This article touches on a subject that I struggled understanding in film theory. However, despite the difficulty in understanding some of the wordage in this article, the concept was made a little more clear.
Crick starts by referring to Sobchack’s view of the film body and how digital media can’t have the same experience because it is too cluttered and not as visceral as film. Crick goes on to examine how this way of thinking is wrong. He mostly talks about the interaction of the player and how they become a part of the game, rather than someone playing the game. His first main argument is in first person games. We are seeing the game through the eyes of the avatar we are playing, thus the game body and avatar’s body are one in the same. You may think this is different for third person games, like in Tomb Raider, for example. However, Crick references his own experience, as well as those of others, that when playing games like this, your eyes go through and past the visual representation of the avatar you are playing. This still makes the player feel as if they are in the world of the video game. Lastly, Crick talks about the controller, or control device. He claims that this is not a physical thing we hold while playing a video game, but rather an extension of our physical body, at least once a user becomes accustomed to it. As a player, if we want our avatar to move forward or jump, we don’t spend a moment to analyse what input on the control device correspond to these movement, but rather think of what we want to do and subconsciously input these movement on the control device. In these aspects, the player becomes a part of the game body, and allow us to live within the virtual world.
Game Studies 
I’m glad Crick was able to help you make more sense out of Sobchack and film embodiment. We’ll talk more about both in class. You honed in on the salient point here–that Crick sees the controller not as an inert tool but as an extension of our bodies, like a cybernetic add-on. The key concept for all of today’s readings is this merging of the body and the game. They all call it something different or have variations in the way it’s described, but all are trying to get to that same phenomenon: that feeling of forgetting that you’re playing a game and temporarily merging with the machine.
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I wasn’t going to comment on this one since I’ve already commented on another regarding the Game Body, but you bring up something that wasn’t brought up in the other one: the controller. During our class yesterday, I was blown away by the study Professor Kemp mentioned regarding professional Tetris players. How they offset some of their computing to game itself and their bodies. It made me question how we look at the mind, and made me realize that our bodies aren’t just some “meat shield” for our mind.
You mentioned how we don’t analyze every button press when we are playing games. In my 2+ decades of playing games, I have never even thought of that in any deeper way. I play a lot of Overwatch competitive (queue the broken toe joke), and its baffling to think about how much button presses we’ll have in just one minute of play. I’m communicating with my team, controlling my character, analyzing where my character should be, and how all of these things should give me a potential advantage over the other team to ultimately win (or lose) an engagement. It’s crazy how powerful our mind and body are, and how they can become “one” with a virtual world.
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