Interactivity as Embodied Pleasure: A Media-Phenomenological Reframing through Interactive Short Videos

This theoretical paper challenges the dominant technical-operational definition of interactivity in game studies by examining "finger-interactive" short videos on platforms such as Douyin and TikTok. These videos imitate game mechanics such as dodging obstacles, tapping objects, and following paths, and invite users to touch the screen in coordination with visual cues, yet the system detects no input, adapts to no action, and changes no state. Despite this, users report pleasure, successful performance, and a sense of participation. The paper argues that such experiences expose a blind spot in conventional accounts of interaction, which treat it as a property of systems that recognize and respond to user inputs.

The author proposes a reconceptualization of interactivity grounded in media phenomenology and embodied cognition, drawing on Merleau-Ponty and Ihde. The central concept is the "Participation Illusion," a felt sense that one's actions affect the mediated environment even without system acknowledgment. Rather than describing deception, the concept is presented as identifying the minimal experiential conditions of interaction: action intentionality, coupled expectation between movement and media rhythm, and affective confirmation through felt correctness or success. When these elements form a self-sustaining loop, interactivity emerges phenomenologically regardless of computational responsiveness.

The paper's implications are that interactivity should be understood as a lived accomplishment of embodied agency rather than a technical capability, and that it can encompass weak, pseudo-, and imaginative forms previously dismissed. It argues that pleasure is the phenomenological basis that makes agency salient, so the value of interactive media may be measured by the intensity and stability of pleasurable embodied agency rather than by computational complexity. The study is positioned as a theoretical contribution, and it supports this argument through analysis of a single emerging genre rather than empirical data such as surveys or sample-based measurement.