Synergistic Suits

This article explores the origins of Mecha, the anime’s gigantic steel armors piloted by teenagers. Transposed into video games of the Gundam genre, the Mobile Suits make possible the experience of vertigo. Symbolically or virtually living in a machine to explicitly control it, seems to offer to the players an alternative to resist to the pressure of social self-regulation of Japanese society.

Decision making, control, reflexes and intuition are at the heart of the practice of these games, but these forms of optimization of actions also anticipate the contemporary issues of engineering, like telepresence, embodiment, remote control, teleoperation and telerobotics.