Computer Games and the Complexity of Experience

This paper by Chiel Kattenbelt and Joost Raessens argues that computer games are typically analyzed through a sensory-motor model borrowed from classical cinema, one that privileges the actuality and causality of action and an Aristotelian, action-driven dramaturgy. The authors contend that this framing fails to capture the full complexity of experience, both as represented within games and as lived by players. To remedy this, they draw on two alternative frameworks: Charles Sanders Peirce's phenomenological categories of firstness (feeling), secondness (action and resistance), and thirdness (reflection), and Gilles Deleuze's cinematographic categories of the movement-image, time-image, and thought-image. Together these generate a conceptual framework for analyzing the emotional, volitional, and cognitive dimensions of play and their interrelations.

Building on this triad, the authors propose three subject positions a player may occupy relative to a game's represented world: the lyric (emotional and affective), the dramatic (action-oriented and sensory-motor), and the epic (reflective and contemplative). They argue that the dramatic position dominates mainstream media because of the "device paradigm," in which technology conceals its own mediating character and delivers consumable experiences, and because classical cinema defines audiences as anonymous masses. Their central claim is that free play, in which none of the three modes is subordinated to the others, offers a route toward more complex and critically engaged gaming experiences.

The analysis is primarily theoretical and conceptual rather than empirical. It does not rely on survey data, sample sizes, or quantitative findings. Its illustrative case study is a close reading of Metal Gear Solid (Hideo Kojima, 1999), which the authors argue is dominated by the dramatic position but contains lyric tendencies in its first-person views and epic tendencies where players must look beyond the game's represented world to continue play. The work's scope is general to computer games and draws on a body of philosophy, film theory, and media studies.

The authors conclude that breaking through the dominance of action is a challenge for game designers, who have largely remediated the forms of classical cinema. They call for games that let the experience of play become part of the game itself, and that open space for intensity, reflexivity, and political and ideological awareness.