Embody Kin with Games: Redefining Player-Game Relationships through Kinship Embodiment

This paper proposes "kinship embodiment" as a theoretical framework for understanding player-game relationships, arguing that the prevailing immersion-outmersion dichotomy is too rigid to capture how games are actually experienced. Drawing on theories of embodied simulation, animism applied to virtual worlds, avatar typologies, and Indigenous and queer kinship scholarship, the author reconceives the relationship as a dynamic, reciprocal bond among interacting components, including avatars, non-player characters, environments, and narrative devices. Rather than locating play at a fixed point between absorption and detachment, the framework treats the player-game connection as hybrid and participatory, with each element pulling the others into relation.

The argument is primarily theoretical and does not rely on empirical data. Its central case study is the action-adventure game Hollow Knight, analyzed through close play. The analysis examines how the game balances player and non-player agency, pairs unlimited revival with permanent loss, as in the transformation of the character Myla, and uses the deliberately frustrating figure Zote to deepen emotional investment. From these observations, the author concludes that games should be evaluated less by their degree of immersion than by their capacity to cultivate a reciprocal bond between player and game.

The scope is correspondingly focused: a single title within the digital game genre, approached through qualitative textual and experiential analysis rather than broad industry or audience measurement. The supporting reference base spans game studies, narrative theory, and kinship scholarship, providing the conceptual foundations, including assemblage, moral engagement, and queer kinship narratives, on which the framework rests.