Methodical considerations also play a role when we engage with media beyond the moving image from a phenomenological perspective. How does viewing films relate to the activity of reading comics or playing video games? In individual investigations on the aesthetic experience of these media, the possibilities of a methodical and theoretical transfer are explored, thus opening new perspectives for comics research and games studies.

The Phenomenology of the Comic

From a phenomenological perspective, encountering comics and films refers to the situation in which readers and audiences are physically entangled with comics and films respectively. The concrete manifestation of this entanglement is tied to the duration of the experience of comics and films. Although the duration of the cinematic image as a quality does not exhaust itself in the runtime of a film, the latter presents a quantitative base for film-analytical description which comics are lacking. A basis to describe movement dynamics in accordance with the medium can be found in comics in the form of a spatiotemporal system. This allows the surface of comic pages to be measured and described and to subsequently interlock this macro-perspective view with descriptions of the micro-perspective movement dynamics of the drawings, symbols, and words. The harmonic and melodic movements in the analysis of cinematic expressive movements thus turn in comic analyses into an interlocking of the micro-perspective and macro-perspective dynamics of a spatiotemporal system and a display of movement, through which a behavior of comics can be qualified.

Further Reading:

• Hochschild, Björn: Figuren begegnen in Filmen und Comics. Berlin / Boston 2024.

Phenomenology of the Video Game

Beyond the two formative currents of game studies, namely narratological approaches focusing on narratives as well as ludological approaches regarding the rules of the game, one can consider the experiential dimension of the video game, or rather of concrete video games, from a phenomenologically-holistic perspective. From this research perspective, kinesthesia, i.e. the aesthetics of movement, forms a central starting point for the topic of the interaffectivity of video games. In the case of playing a video game, one can speak of an ongoing process of auto-affectivity with regard to the player’s kinesthetic experience.

In our working group Games we are currently preparing a working paper on research methods for analyzing the experiences of playing video games.

Further Reading:

• Bakels, Jan-Hendrik: Zwischen Fiktion, Spielfreude und Kinästhesie. Zur emotionalen Erfahrung im Videospiel. In: Hermann Kappelhoff, Jan-Hendrik Bakels, Hauke Lehmann, Christina Schmitt (Eds.): Emotionen. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Berlin 2019, pp. 458–465.

• Bakels, Jan-Hendrik: Steps Towards a Phenomenology of Video Games – Some Thoughts on Analyzing Aesthetics and Experience. In: Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture 11/1 (2020), pp. 71–97.