It is said that a certain man in Abydos being deranged in mind, and going to the theatre on many days looked on (as though actors were performing a play), and applauded; and, when he was restored to his senses, he declared that that was the happiest time he had ever spent.
– Aristotle, On Marvelous Things Heard
Abstract
Previous work in Game Studies has centered on several loci of investigation in seeking to understand virtual gameworlds. First, researchers have scrutinized the concept of the virtual world itself and how it relates to the idea of “the magic circle”. Second, the field has outlined various forms of experienced “presence”. Third, scholarship has noted that the boundaries between the world of everyday life and virtual worlds are porous, and that this fosters a multiplicity of identities as players identify both with themselves-offline and themselves-in-game. Despite widespread agreement that these topics are targets for research, so far those working on these topics do not have mutually agreed-upon framework. Here we draw upon the work of Alfred Schutz to take up this call. We provide a phenomenological framework which can be used to describe the phenomena of interest to Game Studies, as well as open new avenues of inquiry, in a way acceptable and useful to all. This helps to distinguish the core of the field from the supplemental theoretical and critical commitments which characterize diverse approaches within the field.
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Notes
This indicates the scope of our aims here. We will not be addressing: (1) all games (including physical/tabletop games); (2) strictly single-player games; (3) virtual worlds which are not game spaces. Our focus is on online games that involve multiple players interacting with each other. Examples of these kinds of games, as we will discuss, are massive multiplayer online games (MMOs), massive multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs); massive multiplayer online adventure games (MMOAG); multiplayer real time strategy games (RTS’s), and multiplayer online battle arenas (MOBAs).
Zhao has similarly pursued an extension of Schutzian phenomenology to cyberspace (2004: 92). However, our framework does not invoke Zhao’s concept of “telecopresence” (2004: 98) or of a “face to device” interaction (2004: 99), since we rather focus on how we can encounter others face-to-face* in a digital environment.
Note that no literal German equivalent of the term “face to face” is centrally employed in the original text of Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt. Following on Schutz’s use of the English term “face-to-face” in later work, this phrase became the preferred English translation for phrases like “der umweltlichen sozialen Beziehung” and “die umweltliche Situation”—phrases far less likely to invoke commonsense conceptions of everyday bodily proximity. Schutz always emphasized that the core phenomenological features of what he called a “face-to-face” relationship were only a community of space and time during interaction (see, e.g., Schutz’s “Making music together,” reprinted in 1962: 172, fn. 19).
See Schutz (1967) §34. Generally, while phenomenology seeks to analyze everyday experience, this does not mean that its analyses traffic in the everyday or commonsense meaning of terms and concepts. Caution is often required to avoid invoking the (often ambiguous) naïve or commonsense meaning of terms employed in phenomenological descriptions (see Husserl 2014, e.g., the final sentence of §33, or Schutz 1967, §21–22). Likewise, while in everyday conversation “face-to-face” refers to physical bodily co-presence, in phenomenological analysis, it is possible and necessary to disentangle the notion of everyday bodily proximity from the experience of “being together”.
Walsh & Lehnert’s English translation of Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt (“The Phenomenology of the Social World”) has been aptly described as “unfortunately very unreliable” (Evans 1989: 326 fn. 12). Here we limit our English quotations to acceptable portions, and provide the original German for any key phrases.
Heeter (1992) originally used these categories to describe presence in virtual worlds in general, not specifically video games.
Pearce notably co-authors her work on the Uru with her in-game identity/avatar “Artemesia”.
We do not presume that such aspects of identity-in-relation-to-a-place are the only, or even the most important aspects of ethnicity in the everyday life-world. The reader is free to fill in “ethnicity*” if they prefer.
We do not claim that all video games must be understood as offering just such a world. We claim only that many do, and that these have been a major focus in much research in game studies.
Husserl would not explicitly articulate the notion of the “life-world” itself until later, but intended it to tie back to the general thesis of the natural attitude in the way we have sketched here (see Husserl 1950).
This may appear to be in agreement with Turkle’s (2011) position; but see our “Extension and Application” section below.
Compare Mead’s conception of the “organized, generalized other” (2009: 196).
Schutz provided more incisive descriptions of a few more specific kinds of subject we might experience in the social world, such as “the Homecomer” and “the Stranger”—see Schutz (1964) Collected Papers vol. II, Part II.
A detailed examination of experienced worldness is beyond the scope of this paper. Below we say a bit more, but we refer the interested reader to Husserl’s work, especially Ideas II and the Crisis.
We think the applicability of claims 1–4 makes it acceptable to speak of multiple life-worlds. If one reserves the term “life-world” for the everyday life-world, one will still need to recognize a plurality of lived social worlds.
The everyday life-world is the taken-for-granted ground of everyday activities like “playing a video game,” however it cannot be understood as the ground of all in-game praxis. For example, many games involve “fantastic” practices like casting magical spells—none of the taken-for-granted existences of the everyday life-world can support this kind of praxis, and the praxis is not engaged with existences in the everyday life-world.
The cessation of living-into of gameworld can be voluntary (e.g., one might cease in-game activity to examine the graphical details and contemplate the skill of the game’s designers) or involuntary (e.g., due to an in-game glitch or lag, or a disruption from the everyday life-world, such as an errant cat appearing in front of your monitor).
Similar claims are reflected in Erving Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959).
We admit that Schutz himself may often seem to work under the assumption that corporeality is essential to the (everyday) life-world, and that corporeal proximity with Others is required for face-to-face* interactions. However, we maintain that when Schutz stresses the importance of experiences of the “live corporeality [Leiblichkeit]” of oneself (e.g., 1973: 32, 37, 43, 93) and of the Other (e.g., 1973: 62, 254), what is centrally under discussion are lived Bodies as experienced fields of expression and origins of action. This is especially clear when he speaks of “perceptions of [one’s] own animate organism [Leibes]” during dreaming—see 1973: 32).
We agree with Ollinaho that virtual worlds ``gear into’’ the everyday life-world, and influence its relevance structures. But we would resist his gambit to uphold the primacy of the everyday life-world by claiming (a) that virtual worlds are merely symbolic, and (b) that from a scientific-theoretical perspective, virtual life-worlds are ontologically dependent upon the physical structure of the everyday world (2018: 199). To us, claim (a) is phenomenologically disingenuous, and claim (b) is orthogonal to the phenomenological question of primacy.
We recognize that, as of now, virtual bodies typically afford less expressiveness.
Public review on Steam of Meadow by Nuvi at 3:10 pm, February 11, 2018 (https://steamcommunity.com/id/noov/recommended/486310/).
Public comment on “Player Thanks Thread” in Meadow discussion forum on Steam posted at 1:39 pm, February 15, 2018 (https://steamcommunity.com/app/486310/discussions/0/217690940936532128/#c3377008022021143997).
One motivation for realms is that MMOs like World of Warcraft face a difficulty due to limited in-game resources. For instance, a player might pursue a quest to thin a population of “Springpaw” lynxes in a relatively small area; however, if dozens of players are also pursuing this same quest, a player might have to wait awhile for enough Springpaw lynxes to “respawn” for them to kill. This could cause boredom, frustration, or anger at other players. The game designers circumvent this by having many instances of “the same” area (and thus, many places a player can go to complete the quest) in different realms.
It is, perhaps, worth asking where you, the reader, are living in this moment. If one were to extend our argument to worlds beyond that of MMOs, it could be that you are living into this paper as a finite province of meaning. Depending on how immersed you are, it may be that you are experiencing yourself as standing in relation to us, the authors, as your predecessors who have both physically and conceptually moved around this space before you. For our part at time of writing we relate to you as a successor—someone who we have imagined and contemplated extensively, but someone of whose uniqueness and specificity we are unaware.
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Acknowledgments
The authors are, first and foremost, indebted to each other for their patience and their respective areas of expertise. They are also appreciative for comments they received on earlier drafts from (i) participants at the International Communication Association’s 2017 meeting, (ii) Morana Alač, Don Everhart, Yelena Gluzman, and Sarah Klein, and (iii) the anonymous referees at Human Studies. They are particularly grateful to the editors, Martin Endress and Stefan Nicolae, for their patience. In addition, they would like to thank the organizers of, and participants at, The Society for Phenomenology and Media’s 2015 annual meeting for feedback on related work.
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Hardesty, R.A., Sheredos, B. Being Together, Worlds Apart: A Virtual-Worldly Phenomenology. Hum Stud 42, 343–370 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-019-09500-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-019-09500-y