Gestural Economy and Cooking Mama: Playing With the Politics of Natural User Interfaces

Luke van Ryn

Abstract

Gestures are at the heart of cooking: cooks draw on embodied routines to produce food, and this production is seen as a gesture of love, competence, or self-expression. Gestures are also at the heart of the Cooking Mama games for the Nintendo DS handheld console: the player taps the screen to chop carrots, drags ingredients from bench-top to bowl, and draws circles to mix ingredients together.

This paper concerns the coding of gestural techniques into a variety of technologies, and the expansion of gaming into the care of self and others. Existing debates around gestural interfaces, such as the Nintendo DS, stress the production of excess, casual modes of play and the gendering of gamers. By contrast, this paper argues that the encoding of gesture in Cooking Mama is marked by its economy. Situating Cooking Mama within a history of cultural techniques and the DS platform’s specific affordances of touch and gesture, this paper argues that the technicity of the DS blurs divisions between bodily routines and computational codes.

Bringing together a platform analysis of the DS interface with accounts of practice and habit, this paper shows the usefulness of Cooking Mama for thinking of our life in and with media. The term ‘gestural economy’, ported from the domain of phonetics, is proposed to account at once for the formal simplicity of Cooking Mama’s gestures and their abstraction from the familiar routines of everyday life.

Introduction

In the second volume of The Practice of Everyday Life (de Certeau, Giard & Mayol 1998), Luce Giard collects women’s stories of their relationship to cooking. These accounts of making-do, of children’s preferences, and of unexpected arrivals of hungry guests are coupled, in Giard’s analysis, with the suggestion that new technologies are increasingly getting in the way of these techniques of managing domestic work. Giard champions feminine resistance in the face of a threat just around the corner.

At the University of Maryland, researchers use the language of cooking to teach primary school students how to think about programming (Tarkan et al. 2010). They use recipes as a paradigm for defining the relevant actors and objects, the kinds of techniques or operations that agents can perform, and the process by which a set of inputs will produce a certain output.

In the Nintendo DS game Cooking Mama (2005), players tap the touchscreen with a stylus in order to start pouring water from an urn into a cup of instant noodles, and tap again to stop. They are awarded a grade according to the fullness of the cup.

These three moments point to the growth of a gestural economy. This concept hopes to hold in tension both ergonomics - the economisation of labour - and the “becoming-gestural” (Zehle 2012: 341) of economic life. This economy is at work in the spatial and rhythmic disciplining of bodies through new technological interfaces, and particularly in the translation of everyday gestures into gaming routines. This paper takes Cooking Mama - hitherto understood in relation to gender, domesticity, and casual gaming (Cheng 2011; Fantone 2009; Juul 2007) - as an example of a larger interrelation between bodily disciplines, play and code that this paper proposes to call gestural economy. This concept hopes to contribute to materialist media studies (see Apperley & Jayemanne 2012) a tool for understanding the enrolment of bodies into gaming interfaces, the relationship between computational and social protocols, and the possibilities for resistance in a society of control.

The paper begins by addressing the rise of gestural gaming interfaces, facilitated by touchscreens and accelerometers. It then focuses on the Nintendo DS interface, and the kinds of play that it affords and forecloses. Finally, I turn to Cooking Mama itself and its performance of cooking tasks in the form of a game. I therefore draw attention to kinds of demands that follow from Cooking Mama’s gameplay and the ways in which we might play differently.

Food tech and home ec.

The development of Cooking Mama must be understood in relation to a long history of technologies in the kitchen, and a rather shorter history of gestures as sources of input for computing. Technology, codes and gesture are already entwined in the work of Luce Giard, who borrows Lévi-Strauss’s definition of cooking as “a language in which each society codes messages which allow it to signify a part at least of what it is” (Lévi-Strauss in de Certeau et al. 1998: 180). Roland Barthes likewise highlights the political dimension of cooking when he notes that sugar is “bound to certain usages, certain ‘protocols’” (Barthes 2008: 28). By explicitly tying cooking to identity, Giard demonstrates the importance of domestic labour for women and their families, asking:

How can we find the right words, words that are rather simple, ordinary, and precise, to recount these sequences of gestures, bound together over and over again, that weave the indeterminate cloth of culinary practices within the intimacy of kitchens? (de Certeau et al. 1998: 199)

‘Gesture’, then, enjoys a special status among bodily repertoires. With the word ‘gesture’ Giard hopes to describe the activity of both the body and the mind. Likewise, Giorgio Agamben distinguishes between an act - something one simply does - and a gesture, in which “something is being endured and supported” (2000: 57). In both cases, gesture by definition evades capture, description, and specification, contrary to its deployment in advertising for gestural interfaces. The Kinect system tells players “You are the controller”, yet its technological limits cause it to recognise (or misrecognise) certain types of bodies and gestures (Harper & Mentis 2013: 167; see also Zehle 2012).

Many of the women whom Giard interviewed feel that their culinary gestures are becoming irrelevant: electric ovens maintain temperatures more consistently than wood-fired ovens, yet are more sensitive to variations in ingredients or quantities; ‘labour-saving’ gadgets such as mixers and grinders impose “other modes of organization, and new ways of reasoning” on their owners (de Certeau et al. 1998: 220). Giard describes cooks becoming the unskilled spectators of the machines that do their work for them, whose instructions they cannot understand, and whose tolerance for variation and improvisation is greatly diminished. The scenes share a concern for the evacuation of human effort with Baudrillard’s early writing:

Buttons, levers, handles, pedals ... have thus replaced pressure, percussion, impact or balance achieved by means of the body, the intensity and distribution of force, and the abilities of the hand. (Baudrillard 1996: 49)

Yet the gestures that Giard hopes to nurture through her writing, and to some degree protect from technological invasion, are not independent from code. In addition to the linguistic metaphors on loan from Lévi-Strauss and Wittgenstein, Giard provides a formal breakdown of doing-cooking not unfamiliar from an object-oriented programming perspective. Giard breaks recipes into four distinct domains: ingredients; utensils and appliances; performances and gestures; products and their names (de Certeau et al. 1998: 215). Cooking always requires a calculation of time and money, evaluation of cost-effectiveness, improvisation due to unexpected guests and memory of preferences and occasions (de Certeau et al. 1998: 200). These are the elements that are perhaps most easily encoded: think of the registration of dependencies, affordances and combinatory possibilities at work in organisational management techniques, gaming and education.

The analogy between cooking and programming is made explicit in a recent project aimed at teaching simple computer programming to primary school children using a kitchen metaphor (Tarkan et al. 2010: 1). The children gave instructions to virtual cooks, to retrieve utensils and ingredients, and managed chains of dependency in the recipe programme. The authors note that “recipes have an inherent structure similar to programs and concepts that are available in programming languages (e.g. looping, branching)” and that the constrained time and space of cooking has its analogues in computation (Tarkan et al. 2010: 1). In situating this paper in relationship to cooking technologies, we understand that culinary gestures are themselves technological, and that new technological interfaces bring with them new ways of understanding history.

Gestural play

In addition to drawing on a history of culinary technology, Cooking Mama arrives at a key moment in gestural play. Recent gaming interfaces have explicitly taken the player’s gestures as the horizon of gameplay: from early forays into Virtual Reality (Rheingold 1992), to accelerometer-based motion detection in the Nintendo Wii (Jones & Thiruvathukal 2012), and gestural gaming on touchscreen tablet devices. Newer touchscreens, such as those on iPhones and iPads, can track multiple inputs, enabling a wider array of gestures and, ironically, the representation of analogue control components - buttons and joysticks - to play games like Grand Theft Auto 3 (2011) on the iOS platform. Microsoft researcher Bill Buxton (2013) provides an historical overview of the development of multi-touch devices.

We should note that all play involves the body and gesture to some extent. Playing chess, gambling with cards or dice, or standing at a pinball machine require an enrolment of one’s body within a certain space, discipline and code (Swalwell & Wilson 2008: 73-4). Digital play requires a gaming body to push buttons, pull triggers, and move mice using - what else? - one’s body. Even simple control schemas are capable of producing definitive gestures, such as “jogging” the joysticks of an Xbox controller to make slight turns in racing games (Ash 2010). Even in the relatively sedentary play of PC LAN gaming, the body appears negatively through hunger, blurred vision, and hand cramps (Apperley 2010: 37).

At stake in the rise of gestural play is the status of the interface. Interfaces, whether based around buttons, joysticks or infra-red beams, simultaneously make play possible and separate the player from play (Nansen 2009). According to the foregrounding or disappearance of that suturing, interfaces are characterised as tending towards “immediacy” or “hypermediacy” (Bolter & Grusin 1999, pp. 30-31). Gestural play can be described as “immediate” in the sense that it foregrounds the metaphor on which the interface is based (Bolter & Grusin 1999: 2). Light guns, which recreate the gestures of shooting in titles such as Duck Hunt (1984) for the Nintendo Entertainment System, are an early example. The development of the balance board peripheral for Wii Fit (2008) to accurately measure players’ weight and balance foregrounds the biopolitics of natural user interfaces (Millington 2009). Yet interfaces also vary in their transparency according to their context, through moments of excess (Simon 2009), glitches (Krapp 2011), or social relations between players (Harper & Mentis 2013). Because gestures draw meaning from their context, ‘immediacy’ and ‘hypermediacy’ are better thought of as properties of relations than of artefacts. Gestural interfaces, then, are not necessarily more natural, although this paper will argue that they participate in a naturalising of certain bodily gestures.

Nintendo DS as platform

Through the addition of a touchscreen to the button-based interface familiar from earlier handheld consoles, the release of the Nintendo DS in 2003 marks a key moment in gestural play. Like Nintendo’s earlier Game+Watch devices (Verhoeff 2009: 281), the DS flips open to reveal two screens, the bottom of which is a simple touchscreen. Nintendo has since produced several versions of the device: with larger screens, a more compact form factor, and 3D capability. Gameplay proceeds across both displays, and the lower screen provides a space for input in addition to the more familiar control buttons. In addition to offering additional perspectives on conventional game styles, the materiality of this touchscreen also enables completely new styles of play.

The Nintendo DS touchscreen consists of two semi-conductive plates that are narrowly separated. A push on the screen from a finger or a stylus brings the two plates into contact and allows a current to pass through. This provides horizontal (x) and vertical (y) values for the location of the touch, which the processor then sends as input to the game. By tracking the change in these x and y values over time the touch screen is able to account for movement, for example the drawing of a circle or a diagonal slash across the screen. The resulting output of the touchscreen is fed to the DS and allows the control of the device through the touchscreen with gesture in addition to or instead of the buttons. Cooking Mama doesn’t require the buttons at all, while Super Mario 64 DS (2004) retains a button-based control schema supplemented via the touch screen.

The Nintendo DS as ‘platform’ (Keating & Cambrosio 2003: 27; Montfort & Bogost 2009: 147; Leorke 2012) plays a large part in the existence of Cooking Mama. Several early titles for the Nintendo DS indicate the expanded affordances of touch-based play: raising virtual pets (Nintendogs 2005), keeping oneself youthful (Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training 2005), and preparing food (Cooking Mama). These games illustrate both a technology in search of a use (see Swalwell 2012) and an explosion of play into diverse areas of everyday life, particularly the care of self and others (see Foucault 2005: 10).

Making ramen with Cooking Mama

As we witness a rise in the availability of gendered play focusing upon social reproduction, domesticity and the body (Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter 2009: 22), we should note the gendered division of labour long present in game development (Levy 1984: 295-8). The way in which (house-)work becomes play (Wark 2007: 11), and the way that gestural interfaces code these activities as ‘natural’ (Parker 2008) deserves to be addressed in greater detail. Also at work in the production of Cooking Mama is the development and increasing affordability of gestural interfaces, which are advertised as offering a more ‘natural’ mode of engagement (Harper and Mentis 2013). In the time since the first release of the Nintendo DS, touchscreens and motion capture have become increasingly mainstream in mobile telephones, computers, and gaming systems (Zehle 2012: 349). Cooking Mama originates many of the gameplay elements present in casual, mobile and social games.

Scholarly discussions of Cooking Mama have emphasised the game’s gendered mode of address and its casual style of play (Fantone 2009: 217). The touch-screen capability of the Nintendo DS offers a more “immediate” (Bolter & Grusin 1999) or “transparent” (Clark 2003: 37) mode of play. The game’s format, based on short mini-games, seems designed for distracted, interrupted play (while travelling on public transport, for example), which a player can leave and re-enter at a moment’s notice. And the DS itself is designed for this interruptible play: shutting the screen puts the device to sleep, ready to resume play when the screen is opened back up. Cooking Mama is perfectly happy to be stowed in a bag in order to change trains, and to be picked up again to resume play on board the next leg of the journey. This portability of the DS system varies with the game being played, however: a detailed military strategy game like Advance Wars: Dual Strike (2005) can pin a player to a couch just as effectively as an Xbox (McCrea 2011).

Like the Gilbreth family’s motion studies (Gilbreth & Carey 2005), Cooking Mama breaks down the routine of making a meal into simple actions. It couples use of the touchscreen with a highly modular style of gameplay: each of the steps in a recipe forms a mini-game, tests one particular gameplay mechanic, and lasts for between ten and twenty seconds in duration. The ‘fried chicken’ recipe requires players to chop the chicken with tapping motions on the screen, roll the chicken pieces in batter by dragging the stylus from side to side, then deep-fry the chicken until it is brown, tapping pieces as they turn the right shade of brown, before finally drizzling tomato sauce over the completed meal. The ‘ramen’ recipe asks the player simply to pull up the lid on a cup of instant noodles, and tap to add boiling water from an urn until it is full. Most meals vary in complexity between these two poles.

Each step is awarded a gold, silver or bronze medal according to one of three metrics: the speed with which instructions are followed, the timeliness (see Pias 2011) with which actions are completed, or the fidelity of gestures to the ideal type displayed on the screen. The quality of each step in the process - which, it bears repeating, may simply be the speed with which that step was completed - contributes to the final score for the dish. Mastering dishes unlocks new recipes, or the ability to ‘fork’ recipes to produce new meal variations.

There are economies of space and time at work here. Cooking Mama reduces all the actions involved in preparing a meal to the touchscreen’s surface. Taps on the screen can represent knife cuts, kneading with hands, or presses of a button on an in-game device. Dragging the stylus across the screen is interpreted as stirring a mixture or moving ingredients from one place to another. The scale of the performance varies from challenge to challenge, and the touchscreen is the “key” (Flusser 2011: 23) that unlocks action at these widely varying scales. Cooking Mama would best be described as tending towards immediacy/transparency in the sense that its gestural interface foregrounds the ‘table-top’ metaphor: we stir by drawing circles rather than by, for example, pushing the directional pad buttons in sequence. The mode of gameplay, requiring timeliness and correctness of gestures (Pias 2011), direct the player’s attention away from the representational space and towards the rhythms of play. The game emphasises the cartoonish artificiality of its representation, yet it attempts to minimise the abstraction of its interface. Yet it is important to note that gaming devices are indifferent to the meaning of players’ gestures (Galloway 2004: 52). The DS does not ‘care’ about the pets represented in Nintendogs in the same way as a player might. Because digital code can understand gestures only as a source of input, gestures are by definition surplus to the device’s needs and treated like any other piece of data. This paper therefore focuses not on excess, which requires a normative frame, but on economy, which relates to both the player and the interface.

Gestural economy at work in Cooking Mama

This paper proposes the term gestural economy, on loan from linguistics, to account for the encoding of gesture into the touchscreen interface and the incorporation of gesture as a source of value in contemporary capitalism. In linguistics, ‘gestural economy’ is one of a number of terms that explain the formation of languages. Linguistic “parsimony” suggests that languages tend to minimise the total number of sounds (Clements 2003: 288). A “feature economy” model, in contrast, suggests that languages must make significant and efficient usage of their sounds (Clements 2003: 288, 291). In proposing the term “gestural economy”, Ian Maddieson shifts attention from the sounds themselves to the gestures of the mouth and tongue that produce them, from the “place of articulation” to the “typical movement trajectory” (Maddieson 1996: 1). For George N. Clements, “feature economy” requires that each feature present in a language produce a maximum number of sounds. For Maddieson, in contrast, gestural economy suggests that sounds are organised so that mouth’s expressive gestures are as efficient as possible. The economy in question has shifted register from the total number of terms (parsimony), to the efficient use of each term (feature economy), to the movement of bodies in producing those terms (gestural economy).

The economy of movement trajectories also appears in the workplace efficiency research of J.K. Gilbreth (Gilbreth & Carey 2005). Through a series of observational studies, Gilbreth produced a typology of gestures designed to maximise the desired effect with a minimum of motion. Workers were and are trained to move around their workspace as little as possible, and to perform an action with no more effort than the task required. Workers must direct their efforts towards reducing the gap between the ideal gesture and their own; whether this results in a net increase or decrease in workers’ efforts is not the concern of the capitalist (Marx 1993: 693; Leroi-Gourhan 1993: 253).

While the movements of gestural gaming tend to be fairly simple, users must align their bodies to the kinds of input that those interfaces are capable of accepting. As in the workplace, the player’s attention is directed from the object of the labour, to the correctness of their gestures. This shift is analogous to transitions in the relationship between management and its subjects (or what Foucault calls the conduct of conduct; 2008:186) from the disciplinary society - concerned with the enclosure, measurement and counting of bodies - to the “universal modulation” of the control society (Foucault 1977; Deleuze 1992: 7). Games are a key site of disciplinary power because they require players to minimise the difference between their actions and an ideal. Computer games, however, operate on binary logics of presence and absence, requiring only that players’ inputs be timely (Pias 2010). As in Yoda’s axiom, players “do or do not; there is no try”. Gestural gaming - whether on the DS, the Kinect, or the Move - complicates this further by making bodily gestures the subjects of these games of control. As gaming controls become more ‘human-centred’, ‘natural’, or ‘intuitive’, they add a disciplining of gestures to the requirement of timeliness. Yet the concept of ‘discipline’ is not quite sufficient to capture the relationship between players’ bodies, gaming machines and code. There is a gap between the inputs required by gaming machines and the gestures of players - whether leaning into turns while playing racing games or wildly swinging Wii-motes - gestures are by their nature excessive (see Simon 2009). In Agamben’s terms, code can understand only “acts”, and judge them according to their success or failure (2000: 57). The usefulness of the concept of gestural economy, therefore, lies in its relational understanding of gaming, politics, and code.

In Cooking Mama we find a gestural economy at work in three ways. Firstly, the gestures that the game demands are economical in their level of abstraction and difficulty: players need only tap the screen or draw simple shapes. Secondly, the many different cooking gestures that the game mimics are flattened to accommodate the DS’s touchscreen, its representational schema based on two-dimensional sprites, and a casual mode of gameplay. And the resistance between the player and the game, and between the stylus and the screen, is minimised.

The encoding of gestures into Cooking Mama is economical: there is a high margin of error for movements. Drawing tiny circles on the touch screen seems to stir a virtual batter just as effectively as drawing large circles. The complex repertoires of gestures that go into cooking - elucidated by Giard’s subjects - are, as in Gilbreth’s analyses of domestic efficiency, reduced to a set of contacts with a two-dimensional plane across time. Gestures present in the game are used as much as possible. This modularity of programming is a response to the processing constraints of the DS platform: while deep-frying is not an everyday cooking activity, and does not appear in every recipe, the mechanic testing the player’s ability to tap accurately and ‘on time’ is redeployed in several different ways throughout the game. The same game mechanic of drawing circles and diagonal lines is used both for kneading dough and for stirring liquids together, although these actual processes require actions of greatly divergent intensity and duration. Cooking Mama could really be ‘Anything Mama’ and play in the same way: simply by swapping the in-game image sprites of food for objects from some other context the game becomes about doing laundry, or writing a conference paper, or doing open-heart surgery. This absolute interchangeability of the game-space in Cooking Mama reduces the gestures of intimacy, of care and of craft to scribbles on a tablet.

Secondly, those actions are performed in the flattened gestural space of the Nintendo DS touchscreen. The touchscreen only registers x- and y- coordinates, and the force that the player applies to the screen cannot be appreciated. This point bears comparison with Cooking Mama: Cook Off, released for the Wii console in 2007. The Wii remote cannot impart physical feedback to the player: when the player swings the remote like a tennis racquet there is no feeling of connection with the virtual ball (Gregersen & Grodal 2009: 76). While the Wii remote registers movement in three dimensions, it does not present any resistance to the player beyond its own weight. In the frictionless space of the Wii, kneading dough requires no more effort than stirring a bowl of cereal. Cooking Mama: Cook Off and Cooking Mama: World Kitchen (2008) afford a mode of play that involves more of the body than the games for the DS, yet this play differs in relation to the nature of the player’s work. While the DS touchscreen imparts little more resistance than the Wii remote, it nevertheless provides an endpoint for the player’s gestures: one cannot push the stylus through the screen nor beyond its bounds.

Thirdly, the question of friction is a central one for the politics of gaming and contemporary capitalism. Friction (in the figure of “non-trivial effort”) is central to Aarseth’s (1997) conception of video games, and Soenke Zehle implicitly relates Mark Zuckerberg’s desire for “frictionless sharing” to Steve Jobs’ demand for a frictionless touchscreen for the iPhone (2012: 341, 349). Friction-free capitalism seeks to minimise the transaction costs of moving from one field, market or relationship to another (Boltanski & Chiapello 2005; Negroponte 1995), while at the same time promoting affective and playful labour as a source of value (Hardt & Negri 2000; Kücklich 2005; Arvidsson & Colleoni 2012). The Nintendo DS provides very little resistance in the plane of action: the stylus slides across the screen in a way unmatched by any of the tools of the kitchen. The player doesn’t need to apply much pressure to the touchscreen for their efforts to be acknowledged. On the other hand, the requirement of only minimal pressure does not mean that players only apply minimal pressure. The abundance of online touchscreen replacement tutorials suggests that in the heat of the moment one can easily apply more force than the touchscreen can sustain, that play can break through the “informatic control” of code (see Galloway 2006: 105). Additionally, resistance and effort are not desired in kitchen work. The greater force one applies to a knife, the more likely it is to slip and remove a digit. The spectacular display of effort in the case of a weekend barbecue can work to reinforce the gendered division of culinary labour in the household (Szabo 2013). The kinds of resistance experienced by workers, touchscreens, and electrical circuits are not the same, yet each plays a part in the politics of the gestural economy.

Conclusion

Just as gestural economy in linguistics marks a shift of emphasis from the sites of speech to movements, Cooking Mama complicates the timeliness (Pias 2011) of play with a requirement of (fairly minimal) correctness. In the same way as factory workers must adjust their bodies to the machines with which they work (Marx 1993: 692), and students must develop test-taking as a skill alongside spelling and arithmetic (Boltanski & Chiapello 2005: 496), the player of Cooking Mama does not recreate gestures of cooking but rather attempts to reduce the gap between their performance and the gestures commanded (see Chun 2008: 304). As in the case of motion studies of labour (Gilbreth & Carey 2005), the body is disciplined to produce a gesture compatible with a machine working to a different rhythm. The almost constant time limits governing the player’s actions in Cooking Mama drive gameplay towards the gestural economy I have described, much as speed is used to discipline workers:

If he has time, he [the worker] is going to choose a method of prehension adapted to his morphology … in a rush, he will have to ‘choose’ the fastest way of doing things, and that is not necessarily the same thing. (Michel Gollac in Boltanski & Chiapello 2005: 431)

As the player becomes more familiar with the interface, their actions are addressed less to the metaphorical onscreen representations but rather to the specific tolerances of the interface.

As gestural interfaces adopt bodily performances as their means of control, critique needs to shift its attention towards these interfaces. The concept of ‘gestural economy’ presented here, at work as both a moment of contemporary capitalism and a disciplinary technology, extends debates around the transparency of interfaces (Bolter & Grusin 1999; Clark 2003: 37; Flusser 2011: 24) by shifting attention to the work that gesture performs both in computing and beyond. It offers a means of addressing interfaces that privileges neither the ‘natural’ nor the ‘technological’, and of relating rhythms of play to everyday routines of discipline and control. Its applicability for media and games studies can be summarised in two directions.

Firstly, the concept of gestural economy invites a mode of critique not measured in terms of representation but performance. Comparing Cooking Mama to Mama Kills Animals (2008) clarifies this distinction. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) recently produced Mama Kills Animals, a parody game that re-introduces some of the messiness of preparing food. Most of the steps in PETA’s game are those moments elided from Cooking Mama and everyday food consumption: beheading a turkey, plucking its feathers, disembowelling it, stuffing it and (finally) roasting it. As in Cooking Mama, the player must complete each of these steps accurately and within a time limit. So while the game’s images have been détourned, this parody game reinscribes the same logic of timeliness, drill and control as the original. The demands that follow from PETA’s critique - that developer Office Create produce a vegetarian version of Cooking Mama and that players adopt a vegetarian lifestyle - have little to do with the rhythms of gestural economy. Cooking Mama is produced in such a way that the representational space could be easily remapped with new sprites over the top of the existing mechanics (Amero 2010). Rather than asking for an “ethical” version of Cooking Mama, we should acknowledge the disciplinary codes at work in the interface itself.

Secondly, gestural economy also draws attention to the work of play, and relates studies of gestural gaming to more general questions of ergonomics, organization and resistance. While Cooking Mama shares representational content with other forms of food media - from television programmes to Instagram feeds - its concern with effective action under pressure is closely aligned with workplace demands that one’s gestures be correct, timely and efficient. While Cooking Mama contributes to the incorporation of everyday reproductive labours into play, it nevertheless operates under a singular logic of efficiency, with very little play (in the sense of tolerance or slack). While the politics of gestural economy are not always visible, the concept nevertheless draws attention to the enrolment of players’ bodies, interfaces and code into a gestural regime of control. Far from a deterministic fetishizing of code, gestural economy relates computational protocols to social mores, commands to desires, and rhythms to routines.

Lastly, it offers materialist game studies an analytical foothold on other types of gestural interfaces: Nintendo Wii, Xbox Kinect and PlayStation Move. Though these platforms capture and treat bodies in different ways - through a stylus, a remote control, or an invisible field of light - the apparatuses of the gestural economy share an interest in bodies as horizons of play, gestures as sites of discipline, and code as the means of control.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editors of this issue, two anonymous reviewers, and Ben Nicoll for their comments on this article.

Biographical Note

Luke van Ryn is a PhD candidate in the School of Culture and Communications at the University of Melbourne. His research explores the intersection of food, technology and communication. His thesis addresses networking and justification in the production ecology of MasterChef Australia. He is a convenor of the Technology and Culture Reading Group.