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(Image Credit: Techanbob)

Typing, for me, has long been tied up with game playing. Before keyboards were tools for productive labor they were complex controllers for beating monkeys in vine races to bananas and outrunning pirates to the buried treasure. When I first encountered computers in the early 90s my parents, and later the public school I attended, took care to teach me how to type. I was told stories about aging businessmen that floundered when forced to type their own memos and warned about the impending importance of touch typing. So, in what seems to be a fairly common experience, I spent afternoons at home and computer sessions in school playing lots of Mavis Beacon. This ongoing utilitarian interaction with games, though, wasn't an early form of gamification.  

Typing wasn't gamified for me. It was a specific physical interaction that I hoped to wrap my head and hands around so that I could drive my word-car faster than the computer; it was a game. Generally, when we look at gamification we’re considering an overlay that resituates our desires toward particular interactions and activities. Gamification overlays divert our attention so that rather than focusing on the relationships and interactions germane to particular activities we are shaped by our position on a leaderboard or the siren's song of a new badge. The gamified experience is always first with an abstract goal system and second with the activity at hand. So that while gamified systems situate users away from matters at hand and toward abstractions, games situate users toward a particular direct engagement with the matters at hand.

(Image Credit atypingtest.com)

I learned to type so that I could beat that damn monkey, but I didn't want to beat the monkey to achieve a badge. Even with all the talk about needing to know how to type to make it in the world today it was always about winning the game at hand. What I didn't realize, though, were the particular ways that these games were disciplining my relationship with the keyboard as a tool, an object, a body that I've developed a deep relationship with. Perhaps most noticeable is simply how I rest my hands on the keyboard. asdf jkl; each finger not only has a particular place but more unsettlingly feels out of place when resting elsewhere. The realization that your fingers are on the wrong row--a realization made apparent by the mangled words the configuration produces--is uncanny. I can't help but look down to see if my fingers are still my fingers and if the keys are still on straight.

(Image Credit: Shane McGlaun Slash Gear)

That's not to say that I don't or that you can't relate to the keyboard in different ways. These early typing games worked hard to cultivate a specifically productive relationship between the keyboard and my fingers. They focused on speed and precision and largely situated the keyboard as a tool to be mastered. The dissonance between the keys and fingers, the utter unnaturalness of it all, was something to be smoothed over--from my mind to the computer's screen with nothing in-between. This same effaced immediacy is disciplined through other games, as well. After years of playing first person shooters resting my right hand fingers on wasd, left hand on the mouse, almost feels as natural as the home row. More than any particular intent that I carry with me it is where my hands rest on the keyboard that dictates what I will be doing with my computer. Different games, of course, situate keyboard interactions differently. Hotkey heavy games like Starcraft (and I am awful at Starcraft and even worse at keyboard use in Starcraft, so take this as an unfamiliar and awkward perspective) configure the keyboard less a controller and more a console or instrument panel. The perspective shifts from key presses contributing to the creation of a word or action and similar presses performing concrete actions. In some games every key carries the weight of punctuation. 

(Image credit: Steven LeMieux, QWOP screenshot)

And while some games, amongst other practices, work to naturalize our relationships with the keyboard through disciplinary practices there are other games that highlight just how strange these relationships are. There's nothing natural about the home row. QWOP, created by Bennet Foddy and launched in 2008, drastically breaks with common productive interactions with the keyboard. The game, named after the four keys it demands you use, asks the user to run a simple 100 meter dash. But rather than typing out words to move forward like early typing games or simply pressing W to move like in first person shooters the player is offered more direct control. Q and W control your runner’s thighs, and O and P his calves. Rather than controlling a runner you end up attempting to control a runner's legs. 

(Image credit: Steven LeMieux, QWOP screenshot)

Attempting is the key word. It is a hard game, and the majority of my time playing has been spent sending my runner sprawling forward and backward. What the game highlights through these displays of muscle mangling is just how utterly unnatural this whole affair is. While I play I am constantly looking from the screen to my fingers to my legs attempting to wrap my head around how my fingers can relate to my legs. Standing at my desk I shift in place, fidget, work to control my legs with my fingers as I mime pressing the keys. How do my calves relate to my thighs? And how on earth do both sets work together to move me forward? Half the time I spend playing QWOP the runner stands there waiting for me to make my move. The keyboard becomes distinctly unproductive and explicitly foreign. I have never run more than five meters in QWOP, but some people have. They talk about achieving a rhythm, machine human synchronization (imperfect and ugly but a synchronization all the same), and in that moment of success I can't help but wonder if the game is closer to falling back into common disciple practices of naturalization than ever. 

(Video credit: PEROLINN)

Videos of these successful runs, though, make me think that Foddy has not only snatched victory from the jaws of defeat but has compounded the deeply disturbing experience of playing QWOP. The runner shifts and jerks awkwardly along the track. His halting gait is punctuated by brief moments of almost graceful performance. When both feet leave the ground I can't help but see the possibility for fluid motion, but then he lands with a shudder. These glitchy shudders and squats betray any possible rhythm that the player may have reached with his or her keyboard, and they point not only at the ever present friction between user and keyboard but at a complete lack of naturalness in the human. Thighs and calves and feet and running are bizarre. QWOP hints that these inborn connections and technologies aren't any more natural than the home row.