Bounce: Balls, Walls, and Bodies in Games and Play

At the center of thousands upon thousands of games and sports lies a basic kind of interaction: the to-and-fro of a bouncing ball. What do bounce and its many variants - ricochet, rebound, spring, ping, Pong, coefficients of restitution, squash-and-stretch, and other kinds of elastic motion - tell us about the many ways it is possible to scale selves to worlds?

Media scholar and artist, Carlin Wing introduces her newly published book, Bounce, which follows an array of bouncing balls through the histories of electronic and nonelectronic games, across the spectrum of play, game, and sport, and into the domains of physics, material science, animation, and computing. The book’s focus on bounce sidesteps the focus on play found in much of the game studies literature and broadens the scope of game history by spotlighting an interaction that is central to countless numbers of physical and digital games and sports. The book tracks the shift from ricochet in ancient tennis to the true bounce in the modern game; spotlights squash and stretch in animation as a mirror of computing's ping and Pong; and contrasts the bounce feel in the global blockbuster EA Sports FC (formerly FIFA) to the pok ta pok of the three thousand year old Mesoamerican ballgame. In this material history of to-and-fro, Wing shows how bounce has been taken up in different historical moments and contexts as a technique for containing uncertainty, testing truth, constructing character, modeling motion, coordinating interaction, and confirming identity.