Steps Towards a Phenomenology of Video Games: Some Thoughts on Analyzing Aesthetics and Experience

Jan-Hendrik Bakels' paper develops an analytical phenomenology of video games, combining systematic analysis of game design with subjective, embodied accounts of play. Its central concept is kinaesthesia, the aesthetics of movement, which the author uses to connect existing game studies scholarship, such as Swalwell's argument that gaming produces altered, in-between embodied states, to broader traditions in phenomenology and aesthetic theory. The approach is openly acknowledged as limited in scope, and it draws on Daniel Stern's theory of vitality affects to explain how players come to feel movements that are not their own.

The core argument is that the sense of weight, materiality, and embodiment in games arises less from realistic representation than from the temporal and spatial shape of movement. Analyses of titles such as Tetris, Super Mario World, Gran Turismo Sport, and Red Dead Redemption 2 support this claim, with Michel Chion's concept of synchresis and film-theoretical frameworks helping to explain how audio and visual movement combine into felt experience. The paper proposes that examining the kinaesthetic qualities of represented bodies can reveal the specific modes of being-in-the-world that games generate.

A key distinction concerns player agency. Unlike cinema, where the viewer's temporal experience is fixed and shared, video games let the player control the unfolding of the experience, which the author describes as an ongoing process of auto-affectivity drawing on Michel Henry's work. The resulting feedback loop, in which players tune their embodied experience toward pleasure, positions games as a medium for playfully exploring subjectivity itself. The paper acknowledges that its kinaesthetic focus sets aside cybernetic and information-management dimensions, such as those in real-time strategy games, leaving these as open questions for future work.