Skillful Play Is Dependent on Rules: Notes on a Phenomenology of Skills in Games and Digital Games

This extended abstract, presented at DiGRA 2023, argues that skillful play depends on rules and that skills provide the epistemic access necessary for aesthetic and phenomenological study of games. Its central hypothesis is that acquired skill is what allows a player or scholar to perceive a game's form and potentialities. The project combines Merleau-Pontian phenomenology with contemporary analytical philosophy of mind, and is at an early stage: it first examines classical chess and plans to extend to sensorimotor, skill-based videogames such as Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

The work identifies a gap in game studies, where rules have been widely theorized but the role of practical skill has received comparatively little attention. Drawing on Hubert Dreyfus's account of expertise, the author describes how novices move from detached rule-following toward situation-specific, flexible play, with game-constitutive and tactical rules gradually receding into the background of expert activity. In chess, masters are portrayed as perceiving the board as charged with "lines of force" that call for particular actions, so that the potentialities of a position appear directly through trained perception.

To refine this picture, the abstract engages critics of Dreyfus, including positions that reconsider planning, rationality, and the role of judgment and self-awareness in skilled performance. It adopts Alva Noë's notion of concepts and sensorimotor skills as "skills of access" through which the conscious mind makes things present, arguing that greater skill enriches perception, so that what a chess piece is in a given situation is how it appears in the event of play. The same logic is proposed for action games, where style and performance are tied to individual player identity.

As a conference abstract, the piece offers a conceptual framework and research program rather than empirical findings, data, or a survey-based methodology. Its contribution lies in proposing that the phenomenology of play is inseparable from the skilled handling of a game's rules, a claim it intends to test through close analysis of specific games in future work.