The Emancipated Player

Abstract

Elevating video games to the same aesthetic level as other forms of representational art, this paper explores humankind’s inherent drive towards aesthetic beauty and the creation of meaning. To analyse this specific type of player, slumbering in all of us, I propose the emancipated player. The emancipated player represents an open-minded and critical player type who willingly engages in the act of play and who primarily wants to experience play’s aesthetic effect. As a refinement of player involvement in video games, the emancipated player’s experience in the gameworld can be regarded as a specific phenomenology of play and becomes particularly fruitful for the analysis of virtualized storyworlds or video game narratives.