities. Really kind of whether it's a ball game or not. But so in this case the bounce is kind of you're seriously injured and Ulama, the spectacle part, like how does it have no comparisons or reveal how balance shapes bodies and spectacle? It's really that it's kind of facilitated. The balance is kind of enrolled in the shaping of the players bodies and then also the spectator's relationship to the players. So maybe actually I was going to talk about the MOCAP in EA FIFA, but then I also want to talk about tennis and the yellow tennis ball because that's a really good example for spectatorship, but for first for promotion capture. So motion capture I think of, I talk about as a form of balance because the way it's produced is that you bounce light off of a moving body and then that's brought back in to a software program that generates these movement clips that go into a motion capture library. And what's interesting about motion capture is that it doesn't care who you are and it really doesn't even keep you your movements together as yours. It doesn't care whose movement it's captured. And you're broken up into these little pieces. And the way a character movement is produced is that the game will call up whatever movement is kind of most appropriate for the next move in the game. So that might come from like, let's say you and I were both had our movements in a mocap library. It might take like one movement from me, followed by one movement from you, followed by one movement from someone else. And that will all. And that will produce the like that will read as a single character's smooth movement across the screen in a game. So it's really and right. This is really. I find that really fascinating. Amanda Phillips has written about that in some great ways. But because the mocap libraries at EA and at lots of the AAA game companies have had a drastic asymmetry in regards to the kinds of bodies they've captured. They've captured almost entirely male bodies. The task of bringing women players into the game gets described as a technical challenge, by which they mean an economic challenge, because it's way More expensive to build new skeletons and record a bunch of new mocap data with a range of different bodies than it is to just keep working, like, put a ponytail on the skeleton that you already had. But then you're like, why does this look wrong? So that's one way that's like a very. You get to see in attending to how bounce, shape, spot, what the comparisons. Let me see is I'm like, oh, over here, it's about my relationship to risk with Uma. Like, it might be my relationship to risk. It might be like some kind of training tied to my singular body. Over here, I get to think about hybrid bodies, like these hybrid bodies that are kind of produced as coherent, like characters in video games, which I think has some really. Yeah, there's just important. There's an important politics there to, like, how we imagine something as singular and coherent. And especially in sports, where the gender part of that chapter is about the FIFA finally bringing women into the game in 2016, some decades and decades after they had started, because, you know, due to pressure and really, I think probably due to the markets, they saw it opening up, opening up for them. But until until then, it had been impossible to imagine that there could be women players in. In this video. In this video game in. In a form and a medium that, like, actually really doesn't care. Like, it relies on us to do the gender, us as viewers and players to do the gendering, kind of project that onto the characters. I wanted to touch on one other example. There's so many good examples. I was going to talk about the bouncing ball cartoons, but in the tennis chapter, one way we see how bounce both kind of changes, like shapes bodies. In a way that really is about spectatorship is in the early 1970s, the International Tennis Federation makes a rule change and they say, okay, the ball is going to be the ball, which has only been allowed to be white. It's this, you know, it's this very conservative sport. It's this, you know, you're supposed to, like, wear all white on court. It's very print proper. And they say, actually, like, we're going to make the ball. It can still be white, but it can also be optic yellow. And that was a decision that was made to make the ball visible for television viewers along, like, in step with the introduction of color television. And that just got me thinking about how the balance of the ball matters. It doesn't just matter to the player. It of course matters to players who need to hit the ball, but it matters beyond that. You know, its Visibility, it matters to spectators. And then that of course, like it's, that's suddenly we're in. We're dealing with television broadcast and we're dealing with the importance of its visibility. To like to keep eyes on the game, you need to have the game be the part of the game, be visible. And so it matters to sponsors and so forth. Does that answer it was a really hard question. Yeah. So many notes for it.

[B]

Especially last part reminds me that I've just seen Marty supreme last week.

[A]

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

And he was exactly talking about this. Right. Because I'm a very avid table tennis player myself. So this whole discussion was very. It motivated me to look deeper into table tennis history actually, and what he was referring to in the movie. Let's change the color of this tiny, tiny ball because it's easier to spot and to see because it's such a fast sport, you know. Right. So enough of me, myself and I and my movie habits.

[A]

So no, I like bring them in. I think it's good for the conversation.

[B]

But you also pay close attention to how bounce feels to timing, elastically, resistance, responsiveness. And this is very interesting for game designers and scholars alike. So why is this feel of bounce? We often talk about game feel as well when we talk about game design research. But such a critical but often under theorized aspect of games.

[A]

Yeah. And so of course, Steve Swink is the person who kind of popularized the term game feel. And I was really thinking with his work, especially in the EA FIFA chapter. Yeah. Why? This was an interesting question because I was like, why? I was like, is it under theorized? And if so, why. You know, and hasn't. You're right, it hasn't been completely unaddressed, but you are right that it gets less attention. And I wonder what that has to do with a kind of ambivalence about the embodiment and comportment that comes with playing electronic games. You know, on the one hand there's this argument that games are interactive and so they're supposed to, they're supposed to be like much more active than the presumably passive activity of watching television or, or reading a book or something like that where you're not making. And there the action is seen. Like if you're making choices, that's seen as action. The position of a sports person. It's wild to think that like, oh, this is interactive, but like, but you're kind of sitting fairly still with your body. I mean, so. So I think one answer to question, like, why am I interested in It. And, you know, why do I think it's so crucial is because I think embodiment and comportment are fundamental. No matter what activity you're doing, whether that means whether the embodiment is stillness, whether there's a kind of, like, concentration of your. I'm really. I'm really interested in phenomenology. So it's kind of like when you're playing is like, are you. If you drew a portrait of you playing in a kind of. I don't know if you know, Maria Lassnage's paintings. Really, really wonderful painter. Lots of self portrait. Lots of self portraits. But a self portrait is a very loose, like, expansive term for her. So I'm imagining, like, if I'm playing, how much of me, how big would my hands be in that self portrait? And how big, like, what's the loop? Or what parts of my body are in what, you know, are kind of alive or attentive and what are like doing support work? So this is. This is a kind of funny way to talk about this. But it. I really. For me, the pleasure, like, where pleasure lies in games is in feel. And I think really good games, the way Swink talks about it, attend to this and really figure out how the relationship between the figure and ground or the object and the sound work to kind of give players a sense of physics and gravity, like a sense of feel through their body. So that if you're playing Sonic or you're playing Angry Birds, and you'll notice that both the games I referenced are fairly old, and they usually involve, like, spinning balls or projectiles of some kind. So we know where my tendencies lie. But you know that that's a real axis for pleasure. It's not the only access, right? There's really different axes that have to do with narrative or that have to do with kind of puzzle challenge. Many, many in different kinds of games. But for this kind of game, for bounce games, that is kind of like the site of pleasure is like, this is showing you the physics of this world and that world. You know, if I'm a sport, if I'm out in the world playing squash, I'm dealing with kind of the specific situated conditions of the particular court. Am I in New Hampshire playing in a basement court in the winter? That's concrete. It's freezing. You can barely get the ball warm enough to, like, bounce in order to be able to get it. Or am I playing in Colorado at altitude where, like, the ball is just flying all over the place, you know, on a sprung court where you know, I'm kind of bouncing a bit. It's really, really different in video games. What's so magical like and this is true of animation, whether it's interactive or not, but is that you're, you're not restricted to the physics of Earth. You know, you think there are all kinds of rules, there are all kinds of different possibilities. And so I think why it needs, why it should be theorized and what like attending to timing and elasticity and resistance and responsiveness does is kind of key us into the aspects of the game that really give it its aliveness. And I did like that doesn't like aliveness. Both might be a character that has the illusion of life in the kind of animation sense, but really the world's aliveness in a kind of vibrant matter sense in a video game world. What does that block do? Oh, it kind of like shimmers that way or like that one I can kind of break through or that one I can. It has a little hidden secret behind it if I just hit it exactly the right way. Yeah, I don't know how much that answers why it's unaddressed. Because what I should say is I don't know. I think it's what's interesting.

[B]

I was thinking about this right now why I chose this question now. I think it has also something to do with my enormous frustration from teaching last semester when we, when I was talking to my students about this term game feel. And also I think, I assume, let's say I assume that this has. They're having massive difficulties. Maybe it's a semantic challenge, but they really are lacking the words to describe even their this game feel thing. So they're talking about, for example, this feels like a power fantasy. And then I ask again, so what does it mean to be powerful in your fantasy? How does this feel? And it's end of discussion basically because there's so few words to really describe what is going on and it's a difficult task and there's no question. But they also lack the ambition of finding these words, describing and finding terms and describing these. This feel. So maybe that was the, that was also part of my frustration so that I made this point so strong.

[A]

That's really helpful because that helps me kind of identify something. I think I used the word pleasure like it's an axis of pleasure. You, you're describing, you know, kind of the power fantasy, you know, like what does it feel like to have power? And so then that's not just about describing so called physical or physiological sensation. Let alone, like, coming up with language to describe the simulation of physical sensation that you're experiencing, then as a player, which is already difficult, like, I definitely have. I got feedback, you know, where it's like, you're using feel, but you're describing something that's audio, visual. And there's already, like, a lot of difficulty in kind of bringing that term to something that's just audio visual. But I think what you're helping me understand is that it's. It's also, like, why it's interesting and important, and also why it's challenging is it's where you actually can't tease apart the. You can't tease apart the physiological, the physical and the feeling. Like, the feel is feel is feel and feelings. Like. And feelings are. If you have to, then kind of also talk about how you feel. That gets real, you know, that gets real real fast. You're like, oh, is it because I want. Right? Oh, what does it mean that I want power? Just feel. Do I feel? Is they're supposed somatic? Like, I think it's so useful to describe that kind of stuff in somatic terms. Like, I wonder if you asked your students, like, what comes up for you? Like, what are you. Do you notice anything in your throat? Or do, you know, like, do you notice anything in your body? Like, is. Is it an energy? Is it a shrinking. Is it a. Like a. Like. Or like, real, like, eager, like what? So I think it would register as a somatic sensation that then we would in. Nor in, you know, language. Language often try to put into terms of, like, desire or aversion or, you know, where psychoanalysis could help us out.

[B]

Maybe that's so funny, because even I just take a look at you and I see how you're moving when you talk about this. And my students, they. They would say, well, Mr. Innes, this is not a therapy session here. All right, no more feelings talk. Let's get back to Design School of Applied Science, right?

[A]

We've worked very hard to arrive at a place where we will not be asked these questions.

[B]

Now, finally. So for scholars, students, and designers listening, what do you hope readers will take away from Bounce? How might thinking with balls, walls and bodies open up new directions for game studies and play research?

[A]

I mean, I hope. Well, I hope they. I hope they enjoy it. I do. I do care quite a lot about pleasure, and I hope that they like that it's. That it's a pleasure to read and. Or other things. That it's challenging, that it's exciting, that it's scary. I mean there are parts of it that are not meant to be fun and that are meant to be quite challenging and serious and asking us to think of like what our forms of play have to do with really stark forms of oppression and exploitation. So I hope they. One of the things I hope they take away is the complexity of play and of games and of histories that always sit next to each other. That you know, the really simple object you have in your hand is both a, you know, a total delight. The like at the end of the book I write about my. My little boy and him watching him kind of start to play with rubber objects. And I'm thinking like, and there's. It's such a magical material for him and it's a material that I know so much of the history of and that I use in my everyday life and that I. And that's a heart. It's a heartbreaking material and it's a foundational material. It has. I have rubber on the bottom of my shoes right now as do, you know, a huge number of people in the world. Speaking of how about balanced conditions, bodies to move through the world. So I hope that they take away this kind of expanded capacity to hold the world's complexities and contradictions and to hold their relationship to it. I also really hope that. Well, I don't know if I hoped this. I. When I, when I first was kind of making. Deciding bounce was going to be the object of analysis instead of balls, like instead of objects. I wanted an interaction and I. Then I imagined I was like, oh, what would. What. What does the history. This is an experiment in doing a history of an interaction. And you know, I would certainly be curious what happened if other people did their own experiments, you know, with breaking or passing through or fusing. I don't know how loyal that would stay to games. I think this project already kind of bounces far afield and I think those kinds of interactions would. Well, I think, I mean I think you could clearly do a game studies version of breaking. Like how much breaking happens in games of obex and bodies and so forth. It would be good. But so like I can kind of imagine specific research trajectories that could come out of it. But really mostly I want them to. I just hope people enjoy it and take a. That it expands their understanding of the world because that's what the project did for me. I probably overstayed my welcome with it. I worked on it for a long time, but it was really a pursuit. I was pursuing understanding of how the world works, of how these things that I took for granted, the conditions of my life and of my movements and of my like, greatest form of joy, which was squash like, what were the things that had produced this? And some of them were magical and extraordinary, some of them were very everyday and some of, and some of them were atrocious and trying to just like come into relationship to that. I don't know if that becoming into that project is incomplete, but it is complete in this, in this project, in the sense of this project.

[B]

Thank you very much. This has been really a pleasure. And dear readers, dear listeners, sorry, yeah, both of you actually get this book. Good readers, also readers, listeners, viewers, everyone, simply everyone. So unfortunately you cannot see it right now, but I just have the lovely book in my hands and it's a pleasure. So get out and get this book. Very insightful lecture. I'm very happy that I found this pearl. So thank you for joining me today and for sharing this wonderful and original book with us today.

[A]

My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

[B]

Dear listeners, I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you're an author or editor working in game studies and would like to discuss your latest work, feel free to reach [e-mail] you can also find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky under amestudies. And please leave X. And one last reminder, if you want to to support the show, head over to gamestudiesmerch.de and check out our game studies hoodie. Until next time, keep playing and keep thinking. Good night and goodbye.

[C]

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