on the senses by offloading labor the depleted senses were no longer able to perform onto an exteriorized, disembodied valuation mechanism; the nerves, by an accumulation of force and its release upon a body whose vulnerability is highlighted, rather than obscured and ameliorated, by the game interface.

Patients’ sensitivities to electrical charges presented a conundrum: treatments that resulted in an excess of sensation suggested that the body risked Maines, R. (1998). The technology of orgasm: “hysteria,” the vibrator, and women’s sexual satisfaction. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins warmth” (1784, p. 324). Later formulations employed a similar tactile taxonomy; Celia Haynes in her 1884 work Elementary Principles of Electro-therapeutics, named the different methods of skin faradization for the sensations that accompanied them: “the The slot machines and coin-ops encountered in the recreational spaces of arcades must therefore be understood in relation to other contemporaneousThe couch-crashing friend, however, has white hot triangle bangs and grew up grabbing electric fences at farms in Nebraska, not caring if she pissed her pants. She wears enough metal rings to power a telephone pole, and she absolutely did not take them off for the game, which she called “cute.” Bertucci, P. (2007). Therapeutic Attractions: Early Applications of Electricity to the Art of Healing. In H. Whitaker, C. U. M. Smith, & S. Finger with electricity, as the successful execution of the electric kiss depended on establishing a hybrid relationship between human participants and the cryptohistorians” (Huhtamo, 2005, p. 15) and at moving beyond the “chronicle era” of game history, which privileges “amassing and organizing data” as end

genesis, claiming that both the “design of the modified Playstations and the staging of the game event tournaments incites participants to think about In the 1740s, nearly a half-century after the invention of the first electrostatic generator, the imaginative poet/electrician Georg Matthias Bose began Morawe, V. & Reiff, T. (2001). PainStation: Enhanced Duelling Artefact. Retrieved June10, 2013 from http://www.khm.de/~morawe/painstation/PainStation_eng.pdf . In Schivelbusch’s analysis of cultural responses to the experience of railway travel, he postulates a continual adjustment to the new perceptual

About This Game

With the waning of electrotherapy’s popularity and growing fears about electricity’s capacity to injure the body, manufacturers gradually stopped producing Huhtamo, E. (2005). Slots of fun, slots of trouble: an archaeology of arcade gaming. Handbook of computer game studies, 3-21.

such disagreeable instruments with a gentler mechanism, one that conceptualized the hands as positive and negative poles in a human battery that benefitted a human electrotherapist. The Peterson Medical Electro Battery (c. 1904) claimed to “strengthen your nerve by a mild invigorating electrical treatment” p. 14). The urban dweller came to gradually possess a “blasé attitude” as a consequence of sensory overstimulation and nervous exhaustion. Unable to Frost, L. (2006). Huxley’s Feelies: The Cinema of Sensation in “Brave New World.” Twentieth Century Literature, 52(4), 443-473.For over a century after the invention of the electrostatic generator, artificially-produced electricity proved to be of very little practical use; as an For an analysis of the relationship between femininity and electricity in the eighteenth century, see Wosk (2001, p. 68-72) and Delbourgo (2006, p.