Stillborn Gamers? Writing a Birth Certificate for Corporeality and Locomotion in Game Research

Nørgaard's paper, presented at the Nordic DiGRA conference in 2010, argues that game research has largely neglected the corporeal and locomotive dimensions of play. Its central thesis is that gamers are fundamentally embodied, movement-based agents rather than detached cognitive observers, and that scholarship portraying them as "stillborn" thinkers or spectators misses the way understanding in games is produced through bodily movement. The author frames gaming as "thinking in movement," drawing on phenomenology, particularly the work of Drew Leder, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, and Edward Casey on body memory and the primacy of movement.

The paper's evidence for this gap is largely bibliographic and observational rather than statistical. A survey of the thirteen articles in the WoW Reader found none addressing corporeality or movement, and a search of 99 papers in Game Studies likewise yielded none focused on gamers' bodies, locomotion, or tool-use. The author attributes this neglect partly to the body's tendency to withdraw from attention, which Leder terms "dis-appearance," and to theoretical frameworks that treat bodily interaction as trivial or relevant only when it breaks down.

To make its case, the paper draws on the author's own fieldnotes from playing World of Warcraft and observing a child play Power Pamplona, alongside discussion of physically demanding titles such as Dance Dance Revolution and Wii Sports. The analysis is scoped to game studies and phenomenology, with no industry data or quantitative findings. Its conclusion is a call for corporeal and locomotional frameworks in game research, arguing that the discipline must account for the "I can" of embodied action that shapes both players' self-experience and their sense of the game world.