title: Plaything Phenomenology. A Popular Aesthetics of Videogames
advisor: Jun.Prof. Dr. Jan-Hendrik Bakels (Film Studies, FU Berlin)
Abstract
Plaything Phenomenology is the attempt to understand videogames as a popular art of movement that engages in the active creation of kinetic form. Against the premises of modernist aesthetics that usually favor self-reflexivity or criticality, it is my endeavor to meet the popular at its own terms by understanding the videogame in its moments of affective intensity and performative spectacle. Plaything Phenomenology is also the attempt to redefine play, following phenomenologist Johan Buytendijk, as an appearance of lively form revolving around the coming-together of playthings in the to-and-fro of bodily movement. I follow Buytendijk’s intuition to understand the human body as the original plaything whose capacities for perception and movement can extend onto physical things and virtual things as well. The research objects of this dissertation range from the skateboard to the shadow puppet, the fighting game genre, the platformer, augmented-reality games, and game environments from the Legend of Zelda series. In all of these examples, I understand play as the disclosure of a vital knowledge that can only be had in the lived experience of a kinetic to-and-fro. In this constellation, the videogame reveals itself as the promise to find an own style of movement in a bodily extension that rids the player from the constraints of the physical world.