"The original field of aesthetics is not art but reality – corporeal, material nature. Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body. It is a form of cognition, achieved through taste, touch, hearing, seeing, smell – the whole corporeal sensorium" (Buck-Morss 6). In the 21st century, the development and proliferation of video games has shown the world how pixelated, simulative art can be made into a reality, a phantasmagoria of sorts, by invoking reactions from all the senses in the human body. However, by "flood[ing] the senses and fus[ing] them as a "consoling phantasmagoria" in a "permanent invitation to intoxication"", video games block out reality and destroy the human being's power to respond to external stimuli in the real world (Buck-Morss 24). Consequently, I believe video games anesthetize an individual's body and soul by placing them in a virtual reality that not only provides a false human sensorium, but one that is substantiated via a Panoptic influence (Foucault 234). .
Video games create a virtual reality by being the source of stimuli and also the arena for motor response, thus becoming the circuit that connects the human sense perception to motor response, a circuit that is naturally completed by the external world. They provide us with a sense of sight through the enticing images and videos they portray on the screen, a sense of sound through the background score that plays as the characters in the games perform implausible acts of heroism, and a sense of touch through the buttons and joystick on a controller that not only controls the actions of a character in the game, but also vibrates when one's character is under duress. While "our sight or vision presents us optimally with surfaces," "sound gives a perception of interiors as interiors without their being opened up" (Ong 122). Video games seamlessly meld the two senses through fantasmatic effects and in doing so, provide us with a clear definition of the mood and setting of the video game.
