RMIT University

Dancing with the Hands: Frictions with Videogames, Dance and Gender

Timothy Snowdon's "Dancing with the Hands" interrogates the claim, advanced by Graeme Kirkpatrick, that all videogame play constitutes a form of dance, and it probes whether dance can serve as a meaningful challenge to the masculine coding long associated with videogame culture.

• Timothy Snowdon argues that the claim that all videogame play is a form of dance conflates distinct concepts: dance, choreography, and dancing must be separated, and a player's agency differs substantively from a trained dancer's.
• Explicit dance titles such as Just Dance and Dance Central engage with dance thematically, but player performance remains interpretive, and players can resist or subvert prescribed movement.
• Videogames are choreographic in that they embed movement scripts that players engage with more malleably than fixed choreography, often without any explicit dancerly intent.