Extending the Dimensions of the Social World through Game Worlds

Tuckett's paper applies Alfred Schutz's phenomenology of the social world, particularly his "dimensions of the social world" organized around proximity to one's "Here and Now," to multiplayer video games. Its central claim is that existing extensions of Schutz's framework, including Shanyang Zhao's model for internet interaction, fail to describe relations within game-worlds. The author argues these worlds are real finite provinces of meaning experienced as part of the player's milieu rather than as half-real fiction, and proposes first-person shooters (FPS) as the focal case because of their large player bases, with Call of Duty reportedly reaching about 125 million monthly users, and their explicit player-versus-player design, which makes the Other's Otherness visible.

The paper's key conceptual contribution is the "andsociate" relation, a one-sided observation in which one party perceives another who does not perceive them in return. The author contends that competitive FPS games structurally encourage players to keep opponents within their blind spots, a relation Schutz's framework did not anticipate. Dynamic mechanics such as loadouts and limiter perks further reshape each player's manipulatory and perceptive arena, so the boundaries of social interaction shift with the game's design.

The analysis also challenges Zhao and Backhaus's claim that telephone and chat-based communication constitutes a distinct "third realm" of consociated contemporaries. Tuckett argues the perceptive sphere remains unmediated in phone calls, and that Zhao's distinction between chat and letters depends on equating intimacy with objective immediacy rather than subjective experience. Applied to online FPS, the author describes a "face-to-back" andsociate relation and a "face-to-device" consociated relation in which the avatar serves as the perceivable manipulating tool. Text or sound-only mediation yields only indirect perception of an Other "Just Now," whereas sight of an avatar reveals the manipulator's "Now."

The paper concludes that this structure produces a disjunction of sociation: players cannot settle whether an avatar represents a unique individual or a type. The author suggests this ambiguity may help explain the derogatory interaction common in such games, while acknowledging that the claim requires further empirical study. The work situates itself apart from the more common Merleau-Ponty-influenced phenomenology of games and draws on prior research into militaristic attitudes and player communities.