The Philosophy of Art & Video Games

Category: Video Games

  • For the Sake of the Struggle: Agential Intensity & Striving Play

    For the Sake of the Struggle: Agential Intensity & Striving Play

    Introduction

    Playing games, particularly video games, in today’s Western world is often dismissed as a trivial endeavor. From a productivist standpoint, games are a waste of time because they lack utility: no money is made, no food is harvested, and no material products remain after hours of play. We live in a capitalist society where every action and every hour are evaluated and measured by output. Human lives have been reduced to metrics; even our vacations are judged by their visual capital on social media. Our lives become increasingly “striated” or mapped out by rigid paths of practicality. This utility trap weakens agency by limiting meaningful choice between the constraints of production or consumption.

    If life restricts our agency to a narrow band of utility, how can we become more autonomous? I suggest that video games are ontologically valuable precisely due to their voluntariness and lack of material interest. By engaging in forms of play that have disposable goals and voluntary constraints, humans can fortify their autonomy precisely because the activity is unnecessary. In his book, Games: Agency as Art, C. Thi Nguyen describes a form of play known as “striving”, where the struggle is more important than the end goal (Nguyen, 9). Striving play differs from achievement play where the end goal is highly valued (Nguyen, 12). Players move between these two types of play on a spectrum of intensities, but it is the act of striving that produces the greatest amount of agency. To elaborate on my concept of agential intensity, I will describe activities that can be measured on a spectrum of agency. At the lower end, biological instincts, such as the drive to seek food, involve minimal agency. While one can choose to resist hunger, as physical discomfort increases, the subject’s library of choices effectively diminishes. Acting out of fear, such as obeying traffic laws to avoid a fine, represents a modestly higher level of agency. Utility occupies a further step on the spectrum, requiring one to endure unpleasant tasks for productive results, like digging a well for payment. Finally, the highest forms of agency are found in internal values, such as hobbies or moral convictions. These elevated levels of action are driven by intrinsic meaning rather than the external pressures of safety, fear, or utility. The following chart illustrates the spectrum of agential intensity.

    Instinct ↔ Fear ↔ Utility ↔ Value

    Less agency ↔ More agency

    It is important to note that there are no purely voluntary actions in life. All human decisions are directed by some combination of instinct, fear, utility, and social conditioning. The chart above merely illustrates a range of agential intensities. Achievement oriented play is more akin to utility where striving play relates more heavily towards value.

    This raises the question: does striving play retain its agential power within the digital constraints of video games, or is it limited to the flexibility of analogue play? Villem Flusser warns how technical systems are produced by an absurd apparatus for which we are merely functionaries. Flusser would argue that video games are closed systems providing only a finite set of options; players are free only to choose what the code allows (Flusser, 104). Despite Flusser’s warning, I argue that all games provide a limited set of rules, from programmatic code, to oral agreements. By engaging in any form of striving play, which values experience over the outcomes, players can strengthen their agency and resist the utilitarian program.

    By employing a hybrid methodology of phenomenology and rhizomatics, I argue that striving play in videogames can serve as a training ground for human agency. Through a phenomenological lens, I establish a framework where the visceral experience of play encourages players to reorient their focus from the end goals to aesthetic experiences of the moment. I will then explore how the rhizomatic nature of video games creates a space where players can move between striving and achievement modalities.

    I begin with a phenomenological assessment of the video game Journey, which provides a model for how visceral experiences in video games can awaken players to the value of the struggle over achievement. By focusing on the sensory experiences, I show how the game’s mountain-top goal serves merely as a pretext for striving play. Next, I transition to a rhizomatic exploration of the video game Minecraft, viewed through the lens of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “smooth spaces” (Delueze, 352). Unlike a linear path toward a fixed destination, Minecraft’s open world provides a landscape of flexibility that encourages the player to move beyond programmed objectives. Here, I will illustrate how the lack of a traditional win-state persuades players to author their own goals and purposes. Finally, I will address Vilém Flusser’s warning about the “apparatus” by using Kentucky Route Zero as a counterpoint to illustrate how players can engage their faculties of understanding and imagination into a Kantian “free play” within a heavily striated game (Kant, 49). Here I will argue how games can activate a player’s imagination to develop an intrinsic form of striving play.

    Section 1: Striving Play (Journey)     

    Figure 1. Screenshot of the author playing Journey. That Game Company. 2026

    Journey is not a typical video game; there are no points, no fighting, no written text. You play as a robed figure on a journey through a mysterious desert wasteland, heading towards an impossibly tall mountain in the distance. The game begins with a 360-degree view of a vast golden desert. The horizon is obscured by the heat shimmer while the individual grains of sand sparkle at your feet. The sun appears large and hazy above the horizon. The visceral scene triggers a bodily sensation of the desert’s oppressive heat. When you begin to walk forward, the sand sprays beneath your heels leaving a trail in your wake. As the players move their character forward, they are confronted by a series of obstacles which must be overcome to proceed. C. Thi Nguyen defines this aspect of play as “Aesthetic experiences of Action”, which he defines as “the satisfaction of finding an elegant solution to an administrative problem, of dodging perfectly around an unexpected obstacle” (Nguyen, 13). Journey provides ample opportunities for players to experience elegant solutions, first through the awkward navigation of sand dunes and temple ruins, then by jumping and flying between pillars, to finally traversing a snow filled mountain peak protected by stone dragons. Each obstacle is overcome through choices of movement. This experience is enhanced through what Edmund Husserl termed “overlapping-at-a-distance” (Husserl, Cartesian Meditations 118). According to Husserl, mirroring occurs when a person perceives another person and recognizes them to be of a similar form. If the other person’s body moves in an elegant way, the perceiver realizes that “I can and do” move in that way too (Husserl, Cartesian Meditations 119). Since the game’s character moves with grace, the player often moves their own body to match the avatar while playing. When the player’s character surfs down a sand dune, the player compares the action to similar experiences from the real world such as skiing or sliding on slippery grass. This concept, combined with Husserl’s theory of “Kinesthesia,” creates an intense aesthetic experience. Husserl defines Kinesthesia as the internal sense of movement one experiences in three-dimensional spaces. According to Husserl, when a person visualizes an imaginary body, the image is cognized in a three-dimensional space in reference to the person’s point of view or what Husserl refers to as a “zero point” (Husserl, Collected Works, 61). When a player jumps and glides from one pillar to the next in Journey, the three-dimensional environment moves with each jump, providing a Husserlian Kinaesthesia, which enhances the participatory sensations in a virtual space. These phenomena explain why players respond so strongly to the visceral experiences in Journey, and how finding elegant solutions to problems becomes the primary motivation for play.

    Figure 2. Central tower inside the silo with ribbon Jellyfish.

    The visceral movements of the game are reinforced by three acts that reflect childhood, adulthood, and old age. The experience is so visceral and relatable that many players have reported finishing the game in tears (Baker). The character’s movement parallels this narrative arc: the first act includes awkward, bewildered stumbling that gives way to an empowering flight mechanic in the second act, and enduring the difficult movements in the third act that ends in the character’s death. The character then transforms into a sparkling light that flies over the traversed spaces of the game, placing the character back where they began (See Figure 3). This ending harkens to Nietzsche’s eternal hourglass from The Gay Science, where he asks, “Do you want this once more and innumerable times more?” (Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 101). Nietzsche presents this recurrence, not as a trap to be endured, but as a test of affirmation. If you were told you must live your life over and over again, would you curse or rejoice? By framing the conclusion as a return to the beginning, Journey transforms the player’s struggle into an end in itself; the goal is not to finish, but rather to enjoy the aesthetic struggle of the journey. By valuing the struggle over the summit, the player escapes their deterministic role and enters the realm of the “striver”.

    Figure 3. The character flies over each earlier trial, to begin the Journey again.

    While Journey provides both a powerful visceral experience and a deeply relatable narrative, it is important to note that the game is solidly linear with few meaningful choices. For instance, players can move in any direction, but if one travels too far off course, a powerful wind blows you backwards toward the linear path. The sense of an open world is merely an illusion, the game offers only a single path to completion. Furthermore, each obstacle may be overcome in only one of two ways. Players can use stealth to avoid the stone dragons, or they can use their flight and agility to engage them head-on. This presents players with a very limited set of choices. If I define agency as intentional action expressed through choices in pursuit of a particular effect, Journey shouldn’t be considered a game that strengthens one’s agency. For this reason, many experts might consider Journey to be more of an experience rather than a game. But I argue that agency can be strengthened by more than simply making decisions that end with a variety of outcomes defined by the video game’s code. Players develop agency by engaging in micro-decisions of movement that provide a pleasing visceral experience.

    The intensity and urgency of the players’ actions are enhanced by the presence of the mountain top goal. If we remove the end goal of Journey, then the obstacles and wandering will lose some allure. Disposable goals provide a clearer purpose to the action, but it is no more than a pretext for striving. Striving play differs from achievement play, where the goal and the purpose are aligned, such as professional Poker players playing for money, or Olympic athletes playing for glory (Nguyen, 9). Striving and achievement play are interdependent opposites that move up and down a scale of agential intensity. Achievement oriented players may still enjoy the aesthetic experience of action, just as disposable goals provide clearer purpose to striving players. Ultimately it becomes a question of emphasis. If achievement is overly emphasized the potential agential intensity is decreased, just as striving oriented play possesses a greater capacity for agency. If Journey can demonstrate agential intensity through striving within a narrow, linear struggle, Minecraft is a videogame that provides a rhizomatic space where players can move between achievement and striving play by authoring their own goals within the game.

    Section 2 Agential Intensity (Minecraft)

    Minecraft is a video game that plays in a radically different way from Journey. The three-dimensional world of the game is entirely composed of large cuboidal blocks (see Figure 4). The square pixelated landscape can be jarring to new players and often requires a dramatic aesthetic adjustment on their part. Each time a person plays, a unique world is created: every mountain, river, cave and tree are uniquely arranged for that particular game. The landscape consists of an infinite variety of biomes and fauna where every block can be manipulated or collected. For example, players can cut down trees to collect wood, mine for ore, or slaughter animals for food and clothing. Players also “craft” by combining different elements to form a vast variety of amalgamations, such as a loaf of bread or a pickaxe. Players must eat and sleep regularly to stay alive, and they also must avoid injuries from: falling, hits from other players, or from deadly monsters. The goal of Minecraft is simple: grow food so you don’t starve and create shelter to protect you from monsters and weather. Once these tasks are complete, the game becomes anything the player can conceive such as; building a city, exploring the world or manipulating the landscape to farm or fish. Due to the vast flexibility of the game, players have created a wide variety of self-authored goals within the game.

    Figure 4. Cuboidal Minecraft Character surveying a valley.

    Here are just a few of the diverse uses players have discovered. In 2020, Reporters Without Borders, a non-profit dedicated to freedom of information, partnered with the design firm Blockworks to build “The Uncensored Library” within Minecraft. The library holds thousands of banned and censored documents from around the world contained within a building modeled after the French National Library (see Figures 5-6). Reporters without Borders chose Minecraft specifically because it would likely stay off the censors’ radar. Since the library is inside the game, it is difficult, if not impossible, to censor (Gerkin). Another incredible example of Minecraft’s fluidity is illustrated in their partnership with UN-Habitat in 2012 to launch the Block by Block which uses Minecraft’s to help communities co-participate in urban planning projects. The urban planners first design a three-dimensional model of the community space in Minecraft, then encourage community members to design parks, playgrounds and markets using the game’s versatile and user-friendly building system. Over 150 projects have been completed worldwide using this method (Block by Block). There are a large number of medical projects, particularly in the cognitive sciences, that have also used Minecraft’s unique environment. The Autcraft server provides a place for children with Autism to safely practice social skills. Children with Autism experience a disproportionate amount of bullying, both in person and online. Autcraft is a highly regulated whitelisted server that prevents bullying, also known as “griefing” in online spaces, allowing children a safe place to interact with other children. These are just a few of the nearly infinite ways players can create their own rules and goals within the game.

    Figure 5. The Uncensored Library
    Figure 6. The Uncensored library next to the design for a French National Library by Etienne-Louis Boullee

    When playing a game, players wholeheartedly agree to follow a set of rules to accomplish a goal. But when the game is over, players discard these disposable rules and goals. Games are temporary, and the rules and goals of games are fungible. It is a great accomplishment to collect diamonds in Minecraft but the desire to mine for diamonds ends with the game. Exercising one’s ability to adopt and discard a wide variety of rules, goals and values, translates into forms of autonomy. Autonomy can be strengthened by engaging in activities that promote agential fluidity which Nguyen defines as the ability to take on and discard temporary and disposable ends for a diversity of games (Nguyen, 5). Participating in a variety of activities with manageable constraints to accomplish a diversity of goals, increases a person’s adaptability to new challenges.

    Minecraft creates an unusual space where agential fluidity can be experienced in a single game. Since players author their own goals and constraints, they can exercise agential fluidity, particularly when engaging with other players. When I play Minecraft, it is my preference to build elaborate palaces that include private gardens with water features. Two of my daughters prefer to collect a cohort of players and embark on adventures into the wilds to discover ruins and treasure. When asked to join the expedition party, I reluctantly leave the comforts of my castle and collect a pack of survival gear. It is important to point out how vulnerable it is to venture out into the unknown without the safety of shelter. Without the coaxing by my daughters, I would not likely venture out, but I am always so delighted to embark on a journey with a jolly crew of adventurers. This is an example of a fungible goal created by my daughters, to simply embark on a quest for discovery. This example illustrates how achievement play and striving play are not binary opposites, but rather a spectrum of intensities.

    At any moment during a game, players may move between striving and achievement play. In Minecraft, a player may begin with an achievement-oriented goal such as the intent to reach the end and defeat the Ender Dragon. Before the player can set out on this quest, they must first build a shelter and collect a wide variety of items. Since this procedure takes time, players may delight in the experience of building and collecting. Every block in Minecraft is manipulatable, therefore players can choose to build a shelter quickly by using readily available blocks such as dirt. Once a player realizes that wood and stone can be used to create chests, doors, furniture and decorations, the process of building a shelter becomes an architectural endeavor. Immanuel Kant would define the simple dirt structure as the first moment of the judgement of taste, the moment of quality: the building is considered “Good” due to its quality of utility, it functions well to serve the player’s needs for protection and storage. Kantian “Good” would fall under the utility section of the agential intensity spectrum. If a player designs a structure to include elaborate furniture and decorations, this would be considered pleasing for its own sake, Kant referred to this as “The Beautiful” which includes “disinterested satisfaction” where the viewer finds the design of the building delightful, separate from its utility (Kant, 41). The Kantian judgement of the “Beautiful” would exist on the higher level of agential intensity. Moving between judgements of the Good and Beautiful is akin to the movements between achievement and striving play. When a player builds a shelter out of necessity, they take on a set of rules to govern their achievement-oriented goals. If the player realizes that the aesthetic quality of design is important, they shift the disposable rules to adapt to the new design-oriented goal. Designing a beautiful home in Minecraft is an endeavor that is never truly complete. The pleasure of creating such a building is not for the achievement of pride or glory, rather it is in the testing of ideas and materials to see if they are aesthetically pleasing. Moving between striving and achievement play illustrates agential fluidity which is the ability to set aside goals and values for new ones. Agential fluidity also strengthens one’s resistance to entrapment by state apparatuses.

    In their essay titled “1227: Treatise on Nomadology—The War Machine,” Deleuze and Guattari discuss two opposing modalities: striated spaces of the state apparatus and smooth spaces of the nomad. The striated space of the State apparatus seeks to capture the continuous flow of matter and energy in a single location to measure and categorize the surroundings. The smooth space of the Nomad allows the flow to proceed without interruption. Rather than settle in a single location, the Nomad occupies vectorial lines (Deleuze, 361). Although these appear to be polar opposites, Deleuze and Guattari emphasize how the two are in a state of constant mixture, not unlike agential intensities (Deleuze, 474). The authors use the games of Go and Chess as clear illustrations of these two modes. Chess functions within a striated space that includes pieces which are coded to move and capture under rigid guidelines. Go, on the other hand, operates in a smooth space where the pieces are anonymous and arranged in non-linear placements (Deleuze, 352). Striated spaces are metric, hierarchical and gridded, while smooth spaces are uncounted, vectoral and circular. When applying this system to Journey, one may find the game to be striated due to the linear paths and clearly defined goal. Minecraft is an unusual mix of smooth and striated space. When a player is building farms, roads and shelters they are operating in a striated space. Like the State apparatus, the Minecraft player is collecting and storing food and materials in a fixed location. If a player decides to set out on an adventure or go searching for rare materials, they enter into the smooth space of the Nomad. Food and shelter must be collected on the go, while many items must simply be dropped to make space to carry only essentials. Smooth spaces are defined by free mobility, the nomad, just like Go pellets, are free to move in any direction at any time. When a player in Minecraft decides to go on a quest of discovery, they may find a cave which contains a wealth of rare ores. The player will stop at the cave and mine for a while, but the cave was never a destination or a goal, it was discovered  accidentally, inspiring the player to change their goals. Deleuze and Guattari define this shift as “lines of flight” that they define as follows, “There is always something that flows or flees, that escapes the binary organizations, the resonance apparatus, and the overcoding machine…” (Deleuze, 216). Lines of flight provide creative opportunities for shifting goals or escaping strata. Achievement play is oriented in a striated space which longs to fix and control. Striated spaces contain rigid rules that provide greater certainty to outcomes. When a player builds a well-planned house or an automated farm in Minecraft, they enter an achievement modality of the striated space, where outcomes are quantifiable with specific measured outputs. But when a player goes out into the open searching for materials, they enter the striving modality of the smooth space where it becomes impossible to determine what a player will find.

    According to Deleuze and Guattari, smooth spaces allow for rhizomatic opportunities, where players can make a variety of lateral choices in any direction (Deleuze, 371). The Rhizome, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is composed of lateral lines, not hierarchical structures as they explain, “There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines” (Deleuze, 8). Striving play is rhizomatic because it is not strictly constrained by the winning outcome. Playing rhizomatically in a smooth space allows for new discoveries and the freedom to diverge from the original impetus. Minecraft allows for rhizomatic opportunities due to its lack of clear goals and the smooth space of possibility. Agential fluidity is also rhizomatic. By engaging with a variety of games that provide different sets of disposable rules, a player becomes more fluid and adaptable, they become nomads who possess the confidence to follow threads outside of the striated constructs of the state apparatus. Minecraft is a smooth space game that allows for rhizomatic opportunities that take the form of player choice which strengthens agency.

    Minecraft is however a model for extraction. Like Heidegger’s “Standing Reserve” Minecraft does encourage players to see the world as a resource waiting for us to manipulate for utility (Heidegger 324). In his article from Cultural Geographies in Practice titled, “On the 10-year anniversary of Minecraft: two interventions in extractive colonialism,” Bennett Brazelton describes the premise as white Eurocentric colonialism. Brazelton illustrates how the original default character in Minecraft is a white male, the building and crafting materials directly stem from Euro-western imagery. He clarifies the extraction mechanic here, “In fact, I would contend that survival is not and has never been the game’s objective. In reality, once very basic needs are met, the game is about expansion and efficiency. More fundamentally, it is premised on a relationship between land, labor, and resources which demands access to and extraction of infinite natural resources” (Brazelton, 493). Brazelton’s analysis of Minecraft is impossible to deny. There is little doubt that Minecraft has indirectly normalized extraction, colonialism and Heideggerian Enframing. But it is also a smooth space game that allows for an infinite variety of player authored goals that spread far beyond the extractive premise of the game.

    In summary, Minecraft presents a world of infinite blocks where players exercise agential fluidity by moving between achievement and striving forms of play. Unlike the linear path of Journey, Minecraft operates within a Deleuzian smooth space with rhizomatic opportunities, where players author their own disposable goals. This illustrates a spectrum of agential intensity      that spans from the utility of building a functional shelter to the disinterested pleasure of aesthetic creation. Players strengthen their autonomy and adaptability by discarding temporary modes of play. However, this agential space is complicated by Minecraft’s extractive premise. While Minecraft leaves these connections to the neoliberal apparatus unexamined, Kentucky Route Zero confronts them directly, centering its narrative on the human role as a functionary within a capitalist regime.

    Section 3: Agential Subversion (Kentucky Route Zero)

    Kentucky Route Zero is more than a video game, it is a mystical poetic window into the human experience. It is an episodic text adventure game created in five acts released separately from 2013-2020 by Cardboard Computer. Kentucky Route Zero can be completed but cannot be won. Visually the game is a mixture of three-dimensional and two-dimensional abstracted representations of people in a surreal fictional version of Kentucky. For most of the game you follow the main character Conway, an aging delivery driver making his last shipment to an address on the mysterious Route Zero. Along the way Conway collects a cohort of friends that include Shannon, a TV repairwoman; Ezra, a young boy accompanied by a giant eagle; and Johnny and Junebug, a pair of android musicians (see Figure 7). The game alternates between three-dimensional scenes where players can move Conway around to complete various tasks or select to engage in dialogue with other characters. The dialogue is presented as text on the screen where players are provided with 3-5 responses to choose from (Figure 8). The text options provide a form of character building where different dialogue choices change the characters history, for instance, one can choose how Conway remembers the death of his employer Lisette’s son. Player choices diverge in different directions but always converge together by the end of the scene. This creates a linear storyline that provides the player with the illusions of choice that does not change the final outcome. Beyond the text dialogue, all of the characters and sets are abstract, the trees and clouds are represented by flat diamond shapes, and the characters are faceless. The emotional resonance of the game is relayed by the effective use of dialogue combined with surreal visual and narrative ambiguity.

    Figure 7: Conway, Shannon, Ezra and the Eagle waiting in the forest that references Rene Magritte’s painting titled “The Blank Signature”

    Villem Flusser would describe Kentucky Route Zero as an apparatus, where players are merely functionaries who only exist to complete the program of the apparatus (Flusser, 104). Cameras, bureaucracies and video games all qualify as Flusserian apparatuses (Flusser, 96). Kentucky Route Zero, according to Flusser, would be considered an apparatus because it supplies the illusion of meaningful choice, when in truth, all choices lead to a specific outcome at the end of the game. Flusser suggests that we can only exercise true agency by subverting an apparatus within itself, by playing in a way that does not serve the program. In this way, one transforms from a functionary, who only follows the exact guidelines, to a player who makes meaningful choices which produce unintended outcomes. Subversion doesn’t break the apparatus; it merely provides the player with a form of agency that illuminates its absurdity. It would be difficult to subvert a video game such as Kentucky Route Zero because the game is so inflexible. But I argue there are alternate ways, other than direct subversion, which can strengthen human agency within the confines of an apparatus.

    Kentucky Route Zero lacks meaningful choices but empowers players and strengthens their agency as a work of art. Players exercise their creativity by completing visual abstractions, empathizing through narratives and authoring histories using retroactive character building. This intrinsic form of creative thought is not dissimilar to the extrinsic phenomenological striving play in Journey. When players use their imagination to complete visual and narrative gaps in a game, they are experiencing a form of internal striving play.

    I will first explain how the abstracted visuals in the game provide an opportunity for players to conceive of the world in Kentucky Route Zero in a unique and personal way. Since the characters and sets are simplified, faceless and abstract, the player’s imagination is free to complete their own personal visual interpretation of the world. Immanuel Kant referred to this process as “Free Play” between the faculties of the imagination and understanding (Kant, 49). The understanding tries to categorize the images while the imagination attempts to find patterns and develop a concept of what the player is seeing. If the images are realistic, the concept of what is seen is quickly categorized. But if the visuals are abstract, the player’s faculty of understanding has difficulty placing them in a specific category and the imagination can’t form a clear concept. According to Kant, “since no determinate concept restricts them to a particular rule of cognition” (Kant, 49). Put simply, the player cannot make a clear visual judgement about a character, because they are abstract. This act of filling in the visual gaps, using one’s imagination is an act of authorship within the player’s mind. This form of authorship ranks high on the agential intensity scale towards the value region of the spectrum.

    The game furthers this experience by providing a narrative that is unexpected and ambiguous. We are presented with a version of Kentucky that is unfamiliar. There are some recognizable objects in the game, but there are also robot musicians and an underground highway that houses strange art galleries and computers made of fungus. The narrative is so vague and unusual that a player’s faculties of understanding are at a loss and must rely on the imagination to make sense of it all. Players must author their own narratives to fill in the mysterious gaps in the game and answer questions such as: Is the giant Eagle real? Why does it follow Ezra? Why aren’t the characters concerned with its enormous size? This internal authoring provides the player with a delightful form of striving play which Nguyen refers to as “Aesthetic experiences of Action” (Nguyen, 13). Authoring a reason for the presence of a giant eagle in this world is an “elegant solution to an administrative problem” (Nguyen, 13). By authoring a reason, the player is creatively engaged with the world. The video game isn’t altered or subverted, but the player is empowered by their creative solutions. This form of authorship is an act of free will that becomes a personal, internal subversion that empowers the player against the deterministic absurdity of the apparatus.

    By co-authoring the game, the player gains agency that balances the power dynamics within the apparatus. While Hegel’s master-slave dialectic suggests the slave achieves self-realization through the creation of material objects, the player as functionary gains this same autonomy through the intrinsic act of authorship alone, rendering the physical product unnecessary for strengthening agency (Hegel, 97). I argue that it is the authorship and idea generation alone that one gains agency and therefore the functionary becomes a player who subverts the apparatus through their faculty of imagination.

    Figure 8. Dialogue selection between Conway and Lisette in Kentucky Route Zero.

    In addition to the visual abstraction and the unexplained oddities in the game, players are given a choice in how the characters interact through a series of text response options. For instance, when Conway is speaking with Harry, the bartender at The Lower Depths Tavern, players can choose his history with alcohol, he can be sober for a long time or he can have a recent relapse. These choices do not change the outcome of the game, but when Conway relapses, the player’s experience will either be one of tragedy or inevitability. By changing the history of the character, the narrative retroactively changes. I argue that this form of choice is far more effective than a choice that leads to a different outcome, because the choice involves a deeper form of empathy with the character, once again ranking higher on the agential intensity scale. Flusser would see this action as a functionary manipulating symbols in the codified world while nothing changes in the concrete world (Flusser, 30). But I argue that by manipulating the predefined symbols in Kentucky Route Zero, the player is engaging with a character that reflects a concrete person. Both choices in Conway’s dialogue provide varying degrees of vulnerability relating to Conway’s battle with addiction. This intimate encounter elicits empathy from the player, even in a video game that ends with only one outcome.

    Finally, the antagonist in Kentucky Route Zero is the neoliberal apparatus itself. Throughout the game the characters are constantly being beaten down by the Consolidated Power Company. The oppressive and objectifying nature of the apparatus is rendered both in visual and textual content. Textually, we read the dialogue between the characters and discover the reason why Conway is perpetually lost is partly due to the Company renaming streets throughout Kentucky. Furthermore the Hard Times Distillery is a subsidiary of the Consolidated Power Company, which engages in indentured servitude by forcing people to pay their debts to the company through labor. Characters effectively become functionaries for the apparatus. This transformation is visually rendered by characters becoming glowing electric skeletons. Some characters like Conway, have a single limb that is skeletonized, representing a midway conversion into indentured servitude (see Figure 9).

    Figure 9. Conway receives his skeleton leg from the company hospital.

    By the end of the game Conway and his friends find their way to their destination and deliver the antique furniture to a new home surrounded by a devastated community. Conway succumbs to his debts with the Consolidated Power Company and becomes a full Skeleton. The final scene ends with singing by the remaining community members. The group of friends realize how they cannot escape the apparatus but they can choose to find meaning in the community they form with each other. This last scene echoes Flusser’s final message at the end of Post-History,

    We may, equally, be players that play in function of the Other. Thus, we may pass from being robots to once again being “the image of God,” through the back door. To rupture the alienated symbolization and return to the concrete experience of our own death in the Other. To return, in sum, to being Human (Flusser, 166).

    Put differently, to maintain our humanity amidst the absurd apparatus, we must recognize our own vulnerability and mortality in one another. It is our empathetic shared struggle that provides meaning and protects us from becoming permanent functionaries of the apparatus.

    Conclusion

    As I have shown, video games are ontologically valuable due to their voluntariness and lack of material interest. While we live in a capitalist society where every action is measured by output, engaging in forms of play with disposable goals and voluntary constraints allows humans to strengthen their agency. Throughout this paper, I have argued how players move on a spectrum of agential intensities, and it is the act of striving that produces the greatest amount of agency. By analyzing Journey through the lens of phenomenology, I illustrated how visceral experiences can awaken players to the value of the struggle over achievement. Exploring the rhizomatic nature of Minecraft furthered this argument by showing how a landscape of flexibility and smooth space, encourages players to move beyond programmed objectives and author their own goals. This form of authorship strengthens agential fluidity, which translates into forms of autonomy and the ability to resist the utilitarian program. Finally, by addressing Villem Flusser’s warning that we are functionaries of an apparatus, I have shown how players can engage their faculties of imagination within a heavily striated game to effectively subvert the program. By valuing the struggle over the summit, players escape their deterministic role and enter the realm of the striver, making meaningful choices that are decoupled from achievement and utility. Therefore, striving play strengthens agency and allows us to become more autonomous within the constraints of a pragmatically driven world.

    Neoliberal utilitarian apparatuses are absurd and destructive mechanisms that colonize, occupy, extract and objectify. Curating and modeling activities that encourage forms of striving, may aid in a reorientation of ontological perspectives that gradually erode hierarchical and striated ontologies, allowing humans to strengthen their agential intensity toward value, becoming players rather than functionaries.

    Works Cited

    “Block by Block.” Block by Block, www.blockbyblock.org/. Accessed 13 Mar. 2026.

    Brazelton, Bennett. “On the 10-Year Anniversary of Minecraft: Two Interventions in Extractive Colonialism.” Cultural Geographies, vol. 27, no. 3, 2020, pp. 491–98.

    Deleuze, Gilles, et al. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

    Flusser, Vilém, et al. Post-History. Univocal, 2013.

    Gerken, Tom. “Minecraft ‘loophole’ Library of Banned Journalism.” BBC News, BBC, 13 Mar. 2020, www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51883247.

    Harper, Nick. “Journey and the Art of Emotional Game Design.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 21 Nov. 2012, www.theguardian.com/technology/gamesblog/ 2012/nov/21/journey-emotional-game-design.

    Heidegger, Martin, et al. Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927) to the Task of Thinking (1964). Harper Perennial Modern Thought, 2008.

    Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. M. Nijhoff, 1960.

    Husserl, Edmund. Collected Works. M. Nijhoff Publishers, 1980.

    Kant, Immanuel, and Nicholas Walker. Critique of Judgement Immanuel Kant. Transl. by James Creed Meredith. Rev., Ed., and Introd. by Nicholas Walker. Oxford Univ. Press, 2008.

    Nguyen, C. Thi. Games: Agency as Art. Oxford University Press, 2020.

    Nietzsche, Friedrich, and Walter Kaufmann. The Portable Nietzsche Selected and Translated, with an Introd., Prefaces, and Notes, by Walter Kaufmann. Pinguin Classic, 2006.

     Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, et al. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Cambridge University Press, 2010.

    Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Vintage Books, 1967.

  • From Sacred to Simulated: The loss of our connection to tangible art in the digital age

    From Sacred to Simulated: The loss of our connection to tangible art in the digital age

    The human need for shared meaning and community can be traced from prehistory to the present through sacred ritual art and practices. During the present century, many sacred rituals have been disrupted or abandoned, yet the desire for these practices continues to last in many fragmented and less enduring ways. This paper addresses this shift from enduring sacred rituals to short-lived digital practices. Ultimately, I will prove that our need for rituals persists, but the symbolic meaning attached to them no longer originates in the human imagination; rather, it is produced and transcoded by what Vilém Flusser refers to as the apparatus. By understanding this profound continuity between sacred and digital ritual art, we can better formulate approaches for navigating our digital future.

    This paper will first establish a framework for the relationship between humans and sacred ritual art, drawing on the work of Warren Colman to illustrate how sacred sculpture ushered in symbolic thinking that led to shared, unifying experiences. Next, I will build upon this argument by analyzing the profound and enduring sacred masks and dances of the Bwa in Burkina Faso; whose ritual practices have provided cultural stability and a unifying experience for centuries. I will then trace the modern shift toward the virtual world by comparing the Bwa masks with the digital skins purchased by players of the video game Fortnite. I will engage with Byung-Chul Han’s critique in The Disappearance of Rituals, which suggests digital commodities are ineffectively displacing sacred art. I counter this with Ken Hillis’ Online a Lot of the Time, to demonstrate how contemporary online communities are creating new digital rituals to develop meaning and to build community. Finally, I will argue how Vilém Flusser’s concept of the Apparatus is the true source of destabilization in society, proving how digital rituals are merely symptoms of a broader modern condition that has co-opted symbolic meaning and ritual to perpetuate the neoliberal program.

    To understand the origins of ritual, this paper briefly analyses the 40,000-year-old Lion Man sculpture to illustrate early human symbolic imagination (Figure 1). In his book Act and Image: The Emergence of Symbolic Imagination, Warren Colman proves how symbolic thinking first emerged from the human relationship with material objects. According to Colman, when humans attach meaning to an object and share the designation, the object becomes a symbol of the attached meaning. Symbols, such as language, jewelry or sculpture, provide an external form for an idea to attach to. One of the most enigmatic illustrations of this is found in the ivory-carved Lion Man from 40,000 BCE Germany, which is the oldest known example of figurative art (Figure 1). If a human creates an object that resembles both a lion and a man, this new object is a physical manifestation of the imagination. The realm of the imagination is the realm of images, dreams, and to some, a spirit world. If one can make concrete images from the abstract realm of the imagination, then abstract concepts such as religious beliefs can be solidified and shared among members of a community. Colman suggests that social interactions around a sacred object develop into rituals that only enhance the power of the sacred object within a community. He further maintains that sacred art objects such as the Lion Man may have served as a bridge between the spirit world and the physical world, eventually becoming Spirit incarnate (Colman, 202).

    Figure 1. Löwenmensch (Lion-man) Ivory, c. 40,000 BCE. Discovered, 25 August 1939 Germany. Museum Ulm, Ulm, Blaubeuren, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany

    How does symbolic imagination relate to the development of sacred ritual art? To answer this question, I will now turn to the enduring sacred masks and ritual dances of the Bwa people of Burkina Faso. The Bwa have practiced ritual mask-making and dances for hundreds of generations (Roy, 40). Their sacred rituals include: initiations, funerals, village purification, upholding ethical laws, honoring ancestors, origin stories and petitions (Roy, 50-55). Masks are carved and painted with red, white and black geometric patterns that symbolically represent religious laws that have been given to the village priests from Spirits (See figures 2 and 3). Young men and women undergo several years of initiation rites, where they are taught the meaning of the symbols on the masks by the village elders. The carved and painted masks, encoded with symbolic meaning, provide a tactile representation of law, history, and spirituality that temporally binds the community. One commonly used symbol is black zigzag lines (see Figures 2 and 3) that represent the difficult paths traversed by the ancestors. As explained by a Bwa elder, “we must try the best we can to do as our ancestors did because they, after all, were successful” (Roy, 51). Each mask is meant to represent an animal spirit by combining different abstract animal forms such as: antelope, bush pig, hyena, serpent and hawk. Much like the chimera of the Lion Man sculpture, these masks are the Spirits incarnate that allow viewers and participants to experience the immaterial. The tactile symbol of the guardian Spirit strengthens the participant’s prayer for guidance along the path of their ancestors.

    Figure 2 (Right). Nwantantay Mask, by Yacouba Bondé (Bwa, Burkinabé, ca. 1986 High Museum of Art, Atlanta GA. Figure 3 (Left). Dancer and Mask in Boni village. Photo credit: Elena Bobrova, 2020

    Like many religious practices, the ritual practices of the Bwa reach deep into the past and continue to endure. Unfortunately, many rituals have disappeared in modern societies. Byung-Chul Han, a contemporary philosopher, posits that neoliberal consumer culture traps individuals in a perpetual cycle of production and consumption, leading to disconnection and discontent. According to Han, we can resist this never-ending cycle by embracing symbols and ritualistic activities. It is through symbols that we silently share and connect with one another, as Han poetically describes “… rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. …They are to time what a home is to space: they render time habitable” (Han, 2). Han’s main thesis is that modern society has lost its meaningful rituals, leading to existential anxiety and a lack of belonging. Han posits that rituals are symbolic acts that are diminished in our consumer-driven society, where everything is judged by its utility and productivity, stripping objects of their deeper symbolic meaning. This leads to a world that is “symbol-poor” (Han, 2). Han argues that symbolic perception stems from a shared, stable experience of the world. This stability is maintained by symbols used in rituals that are regularly practiced through generations. When one perceives a ritual symbol, such as a Bwa mask, they are reconnecting with a meaning that is already learned and shared by the community, drawing it from the past into the present, trusting it will endure into the future. This contrasts with the contemporary neoliberal obsession with the ‘new’. Rather than rendering art objects that reflect an enduring ritual, we create new replaceable objects to consume and discard, allowing for more, new objects to be consumed in a never-ending loop.

    As enduring sacred rituals decline in modern society, are these practices replaced or do they disappear? I argue that rituals and symbolic imagination have been part of humanity before the Lion Man, and therefore, these practices are embedded into the human condition. I will argue that human’s continue to create new rituals in less enduring forms such as video games. Using Fortnite as a case study, I will attempt to prove how digital rituals can help humans feel at home in the world, but their conception and delivery is embedded in an apparatus that disrupts their stability.

    Fortnite is a video game that possesses many of the requisites of sacred ritual. Fortnite is a Battle Royale, multiple player online video game that begins with 100 players parachuting onto an island (Figure 4), collecting weapons, and engaging with opposing teams in an attempt to be the last player standing. Each match lasts only 10-15 minutes, as a toxic storm shrinks the boundary of the island, eventually forcing the players to battle or die in the toxic cloud. In an age where everything is based on the ‘new’, Fortnite has proven to be an unusual example of longevity, as its player base continues to steadily grow since its inception in 2017. The video game’s success is likely owed to its seasonal use of new content and its astute alignment with popular culture. Each new season refreshes the theme of the island map and purchasable cosmetic “skins” to fit with current popular media. This seasonal aspect provides players with regular content changes that encourages them to return season after season. The most recent example of this commodification of popular media icons was the collaboration between Fortnite and the explosively popular South Korean animated film, K-pop Demon Hunters (Figure 4). Fans of the film raced to login to Fortnite and purchase the skin of their favorite character from the film. These seasonal changes are limited time events that effectively generate Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) incentivizing players to engage with the new content before it disappears. Both the seasonal events and the FOMO are illustrations of the neoliberal regimes’ attempt to keep players returning, which Han describes as an endless cycle of consumption and production. Fortnite skins are encoded with symbolic meaning from cultural icons that symbolize the player’s skill and interests. In a similar way the Bwa masks incorporate learned symbolic images that communities recognize, creating an unspoken unity among the tribe. Beyond this, both the Bwa ritual dancers and Fortnite players leave their primary identities behind and enter into a sacred space that suspends the rules of daily life for a constrained set of temporary rules.

    Figure 4. K-Pop Demon Hunters and Fortnite Creative Character Cosmetics, Fortnite.com, 2025

    These rules separate rituals and games from the seemingly chaotic real world. According to Johan Huizinga in his book Homo Ludens, “play…creates order, is order. Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life it brings a temporary, a limited perfection” (Huizinga, 10). Both the game space and the ritual space illustrate a more perfect and simpler place, offering protection through limited, prescribed rules. Fortnite will regularly change the theme of the play space, but overall the gameplay and general look of the game is extremely consistent and predictable. The seasonal changes encourage players to re-engage with Fortnite, but once they enter the game for the new season, there is very little to learn and adapt to the prescribed framework, which provides the player with comfort and control.  The Bwa dancers are adorned with costumes that are designed anew each season by local artists who follow a limited range of symbols and colors. Each Bwa ritual performance is scheduled for specific seasons and offers a temporary window into the Spiritual realm. In summary both games and rituals provide a predictable framework that establishes duration, but also provides flexibility and newness to keep the practice interesting.

    In addition to predictable rules, digital spaces may also provide a substitute for Spiritual realms. The conscious goal of many religious rituals is to connect with entities from another realm, be it the land of the dead or with Spirits. Bwa dancers attempt to embody entities from the Spirit world to divine the future and connect with the past. How can a secular neoliberal culture embrace these transcendent experiences? The answer may lie in the telepresent nature of the internet. Humans can bi-locate or astral project themselves through web cams, chat rooms and video game avatars. Are these digital spaces acting as a substitute for traditional sacred spaces?  Hillis would say they do, “Technology itself, for these individuals, approaches a material actualization of the ideal and performs sacred, even spiritual, operations similar to those once reserved for the sphere of religious practice” (Hillis, 64). Here Hillis argues that the digital realm is replicating many aspects once provided by the Spiritual realm. The play space in Fortnite is a three-dimensional virtual environment populated with lifelike fauna, buildings, roads, and infrastructure. Although presented on the player’s screen as a physical location, this environment, like the player avatars, exists only as digital code, lacking a real location, not unlike a spirit realm. This experience of meeting fellow players in a virtual realm may function in a similar way to participants in a sacred ritual who imagine a Spiritual realm.

    In summary, sacred rituals and digital games ultimately provide a way for people to establish order in a chaotic world, by following rules, brushing against the transcendent, creating meaningful experiences that bind communities. I argue that despite the similarities, digital rituals do not fully supply humans with enough stabilizing duration to ease our anxieties caused by the neoliberal apparatus, which prevents these new rituals from fully performing their function.Digital rituals are weaker forms of sacred practices, but they are not the cause of ritual decline, nor do they contribute to the destabilization in neoliberal societies. I argue that it is the apparatus, rather than digital ritual practices, that is the root cause of ritual decline and societal destabilization. According to Vilém Flusser, a twenty-first century philosopher who suggests we are on the precipice of a “programmatic reality” which he defines as a world run by apparatuses composed of functionaries (Flusser, 24). Functionaries are humans who only wish to maintain the apparatus’s program. The apparatus, according to Flusser, is like a “black box”, with complexity so vast that individual functionaries cannot fully comprehend it (Flusser, 96). Since the apparatus is beyond comprehension, it operates on its own, treating the functionaries as cogs in a machine. For Flusser, bureaucracies, companies, computer programs and even cameras are all apparatuses that produce symbols which he refers to as technical images. “Traditional images are produced by men and technical images by apparatus” (Flusser, 95). Flusser would define the video game Fortnite as part of an apparatus. The game is programmed by functionaries who unknowingly follow the apparatuses program. Players are in turn, functionaries of functionaries, who collude with the program whose only purpose is for players to keep returning and consume. Technical images, according to Flusser, are post-historical, they are not created by humans but by the apparatus to present the illusion of objectivity (Flusser, 97). People have come to trust the photograph because it appears to be an objective replica. According to Flusser, the photograph is not objective, it is transcoded with layers of indecipherable information encoded by the apparatus. The Bwa ritual masks and dances, on the other hand, are created by humans and use traditional images to create imaginative scenes by encoding them with agreed upon meanings (Flusser, 93). When humans assign shared meaning to an object, it becomes a symbol from which regular interactions develop into a ritual. The ritual symbols are conceived by humans for humans, resulting in unifying cohesion, serving to benefit the group. Images that are transcoded by the apparatus are too complex for humans to decipher. Since the symbolic nature of technical images produced by the apparatus are undecipherable, we are unknowingly collaborating in our own enslavement.

    If transcoded messages produced by the apparatus are too complex to fully decode and the apparatus itself escapes our understanding, how do we exist without losing ourselves under the absurd hegemony of the mindless apparatus? Flusser believes the solution involves a recognition of the apparatuses absurdity and intentionally disrupt the program. Only in sabotage can we catch a glimpse of the ‘real’ and gain a momentary sense of agency. Choosing to play the game in a way that was not intended allows for a brief moment of recognition of the absurdity of the program. This act of rebellion temporarily stops our cog from being played by the apparatus and the player may experience a brief glimpse of empowerment. In Fortnite players have devised a wide variety of ways to subvert the game by inserting their own constraints. The most common subversion is the refusal to shoot other players. A player can win by hiding and relying on the toxic cloud to kill the other players (Waldron). Another popular subversion is the hosting of fashion shows, where players will agree to meet at a designated location on the map and conduct a private fashion show (rFortniteFashion). Finally, many players have simply provided a free taxi service by offering other players rides around the map (Garst). By accepting the absurd and playing the game as it wasn’t intended, we can become a player in the game rather than a piece that is controlled by the apparatus. If we apply acts of subversion to secular digital rituals such as Fortnite, it could function to help us feel at home in the world, if we occasionally choose to play the game in a way that is not intended.

    Figure 5: Birds-eye view of the island in Fortnite, Fortnite.com, 2025

    In conclusion, the enduring human need for shared meaning and community can be found in objects that illustrate symbolic imagination and ritual such as the Lion Man and masks of the Bwa of Burkina Faso. These symbolic ritual practices have begun to disappear under the neoliberal drive to produce and consume. According to Byung-Chul Han, this obsession with consumption leads us to a perpetual striving for the ‘new’ in turn, preventing us from being at home in the world and rendering time habitable. Our human desire for habitable time has led us to find ritual practices within the neoliberal apparatus in the form of online multiplayer videogames such as Fortnite. Although Fortnite is certainly not a direct replacement for the enduring qualities of sacred ritual, it clearly illustrates an attempt to maintain community structures through shared ritual, symbolic imagery and play. These contemporary digital rituals are not the cause of our existential destabilization, rather they are a symptom and a vestige of a past survival tactic to form community through shared meaning. The true nature of society’s destabilization lies in our perpetuation of the absurd apparatus. The hope for new ritual practices lies in their ability to allow for brief windows of human agency, through the disruption and subversion of the apparatus. If we apply our own constraints to the apparatus and expose its absurdity, we may once again feel at home in the world through the silent shared meaning of symbols.

    Works Cited

    Colman, Warren. Act and Image the Emergence of Symbolic Imagination. Routledge, 2021.

    Flusser, Vilém. Post-History. Univocal Publishing, 2013.

    Garst, Aron. “Fortnite Players Are Roleplaying as Taxi Drivers.” GameSpot, GameSpot, 10 Aug. 2020, www.gamespot.com/articles/fortnite-players-are-roleplaying-as-taxi-drivers/.

    Han, Byung-Chul. The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present. Polity, 2020.

    Hillis, Ken. Online a Lot of the Time: Ritual, Fetish, Sign. Duke University Press, 2009.

    Huizinga, Johan Homo Ludens Ils 86. Reprint of the edition 1949, vol. 00003, Routledge, 1998. 

    Marx, Karl, and David McLellan. Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Oxford University Press, 2000.

    r/FortniteFashion. Fortnite Fashion Shows: What Makes Them Good for You?, 2019, www.reddit.com/r/FortniteFashion/comments/etlxyk/fortnite_fashion_shows_what_makes_them_good_for/.

    Schechner, Richard. Performance Studies: An Introduction. Routledge: New York and London, 2006.

    Waldron, Carl. “How to Become the Solid Snake of ‘Fortnite: Battle Royale.’” Fandom, FANDOM, 26 Apr. 2018, www.fandom.com/articles/how-to-become-the-solid-snake-of-fortnite-battle-royale.

    Roy, Christopher D., et al. Land of the Flying Masks Art and Culture in Burkina Faso Christopher D. Roy ; Thomas G. B. Roy. Prestel, 2006.

  • Abstraction and Singularity: Hegemonic Disruption in Video Games

    Abstraction and Singularity: Hegemonic Disruption in Video Games

    This paper explores the role of abstraction in fostering unique, singularizing experiences while engaging with both plastic and digital art. I will begin by defining hegemonic phantasms and examine how first-century Roman art and thirteenth-century Gothic art played a role in the institution and destitution of the Latin Phantasm, according to Reiner Schürmann. Subsequently, I will apply these principles and concepts to pixel art used in contemporary video games. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how abstract art possesses a greater potential for creating unique, individualized experiences that may foster self-reflection and resistance to hegemonic systems.

    Hegemony can be defined as dominant leadership by one group over others. A phantasm is an illusion or a product of a fantasy. According to Reiner Schürmann, hegemonic phantasms use normative rules and universals as a construct to establish order and meaning in culture or linguistic era.

    For instance, the American Dream serves as a universal, manifesting in particulars like homeownership or securing a well-paying job. Singularities themselves are distinct, unrepeatable events or individuals, such as the election of President Obama. Universals tend to simplify reality and can dismiss counter arguments, while maintaining falsehoods that support the dominant group. In terms of the American Dream, a negative universal is meritocracy, the concept that everyone has an equal opportunity for success. This universal ignores obstacles that can limit success to some groups while celebrating the financial success of those born into wealth. Hegemonic phantasms aren’t entirely negative; they often include universals that help people navigate and make sense of the world. For instance, the American Dream may encourage people to develop a good work ethic or a drive for self-improvement. The problem occurs when the overreliance on universals to define reality begins to support oppression. Schürmann argues that we need to strive to measure our being though singulars and recognize that universals tend to inflate the dominant group.

    Reiner Schürmann provides an example of the institution of the Latin hegemonic phantasm of natura in his book Broken Hegemonies (Schürmann, 191). According to Schürmann, Cicero, a first century Roman poet and politician, played a key role in the institution of natura as a hegemonic phantasm (Schürmann, 193). Cicero’s concept of natura was based on the idea that there is a natural order to the world, and this order is used to justify the rule of law and the importance of civic virtue. Schürmann argues that Cicero’s concept of natura was a hegemonic phantasm because it provided a way of understanding the world that was dominant, unquestioned yet was in fact nothing (Schürmann, 8).

    Art can play a significant role in both the institution and destitution of hegemonic phantasms. In the case of Cicero’s institution of natura, we can look to first century Roman Veristic portraiture, defined by highly realistic sculptures that included wrinkles, warts and thinning hair. A clear illustration of this style can be seen in Roman marble portrait of Marcus Nonius Balbus Figure 1. The head of the portrait of Marcus Nonius Balbus is rendered with Roman verism, complete with wrinkles and disapproving frown. The body, on the other hand, is a copy of a 5th century BCE Greek Bronze rendering of Doryphoros by Polykleitos Figure 2. The naturalism of the statue of Balbus leaves little room for interpretation. The wrinkles and aged facial features are intentionally encoded signaling to the audience that this man has dedicated his long life to civic duties. The downward gaze along with the frown communicates authoritarian disapproval creating a space between the sculpture and the viewer that leaves the viewer feeling belittled, yet grateful to this wise benefactor. Beyond the wisdom and superior status, the sculpture includes a mathematically perfect figure modeled after the Greek bronze statue of Doryphoros that presents a man who is more than mortal, to be envied for his virility and god-like power. These conflicting images reveal the inconsistent message of Cicero’s natura. The Greek body reflects the perfect harmony and power of nature that is mismatched with the veristic head that reinforces Roman civic authority. The laws of nature have little in common with Roman civic virtue, just as Balbas’s veritive head has little to do with the Doryphoros idealized body.

    Figure 1. Marcus Nonius Balbus c. 27 BCE-14 CE (arms and legs modern). Naples National Archaeological Museum
    Figure 2. Doryphoros of Polykleitos. c. 5th century BCE. Naples National Archaeological Museum

    Cicero’s concept of natura lasted many centuries, until Meister Eckhart, a 13th century Dominican monk, introduced the concept of natura non naturata (non-natured nature) creating a diremption or fracture against the Latin hegemonic phantasm of natura. Eckhart’s concept challenged the traditional view that God must follow his own rules, therefor making the law of nature unrefutably. Eckhart posited that God is separate from and transcendent over nature, and not beholden to nature’s laws. Schürmann argues that Eckhart’s concept was a significant challenge to the hegemonic phantasm of natura by presenting nature and God, not as a hierarchy of rules, but rather as a dynamic and creative force of becoming. This concept creates a diremption in Cicero’s hierarchical law-abiding phantasm. Eckhart’s theology does not focus on outward rules, rather it was focused on interior change that begins with detachment from the physical world allowing individuals to grow in virtue internally (Schürmann, 286). This concept is difficult for a hegemony to manipulate, since it is inherently singular, focusing on the individual’s interior experience with the divine. 

    This interiority is a formless experience that cannot be easily rendered in plastic art. Naturalistic art can reflect the outside world very well, but it isn’t suitable for rendering abstract concepts that occur within an individual’s interior mind. Abstraction in art provides room for individual interpretations. The Röttgen Pietà, Figure 3, is a painted wood sculpture that illustrates medieval abstraction. This painted wood sculpture represents Mary, the mother of Jesus, holding her dead son’s body after he was removed from the cross. Both Jesus and Mary are intentionally rendered with unreal, exaggerated proportions. The abstracted figures allow the viewer to focus on the event, not the people represented. Mary appears genderless, allowing the viewer to see any suffering person in her image. In comparison, the naturalism used in Michelangelo’s Pietà Figure 4, presents two specific people, Mary and Jesus, whose likenesses leave little room for interpretation. One might argue that Michelangelo’s Pietà is a far superior work of design and craftsmanship. The question isn’t whether one sculpture is superior to the other, rather, how each sculpture successfully executes their intended purpose for a specific time and culture. I argue that the abstracted forms of the Röttgen Pietà encourage the viewer to use their imagination to explore the intangible concepts of death and suffering while eliciting empathy from the viewer. By simplifying some features, each figure becomes a less specific person, therefore, encouraging the viewer to bridge the subject-object divide. In other words, the viewer doesn’t simply contemplate the work of art; instead, they may project themselves into it.

    Figure 3. Röttgen Pietà, c. 1300–25, painted wood, 34 1/2″ high. 2025. Smarthistory.org, Photograph courtesy of Heinz, Ralf. The Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn, https://smarthistory.org/roettgen-pieta/.
    Figure 4. Buonarroti of Florence, Michelangelo. Pietà [Our Lady of] Pity 1498–1499. Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni 174 cm × 195 cm. Saint Peters Basilica Info, Saint Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City,

    Can these arguments be applied to contemporary video games? Undertale and Red Dead Redemption II are two popular video games of similar genres that I will argue, present radically different experiences determined by the use of abstraction vs naturalism.

    Red Dead Redemption II is a video game created in 2015 by Rockstar Games that places players in the world of late 19th century American wild west. Playing as Arthur Morgan, a rugged white male outlaw who faces a dying Wild West with other members of the Van der Linde gang. Players enter a three-dimensional photorealistic world to navigate threats, explore landscapes, and make moral choices about loyalty and survival. The realism in Red Dead Redemption II is striking, once a player adapts to the uncanny resemblance to the nature world, the player experience becomes immersive. Snow moves and creates footprints while horses gallop with the grace and rhythm (see Figure 5). Beyond the visual naturalism, Red Dead Redemption II is what is known as an open world game, meaning the player can walk around and interact with the landscape as they please.

    The naturalistic visuals, like the statue of Balbus, leave little room for interpretation. Due to the use of naturalism, players are less likely to question the validity of the experience and are more likely to believe this interactive story is a trustworthy representation of history. Although the game attempts to portray a diverse array of perspectives about the American wild west, it may also perpetuate common myths such as rugged individualism, glossing over the violence and injustices inflicted on marginalized groups of the time period. The naturalistic imagery becomes synonymous with the natural world, encouraging viewers to grant equal validity to the story and dialogue, thus establishing a portrayal of the American Wild West as nearly true and universal. Universals, according to Schürmann, attempt to subsume singularities under generalized categories. The realistic rendering of the Wild West is arguably creating generalized categories that can subsume singularities and inturn support hegemonic systems.

    Figure 5. Aurthur Morgan from Red Dead Redemption II. 2025. Reddead Fandom, Rockstar Games, https://reddead.fandom.com.

    Undertale is a role-playing video game, developed by Toby Fox and released in 2015 (Hiscott, 2016). The game is set in the Underground, a realm of monsters that was sealed off from the surface world by a magic barrier. The player controls a human child named Frisk who has fallen into the Underground and must find their way back to the surface. Along the way, the child encounters a variety of both friendly and hostile monsters and must choose to fight or befriend them, significantly impacting the game’s outcome. 

    The design of the main character Frisk is noticeably different from many video games (Figure 6.). Frisk is gender neutral, of no fixed racial identity. Their hair is unkempt and their body is the opposite of athletic. Frisk’s abstraction and plurality allow for a wide range of players to identify with them. Beyond the physical appearance, Frisk is composed of large-scale pixels with no depth or detail, abstracting the character even further. Frisk is not heroic, athletic or mighty, therefore players immediately are presented with the realization that they are ill equipped to fight the oncoming monsters. 

    Frisk’s rendering is not unlike the thirteenth century Röttgen Pietà. Both Frisk’s character design and theRöttgen Pietà are abstract. They are both genderless, poor and unheroic. Both renderings feature exaggerated characteristics that draw the viewer’s attention to the person’s emotional state rather than specific features, allowing for greater personal identification with the image. Frisk’s figure has poor posture and is simultaneously thin and overweight emphasizing a state of vulnerability. Jesus, as presented in the Röttgen Pietà, is rendered emaciated, displaying gory wounds, and his head, angled unnaturally from the neck, attests to his brutal demise. Since these images are abstracted, they don’t resemble typical humans, yet they are both recognizably human. It is precisely this vagary that leaves room for the viewer to imagine themselves or someone else in place of the abstracted human form. This empathetic experience is unique to the individual, providing the viewer with imaginative agency, consequently, encouraging them to value their own individuality. It is these individualized experiences that combat universals, according to Schürmann.

    Figure 6. Frisk from Undertale. 2015
    Figure 7. Sans the Skeleton and Frisk in the Forest. 2015

    Emmanuel Kant was a 18th century German philosopher who posited that the subject (human mind) perceives an object (the world outside the mind) through mental frameworks that result in a phenomenal experience, that differs from an object’s true, noumenal existence (Jaspers, 38). In other words, we receive stimuli from the outside world through our senses and the mind interprets the sensory information through mental frameworks such as the imagination and understanding, thus creating unique interpretive experiences. Kant goes on to say, when one has a new experience with an object, the mind attempts to understand it by comparing it to previous concepts and categories (Kant, 145).

    If the mind cannot find a sufficient category to place the new object in, it may enter into a state of what Kant calls “free play” between the understanding and the imagination. While naturalistic art can evoke aesthetic pleasure, according to Kant, it may limit the ‘free play’ of the faculties and reinforce existing expectations, thereby restricting one source of human creativity. In other words, when the mind sees something recognizable, it places the image in a category and may not think much more about it. One can suggest that abstract art may encourage a viewer to engage with the artwork without relying on pre-existing categories or concepts, since some of the information is either unrecognizable or unusual. It is in this state of Free Play that the viewer becomes more deeply engaged with the art. This process can lead the viewer to discover something new, resulting in a meaningful and pleasurable experience or what Kant describes as “purposeful without purpose” (Jaspers, 78). The understanding is looking to find a practical use for the object that has no practical function. According to Kant, the purpose is the activation of the faculties of understanding and imagination, leading to the discovery of new meaning. This supports Kant’s argument that abstract art may encourage “Free Play” to a greater degree than naturalistic art.

    The sculpture of Marcus Balbus has a clearer message than the Röttgen Pietà. The veristic Roman portrait is straight-forward and easily recognizable, the viewer is reminded that this particular benevolent benefactor is wise, powerful and superior. The Röttgen Pietà, conversely, is not so easily understood, the sculpture doesn’t easily fit into the viewer’s understanding of the world. Mary and Jesus, while recognizably human, are depicted as unlike any ordinary persons. Their lack of recognizable identity allows the viewer’s understanding and imagination to enter into free play creating a unique singular experience. This is not to say that free play does not occur when one contemplates Michelangelo’s Pietà or the statue of Marcus Balbus, it’s more a question of degree. The experience of the statue of Marcus Balbus is likely to be more universal and less singular due to its recognizable naturalism. Therefore, it can be argued that naturalistic art may be inclined to support hegemonic phantasms due to the universality of the experience. While abstract art may have a greater ability to elicit the viewer’s mind into a state of free play, producing unique and singular experiences. 

    This concept can also be applied to video game art. The hyper-realistic images of Arthur Morgan and the American wild west is recognizable to the viewer, therefor the imagination is less likely to be activated, creating a nearly universal experience between players. Conversely, Frisk in Undertale is abstract, allowing the player’s mind to enter a state Kantian Free Play between the imagination and understanding.

    One of the clearest examples of this is found in the vast array of Frisk fan art. Frisk has been rendered by players around the world in an infinite variety of genders, nationalities and styles, while Author Morgan is consistently rendered as a rugged white male.

    Figure 8. Frisk fan art
    Figure 9, Aurthur Morgan fan art

    In conclusion, this paper argues that abstract art, particularly in the medium of video games, possesses a greater capacity for fostering singularizing experiences that can challenge hegemonic phantasms. Naturalistic art, found in Roman verism and Red Dead Redemption II, tends to reinforce these universals by presenting seemingly objective realities. The naturalism in these forms limits individual interpretation and can inadvertently perpetuate dominant ideologies. Conversely, abstract art, such as the Röttgen Pietà and the pixel art style of the video game Undertale, encourages individualized experiences.By moving away from fixed, naturalistic representations, abstract art prompts viewers and players to engage their imagination and understanding in a state of Kantian Free Play. This active engagement with the art, may foster self-reflection allowing for a wider range of interpretations, potentially disrupting the universalizing effects. Ultimately, engaging with abstract art offers a valuable space for challenging dominant narratives and celebrating the unique experiences of individuals, thus acting as a potential counterforce to the influence of hegemonic phantasms.

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