Deepening Gameplay Experiences Through Estrangement

Game studies and design have long treated uninterrupted, absorbing play as the ideal, with flow, immersion, engagement, and even addiction all implying continuous engagement with the game. This extended abstract for DiGRA 2018 challenges that orthodoxy by examining gameplay through estrangement, distance, reflection, and queering. The authors argue that play is also reflective and prone to interruption, and that moments exposing a game's artificial or mechanical nature need not be read as purely negative.

The conceptual backdrop is the idealization of complete player absorption, evident in design principles, positive game journalism, and societal fears of problematic play. Both celebratory and fearful framings echo a literal reading of Huizinga's magic circle, and ongoing interest in virtual and augmented reality, wearables, and seamless interfaces suggests the trend toward ever more captivating games continues.

The authors set two objectives. First, they explore estrangement, the making of the familiar unfamiliar, drawing on game studies, literature, and performance theory, including Brecht, Shklovsky, Freud, and recent work on Brechtian alienation in games. Second, they examine estrangement as a deliberate design philosophy, tracing events, characters, items, and mechanics that break suspension of belief and push players to view the game as outsiders. Central to this is a dual consciousness of playing and not-playing, along with in situ reflection. Methodologically, the planned paper analyzes the player-character relation as the core of game semiosis, weighing conditions that encourage identification against those sustaining critical distance, using approaches borrowed from dramatic action. The guiding question is how games create room for transgressive and subversive play through estrangement.

Estrangement is defined here as seamful design that enables reflection. Queering is positioned as a subset: using something against the grain in ways that challenge heteronormativity and the gender binary, or more simply introducing LGBT content. The authors stress that both queering and estrangement are contextual, since no act is inherently queer or transgressive. They conclude with a key tension: deliberately estranging techniques can become familiar and formalized, losing their power, because alienation cannot be standardized.