Corporeal Capture: The Rhetoric of Boundaries in Procedurality

Abstract

This work offers a philosophical reflection on the nature of boundary-drawing in software and video games, specifically, how boundary-drawing within software can embed perspectives, assumptions and rhetoric. The concept of corporeal capture is offered to understand boundaries as capable of localizing relational qualities, as in, something produced distributively is attributed locally to a boundaried entity. We study two video games: Crusader Kings III and Civilization VI, to demonstrate how boundary-drawing can open up opportunities to inject assumptions and biases about the human bodies, genetics and state bodies. For example, coding negative qualities such as Ugly as character traits highlights a certain view about the causal relationship between the character and ugliness, where ugliness is no longer co-produced in a distributed, inherently social environment, but is mainly attributed casually to the character. This is also applicable to ownership of the state, which is often justified by highlighting the state as the main causal source of its internal productions. The general goal of this paper is to critique boundary-drawing as at once a technical and design practice as well as a cultural and philosophical practice. As a result, the rhetoric of boundary-drawing goes beyond the level of authoring or appreciation, to the level of a techno-cultural infrastructure that makes those rhetorical expressions through the medium possible in the first place.