![]() ![]() Video games are an important part of the lives of many people, being a popular entertainment medium, and providing engaging and motivating player experiences. 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. 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. 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. By contrast, this paper argues that the encoding of gesture in Cooking Mama is marked by its economy. Existing debates around gestural interfaces, such as the Nintendo DS, stress the production of excess, casual modes of play and the gendering of gamers. 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. 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. 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.
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