The expressive power of virtual hands

What are your hands doing right now? They’re probably playing some part in how you’re able to read this text in the first place, but you likely weren’t paying a lot of attention to them. Our hands are our most frequent and reliable way of interacting with the world around us, and as a result, we tend not to give them much thought.

And yet, hands are far more than just tools to get a job done. Ever since its discovery, the Cueva de las Manos in Argentina has fascinated people with the stencilled handprints of hundreds of human beings. Some of them reach out to us over a historical distance of nearly 10,000 years. There’s something both mysterious and mundane, distant and intimate about this sight. We can’t know the minds of the humans that left their handprints behind, but we do know that they were people like us, exploring and connected to the world around them through their hands.

The Cave of Hands made its way into several video games, Psychonauts 2 and Genesis Noir among them. They’re far from the only games to show appreciation for hands, and handprints in particular. Just think about how the bloody handprint on the wall has long become the tired cornerstone of environmental storytelling in countless horror and action games.

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