Bodily Movements in Video Game Practice: A Phenomenological Analysis of Digital Virtuality

Abstract

In this article, I will present Merleau-Ponty’s idea of embodiment and apply it to demonstrate two attributes of the on-screen virtual world, which suggest that the videogaming situation is projected in a contextual sense and flattened in a spatial sense. According to Merleau-Ponty, humans are primordially situated body subjects taking up the world in and through movement. He views bodily movements as correlated and solicited by situations that the body subject encounters. Building on this, I argue that, because of the projected and flattened videogaming situation, playing video games always involves an abstract attitude; and it always involves a determined and constrained pattern of bodily movements in the present, as well as limited possibilities for future movement development.

Introduction

This article is motivated by the ongoing debate on the bodily element of competitive video games (esports) and the difference between esports and sports. Concerning the debate, I summarise three formulations of discourse in this literature. The first concentrates primarily on the definition of sport and accordingly excludes or includes esports, leaving relatively less in-depth reflection on esports itself (Elstein, 2025; Jenny et al., 2016; Parry, 2019). The second is dedicated to interpreting esports (Hemphill, 2005; Larsen, 2022; Rosell Llorens, 2017; Xu, 2023), wherein some defend the physical character or the embodied aspects of esports (Ekdahl, 2022; Ekdahl and Ravn, 2019; Hilvoorde and Pot, 2016) and others argue the absence of the body from the activity (Hofmann, 2019). The third approach is a direct comparison and interpretation of the characteristics of esports and sports, even though it concerns only one or two aspects of them (Holt, 2016; Martínková and Wang, 2024). This article might be considered as a fourth approach. It does not directly address the difference between esports and sports but contributes to this debate by examining the attributes and implications of the digital virtuality ¹ of the on-screen virtual world on players’ bodily movements and, in turn, the distinction between the virtual and the non-virtual.

Holt (2016) attempts to make the virtual/non-virtual distinction by stating that in playing video games, the application domain of players’ physical skills is, in principle, separate from the execution domain of their skills because the application domain exists in the virtual and the execution domain is non-virtual, whereas, in regular physical activities such as sports, these two domains overlap. Nevertheless, Holt (2016) does not justify the fundamental gap between virtual and non-virtual spaces. Thus, as Ekdahl (2022) remarks, without an articulation of the attributes or essence of the virtual, Holt’s argument is grounded upon an arbitrary division between the virtual and non-virtual. By providing an analysis of the attributes of digital virtuality, I distinguish the virtual world from the non-virtual. And by considering these attributes, I further present how the digital virtuality shapes the videogaming situation and players’ correlated bodily movements within Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology.

There are many studies that have applied phenomenology to explain video games (Ash, 2013; Conway, 2016; Ekdahl, 2022; Ekdahl and Ravn, 2019; Hemphill, 2005; Hilvoorde and Pot, 2016; Klevjer, 2012; Martínková and Wang, 2024; Vella and Gualeni, 2019). For instance, Ash (2013) discusses players’ affect in gaming experience in terms of Heidegger’s concept of attunement. Vella and Gualeni (2019) interpret the players’ subjective sense of being-in-the-virtual-world through Heidegger and Sartre’s existentialism. Klevjer (2012) and Hilvoorde and Pot (2016) account for the relationship between the avatar and players through concepts of prosthetic body or virtual embodiment, which are also drawn from Merleau-Pointy’s phenomenology. The immersion experience of players in gaming is an intriguing and trending topic in video game research. Nevertheless, those studies tend to lean more on the game side, which is to examine the features of the video game itself to account for the experience. I think it will also be informative to take a step back and look at the holistic picture of the experience, that is, to see it as a body subject playing with a virtual world in a particular space in the actual world. This means that the game itself is part of the experience. In this article, I attempt to make my analysis encompass the holistic picture of the experience. ²

By the idea of embodiment, Merleau-Ponty emphasises a modality of human existence by which the body is the human subject, inhabiting the world and taking up the world in and through movement. One of the essential implications of the embodiment concept is to distinguish the body from an object and show that movement is neither mechanical nor representational; instead, it is primordially the body’s exploration and expression conjured up by situations. I will gradually unpack the elements of this view in the section ‘The Idea of Embodiment’. Based on the illustration of what an object is, the section ‘Attributes of the On-Screen Virtual World’ will demonstrate two attributes: (1) it is a sharable apparent projection made by a third party and (2) it lacks spatiality and exists in front of us like a wall instead of a world.

The section ‘The Projected and Flattened Videogaming Situation’ then moves on to a closer examination of the situations encountered in playing video games. Considering the attributes of the on-screen virtual world, which plays an essential role in constituting the videogaming situation, I suggest two main features of the situation: that it is flattened and projected. It is flattened by the insertion of the screen in a spatial sense. It is projected, which involves two kinds of projection: one on a primordial level in terms of players’ practice and the other on an apparent level in terms of the video game itself as a designed product. This flattened and projected character suggests that playing video games involves an abstract attitude with limited potential for further movement development.

The Idea of Embodiment

In Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2012) illustrates various pathological phenomena to challenge the mechanistic explanation of the body in physiology and the representational interpretation of the body in classical psychology. In his view, we humans tend to observe and interpret the experiences of others and are inclined to take our own vivid, lived bodily experiences for granted. This tendency coheres with the impersonal scientific mode of explanation in physiology and classical psychology. Nevertheless, it is often our own lived bodily experiences that provide a more authentic source of inquiry (Merleau-Ponty, 2012: 97–99).

It is worth noting that our own lived bodily experience is more about a universal ³ living experience through which we, as human beings, inhabit the world. In this light, Merleau-Ponty expounds on the embodied modality of human existence: embodiment, by which the body is the living subject, also has the possibility of being perceived (mistakenly) as having objective features. This means that I might tend to treat my body as an object because of my perception. I, at the same time, am the body. This idea can be understood if we step back for a moment and interrogate our ordinary bodily experience of an ‘immediate object’ ⁴ (Smith, 2007) to consider how that object appears as an object to us.

Immediate Objects in Perception

Let me start by reflecting on the inherent way I see an object. Take the cup on my table as an example; whenever I see my cup, I can only see one side of it. Certainly, I can turn the other side of the cup towards me or move myself to come into sight of its other sides. Even in moving, I am always limited to my position and, hence, only capable of seeing the cup from one perspective. Simultaneously, whenever I see the cup, other objects, such as the wall, the book near it, and the lamp behind it, are also in my sight around there, though they may be blurred when I focus on the cup. Regarding this phenomenon, Merleau-Ponty (2012) writes that:

In vision, however, I apply my gaze to a fragment of the landscape, which becomes animated and displayed, while the other objects recede into the margins and become dormant, but they do not cease to be there. (p. 70)

He says that the dormant figures in the margins serve as a ‘horizon’, without which ‘the inner horizon’ of the viewed fragment cannot become an object (Merleau-Ponty, 2012: 70).

Without a horizon, even my memory of an object alone cannot constitute an object for me. Now, I use a camera to zoom in on a cup full of patterns and take a picture of its patterns. When I check the picture, I may remember that the patterns are actually parts of a cup, but the picture can only show patterns for me rather than a cup as an immediate object. This is because the picture is full of patterns, resulting in no horizon to display an object. When my gaze settles on the lamp next to the cup on my table, the cup automatically recedes into the margin of my vision, with other figures becoming a new horizon. Hence, Merleau-Ponty (2012) adds that my perspective, which is an object–horizon structure, can be ‘the means that objects have of concealing themselves, it is also the means that they have of unveiling themselves’ (p. 70). My gaze and horizon correlate, allowing objects to present themselves in front of me.

It is worth noting that the horizon here is not a predefined static background like in a painting. The surroundings of the viewed object constitute the horizon. Hence, I do not attribute qualities to an object simply based on its visible side. I grasp the height and thickness of my cup not only from the side facing me but also from the whole relations between it and its surroundings (other objects that exist but are inconspicuous on the horizon), or in Merleau-Ponty’s (2012) words, also from ‘those that other objects can “see”’ (p. 71). He describes it in the following way:

we can see an object insofar as objects form a system or a world and insofar as each of them arranges the others around itself like spectators of its hidden aspects and as the guarantee of their permanence. (Merleau-Ponty, 2012: 71)

To sum up, an immediate object appears on a horizon constituted by its surroundings as spectators of its hidden sides, including the gazing person, or, in Merleau-Ponty’s words, ‘a house itself is the house seen from everywhere’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2012: 71). ⁵ I will apply this point in more detail in the section ‘Attributes of the On-Screen Virtual World’.

Above, I explained how an object appears in vision. It is worth noting that I also see the bodies of other people and my own bodily parts in such a way. Hence, the body is sometimes inevitably regarded by me as an object. Merleau-Ponty reminds us that the body is also that which enables us to constitute objects. ⁶ And the exceptionalities ⁷ possessed by the body also, to some extent, show that the body is not the same as an object. For instance, when I look at my eyes in the mirror, it immediately refers me to ‘an original of the body that is not out there among things, but on my side, prior to every act of seeing’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2012: 94). This is one of the exceptionalities that distinguishes the body from an object, which was originally described by Husserl (2000), who noticed that ‘an eye does not appear to one’s own vision’ (p. 155). What prevents the body from being a completely visible object is that the body is what sees (Merleau-Ponty, 2012: 94). The body is not an object, but the perceiving subject inhabiting the world. This point will be further demonstrated by understanding the spatiality and motricity of the body.

The Spatiality of the Body

In my perception, my bodily parts may appear as an object for me. Still, my senses of the positions of my bodily parts are different from my senses of the positions of objects. As Merleau-Ponty (2012) put it, ‘if my arm is resting on the table, I will never think to say that it is next to the ashtray in the same way the ashtray is next to the telephone’. My bodily parts are not laid out side by side or juxtaposed like ‘mosaics’ to form the body, but rather, they relate to each other in a particular way (p. 100). When I know that my arm is resting on the table next to the ashtray, simultaneously I am not unaware of the other parts of my body. Merleau-Ponty provides a better illustration:

If I stand in front of my desk and lean on it with both hands, only my hands are accentuated and my whole body trails behind them like a comet’s tail. I am not unaware of the location of my shoulders or my waist; rather, this awareness is enveloped in my awareness of my hands and my entire stance is read, so to speak, in how my hands lean upon the desk. (Merleau-Ponty, 2012: 102)

In this posture, my hand supporting me and leaning over the desk is the focus of my awareness, in which the position of the rest of my body (shoulder, waist, etc.) is obscure, but I do not lose the sense of them. Here, we can perhaps analogise the hand I am aware of to the cup I am gazing at. The positions of the rest of my body parts that ‘surround’ the hand that is focused on by my attention are similar to other surroundings around the viewed cup in my vision. They recede into the margins of my awareness and become dormant, but they do not cease to be there. The rest of my body is inconspicuous for my awareness, ‘hiding’ in a background, just as the surroundings of the viewed object hide on the horizon.

If we say that space is this figure–horizon structure in our experience, analogously, there is a bodily space similarly structured by the focused limb and the background, which allows a limb to be the focus of my attention without losing sense of the others or allows the bodily parts to conceal and unveil themselves for my attention. The indistinguishable spatiality of bodily space and the world justifys Merleau-Ponty’s (2012) claim that ‘I am not in space and time; rather I am of space and time; my body fits itself to them and embraces them’ (p. 141). Hence it can be stated that the body is not positioned in a space as an object; rather, the body inhabits space.

By the ‘same spatiality’, Merleau-Ponty (2012: 105) means that the bodily space and the spatial world form a practical system offering a double horizon for the moving body. The other parts of the body in the bodily space and the body space itself structure one background (the body schema) against which my moving bodily part can stand out, and the surroundings of the viewed object in the world structure the other horizon on which an object can appear. Through this double horizon, I sense the relation between me and the object (e.g. I immediately know if an object in front of me is reachable or not), and the object can naturally become the goal of my action. Therefore, Merleau-Ponty (2012) states that it is in movements that ‘the spatiality of the body is brought about’ (p. 105), and he continues by elucidating two kinds of movement: concrete movement and abstract movement, which reveals a correlation between movement and situation and the primordial role of the body that is myself, the situated moving subject.

Correlated Movement and Situation

In Merleau-Ponty’s (2012) discussion of the theme of movement, the pathology of Schneider’s case works as a point of departure from which Merleau-Ponty provides a new understanding of bodily movements. Schneider is a patient who suffers from agnosia. He cannot perform actions on command with his eyes closed. For example, if a mosquito bites a part of his left hand, he can naturally grasp it; however, when asked to point to the same position with a ruler, he cannot do so, even though he clearly understands the instruction and knows what ‘left hand’ means (Merleau-Ponty, 2012: 106). Also, Schneider may know how to knock on a door when he is standing in front of it, announcing himself, but when asked to simulate knocking in a situation where the door is hidden or out of reach, he fails to perform the action (Merleau-Ponty, 2012: 119). The former type of movement, grasping and knocking, is termed as ‘concrete movement’, while the latter, pointing and simulating knocking, is termed as ‘abstract movement’. Merleau-Ponty (2012) suggests that Schneider’s failure to perform abstract movement indicates ‘a privilege enjoyed by concrete movement’ (p. 106) and a disassociation of these two kinds of movement, which are often intertwined in a healthy person’s daily activities.

Simply speaking, unreflective habitual daily movements that happen in a practical world (concrete situation) can be seen as concrete movements. For example, a child can grasp an object in front of her without understanding the concept of object. I can easily pick up the cup of tea on my table without any calculation. An experienced typist can just move above the keyboard without even looking at the letters. Certainly, a typist’s series of hand movements are more complicated than my picking up of a cup or a child’s first grasping, but they are all immediate, fluent, and without deliberation. To explain this phenomenon, Merleau-Ponty (2012) argues that ‘places in space are not objective positions in relation to the objective position of our body’. Rather, our body merges with space and hence places ‘inscribe around us the variable reach of our intentions and gestures’ (p. 144).

Hence, at a child’s first attempt at grasping, she looks at the object instead of the hand (Merleau-Ponty, 2012: 150); the object in front solicits the reaching. I can pick up the cup of tea so easily, not because of a map of space in my memory, but because ‘my motor experience embraces the cup into the meaningful web of possible motor tasks’ (Kříž, 2021: 130). In terms of a more complicated habitual skill, Merleau-Ponty argues that it is neither a form of knowledge nor an automatic reflex; rather it is knowledge in the moving limbs given through bodily efforts. By practice over and over again, the body incorporates the instrument into bodily space, so an experienced typist knows where the letters are on the keyboard just as she knows where her limbs are. ⁸

In abstract movement, a person without Schneider’s impairment can move without corresponding to an actual situation. For example, I can pretend to pick up a cup without having a real cup in front of me. I do not just react to actual given situations; I can also imagine a virtual situation for myself to move in the imagination, such as play-acting, by which I am moving ‘toward the possible’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2012: 109–112). Regarding this phenomenon, Merleau-Ponty (2012) suggests that it is made possible by the function of ‘projection’ by which I organise before myself a free space in which the object that ‘does not exist naturally can take on a semblance of existence’ (p. 114), which means that I project an object there for myself as the goal of reaching. What is impaired for Schneider is exactly this power of projection that allows him to place himself in a possible situation. I shall refer to this kind of projection as the primordial projection in the following section to distinguish it from the apparent projection.

What distinguishes abstract movement from concrete movement is the nature of the situations encountered by the moving subject. Merleau-Ponty articulates the two kinds of movement as below:

Within the busy world in which concrete movement unfolds, abstract movement hollows out a zone of reflection and of subjectivity, it superimposes a virtual or human space over physical space. Concrete movement is thus centripetal, whereas abstract movement is centrifugal; the first takes place within being or within the actual, the second takes place within the possible or within non-being; the first adheres to a given background, the second itself sets up its own background. (Merleau-Ponty, 2012: 114)

The function of projection in abstract movement implies the ability to assign significance to objects and situations and recall or rebuild the significant situations that conjure up movements. Merleau-Ponty (2012) assumes that consciousness is an activity of such projection that ‘deposits objects around itself like traces of its own acts’ (p. 138) rather than instructing and controlling the bodily parts to move. Although the thought of space (imagined space) might be seen as merely represented, Merleau-Ponty (2012) explains, ‘in order for us to be able to imagine space, it must first be introduced into it through our body, which must have given us the first model or transpositions, equivalences and identifications that turns space into an objective system’ (p. 143). This means the projection sources come from the body’s actual encounter in the lived world. The projecting ability is established upon the daily interaction between the body and the world by which the body takes up various lived situations and simultaneously incorporates objects into bodily space ‘to move on to new acts of spontaneity’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2012: 138, 143).

Merleau-Ponty (2012) argues that concrete bodily movements solicited by given situations enjoy a privilege. Similarly, in her book The Primacy of Movement, Husserlian scholar Sheets-Johnstone (2011) argues that our spontaneous movements in infancy are the epistemological foundation of learning ourselves and the world, and she makes a more radical move, saying ‘everything cognitive leads back equally to movement, to animate nature’ (p. 118). By borrowing Husserl’s phrase ‘ich kann’ (I can), Merleau-Ponty (2012) sums up that ‘consciousness is originally not “I think”, but rather “I can”’ (p. 139). It is, therefore, reasonable to suggest that moving and thinking are not two discrete activities; they are intertwined and, more importantly, moving is of fundamental significance to thinking.

To introduce these two kinds of movements, the concrete and the abstract, is also not to say that human movements can be simply divided into these two categories because they are intertwined in most human activities. Rather, it is to show the bonding between movement and situation. A healthy human adult can move according to current tasks afforded by the given situation and, at the same time, recognise possibilities for potential actions (Dreyfus, 2007; Romdenh-Romluc, 2007). Consciousness is embodied consciousness, and as body subjects, we humans have the freedom to abstract away from the concrete given world while at the same time, again, this abstraction is constituted by the body and bodily experience in the concrete world.

According to Merleau-Ponty, the relation between the perceived world and the perceiving body subject is like ‘the relation between a question and its response or between a solicitation and a gearing into’ (Landes, 2012: xliii). We should not view body subjects and the lived world discretely, which means that we should not separate bodily movements from their surrounding environment and encountered situations. Bodily movements are correlated and solicited by situations that could be (either or both) actual or possible, concrete or abstract, given or projected. This is why, for insight into videogaming, I believe we need to contemplate the attributes of the on-screen virtual world in order to see what kind of situations we encounter while playing video games.

Attributes of the On-Screen Virtual World

In explaining the existential implication of digital virtuality within Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Du Toit (2021) suggests a concept of ‘embodied screen’ and argues that the meaning found in the virtual can be understood as a meaning of projection. He says, ‘The embodied screen suggests that the scale between actuality and potentiality tips more towards the engagement of the world in terms of possibility in lieu of actuality (neither is lost, however)’ (Du Toit, 2021: 8).

Certainly, when Merleau-Ponty speaks of virtual and projection, he does not address the virtuality brought up by digital technology nowadays. The virtual space in Du Toit’s (2021) discussion is also not precisely the on-screen virtual world in video games; instead, he thinks the virtual space arises from ‘the circuit between the body-subject and the technological artefact’ (p. 5). The circuit stresses a reciprocal structure suggested by the embodied screen concept: ‘Without the flesh (as modulated by digital technology artefacts), the lived experience of the phenomenon of digital technology would be impossible, just as without the digital technology artefact no lived experience of the phenomenon of digital technology would be possible’ (p. 5). Hence, this meaning of projection or imaginative signification, argued by Du Toit (2021), is not a matter of the attributes of the on-screen virtual world but of situations involving digital technology artefacts encountered by the body subject.

I will further elaborate on this kind of situation in the section of ‘Projected and Flattened Videogaming Situation’. For now, I shall introduce two kinds of projection. One is the primordial projection, as discussed within Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology above, which is the activity of the embodied consciousness, one way of correlating herself with the world. By primordial projection, the body subject confronts the world primarily in terms of possibilities (Cerbone, 2014; Du Toit, 2021). The other is the apparent projection, which is the on-screen virtual world itself. Şentuna and Kanbur (2016) think that everything that takes place in the virtual world of video games is ‘the product of one’s imagination, however, the reflection area of this imagination is another’s body’ (p. 47). Instead of the player’s personal invisible imagination, the on-screen virtual world is a presented and shared projection produced by a third party (game designers and publishers, etc.).

In understanding human existence as embodied being, it makes sense for us to attempt to describe the virtual world in a spatial manner, because we primordially understand the world in terms of spatiality and bodily potentiality in movements. However, we do not grasp the virtual world in the same spatial manner as we might grasp immediate objects such as a cup or a keyboard (Du Toit, 2021). This might be easily understood when we consider simple two-dimensional arcade games such as Breakout (although with technological advances, most modern video games are three-dimensional now). The virtual world can be made to look spatial, especially when it has a first-person viewpoint, and often has complicated maps for players to explore, such as Super Mario Bros., Life is Strange, Call of Duty, League of Legends, etc. Still, the virtual things on the screen do not relate to me in the exact same way as do immediate objects. I shall illustrate this difference by returning to the discussion of immediate objects in the previous section.

An object present in my vision is always an object on the horizon, which means the object does not exist alone but is surrounded by others that constitute the horizon, making the object stand out. Merleau-Ponty (2012) metaphorically regards these surroundings as ‘spectators’ of the object in gaze (p. 71). To make the virtual world appear spatial, designers must construct a scene that fulfils all the optical and geometrical principles, meaning that an object on the screen must also be presented on a horizon. However, this virtual world is a ‘world’ just in visual perception. Technology now allows designers to arrange ‘spectators’ for the figures focused on in the virtual scene; still, the scene itself does not have other surrounding ‘spectators’, except for humans who are viewing it. We can think of this point in the following example.

In the FIFA game, its football field is simulated by computer code. Even if all the virtual objects in the football stadium are presented in the same form as the objects in the lived world, the football stadium itself can never be present to me as an entity unless the designer creates another scene that arranges the surroundings or ‘spectators’ outside the stadium, making the stadium an ‘object’ on a horizon. Still, the scene itself does not have the ability to exist as an objective entity since we cannot see a house as an entity when we are in the house. This implies that the digital virtual world always requires an artificially set boundary or ‘container’ to load it, which is the screen.

Conversely, the football stadium in the lived world can be a space for me when I am in it, while when I walk outside it, it can also appear to me as an immediate object. This is because it is always surrounded by its ‘spectators’ who witness its existence, ready to become a horizon in my eyes to bring the stadium to the fore. When I look down from a plane, I have a view of the city in which the stadium is located, of the large ‘container’ that holds it, and if I look at the earth from a spaceship, I can have a view of the ‘container’ that holds the entire human world. The lived world might be understood as ultimately a finite and larger ‘container’, as Chalmers (2023) argues in his new book REALITY+, that we may all be living in a simulation, a possibility we can neither prove nor rule out. Still, this lived world has infinite possibilities for exploration for the human beings who inhabit it. In this view, humans construct a society, building various stadiums, but the largest ‘container’ is not created by humans: the earth, the concrete, natural world we are living in. In comparison, the virtual world that inherently demands an artificial container is ultimately constrained by human creativity.

Moreover, as designed upon visual perception, the on-screen virtual worlds are only accessible through vision. This does not mean that people with visual impairments cannot play video games, but it is precisely why they have a different experience while playing, and adaptation is called for. Certainly, sounds and even haptic effects are also important parts of video games. But do sound and touch actually come from the on-screen virtual world? Or are they physical enhancements of the virtual world? That is, they do not constitute the virtual world but rather decorate it to make it more immersive.

The claim above can be further justified by considering a question: can we grasp the virtual world without seeing? Now I am in my bedroom, sitting in front of my desk, looking at my computer screen. When I close my eyes, I can no longer see my screen, let alone a scene from a game on it, but I can still feel my lumpy keyboard surface, touch my screen, smell the sweet scent of figs from the aromatic candle in my room. Without seeing, I still feel, touch, and smell the lived world where I am, but I lose the connection with the virtual scene on my computer. My vision constitutes the necessary condition for the on-screen virtual world. The sound, touch, and smell might relate to the virtual, but this would be closer to virtuality in terms of the primordial projection of players rather than the apparent projection set by game producers.

Sudnow (1983) describes the virtual world of Breakout as a ‘flattened two-dimensional space’ (p. 124). While the context is different, this coincides with the fact that the virtual world on a screen is sometimes referred to as a fourth wall or circular wall within the video game culture (see Conway, 2010). ⁹ It may look spatial but it fails to provide depth perception (Sakamoto, 2022). ¹⁰ Du Toit (2021) argues that spatiality is subsumed into the virtual, and in the experience of the virtual, ‘the body as a measurement of space and time is lost’ (p. 6). This may support Holt’s (2016) remark that the execution domain and application domain of bodily movements are separate when playing video games. The domain of execution is where the agent’s skilled movement occurs, which is the concrete lived world; by contrast, the domain of application is where the action’s outcome is meant to be obtained, which is on the screen.

So, it is reasonable to claim that the on-screen virtual world would never merge with my body as the actual world does but is more like a wall in front of me. The engagement of the body in video games will be further elaborated in the next section by considering the projected and flattened videogaming situation. To summarise this section, I suggest two attributes of the on-screen virtual world:

1. It is a sharable apparent projection made by a third party;

2. It lacks spatiality and exists in front of us like a wall instead of a world.

The Projected and Flattened Videogaming Situation

When I am playing video games, the situation I am actually in is not only constituted by the virtual scenes on my screen but also by the keyboard, mouse, desk, and all other entities in my room and the room itself. At the same time, I operate my keyboard and mouse mainly according to what I see on the screen. When I am so focused on the game, I can even forget the part of the space that is behind me and ignore the events and people around me. In this case, I am still in my living room, but I stop interacting with other beings in the room. The situation I am encountering shrinks suddenly into a smaller one formed by my mouse, keyboard, and the virtual world on my screen. Ash (2013) names this phenomenon a process of ‘captivation’, by which ‘bodies enter a state of engaged and focused concentration in order to successfully negotiate the ongoing flow and immediacy of an encounter’ (p. 41). The setting of games forces users to concentrate as closely as possible on what is going on in the game if they do not want to be defeated.

The on-screen virtual world plays a crucial role in constituting the situation encountered by the body subject while playing video games. Considering the two attributes of digital virtuality suggested in the previous section, I argue that the videogaming situation is projected and flattened. First, it is ‘flattened’ in a spatial sense since the virtual world on the screen is always in front of me like a wall, cutting off or flattening the extension of the existing space in front of me. Sudnow (1983) vividly describes this sense of flattened situation in his experience of playing Breakout:

Maybe it all has to do with the fact that when interfaced on the TV screen, the human body is in an altogether unaccustomed setting, as holistic three-dimensional movements are graphed onto a two-dimensional plane. The Breakout hand doesn’t move a paddle freely along all facets of bodily space and surroundings. It encircles the knob, to be sure, but all actions transmit back and forth between the mere surface of things. (p. 48)

Within phenomenological research on video games (including esports), it is well recognised that while facing the on-screen virtual world, the body subject has to adapt her movements on the device to the new modality of perceiving set by video games (see Ash, 2013; Ekdahl and Ravn, 2019; Klevjer, 2012; Sudnow, 1983). I think the flattened feature of the gaming situation explains why this adaptation is needed.

As for how the adaptation is possible, we come to the ‘projected’ feature of the situation. In the process of mastering gaming skills, the player also incorporates the devices into her bodily space. Hilvoorde and Pot (2016) explain that the console used in the game is like an instrument or ‘detachable organ’ to extend the boundaries of the player’s body. Klevjer (2012) also remarks that:

We somehow ‘transplant’ into these kinds of computer games in a similar fashion as we do when we learn to play an instrument or drive a car. However, unlike cars and walking sticks and pianos, video games extend our bodies across a material divide, into screen space. This material gap is a major complication, which obviously Merleau-Ponty does not address. (p. 10)

Klevjer (2012) explains this complication by focusing on the avatars in video games and players’ experience of being in the game through their avatars. He argues that the avatar functions like a prosthetic body, which is a trick at the level of phenomenology of the body rather than a trick of fiction. Here I suggest another perspective to interpret this complication. Instead of considering video games as extending our bodies into the virtual, I argue that there are two types of projection involved in playing video games: one is the third-party-made apparent projection, which is the on-screen virtual world; the other is the primordial projection executed by players themselves.

The apparent projection, together with technology artefacts, keyboard, and mouse, functions as a given actuality of the motor task for players. However, the regular motor signification of the physical devices is distorted by the virtual. To be able to adapt to the new motor sense of the physical devices according to the virtual setting, players need to execute their own power of primordial projection to assign the technology artefacts new motor senses or, in Merleau-Ponty’s (2012) words, ‘deposits objects around itself like traces of its own acts’ (p. 138). Du Toit’s (2021) interpretation of the embodied screen can be applied here. If we say the body subject engages in the world on a scale between actuality and potentiality as demonstrated by concrete movement and abstract movement, then in playing video games, the scale ‘tips more towards the engagement of the world in terms of possibility in lieu of actuality (neither is lost however)’ (Du Toit, 2021: 8).

Similarly, when discussing the embodied skills in competitive video games (esports), Ekdahl and Ravn (2019) write, ‘the eSports practitioner must lose some indeterminate part of his or her sense of being in front of a monitor, peering into a digital world, instead allowing his or her body subject to become enveloped by a new and unique world of virtual comportment with its own sensory structures’ (Ekdahl and Ravn, 2019: 137). In this sense, playing video games and abstract movement are alike.

However, playing video games is not simply abstract movement. Because a body subject’s regular abstract movements are conjured up by personal projection or imagination alone, while video game players execute the primordial projection according to and respond to an apparent projection established by a third party. It would be more reasonable to state that playing video games always involves an abstract attitude. Moreover, precisely because this apparent projection is produced by a third party presenting on the screen, this sharable apparent projection facilitates video games as a collective virtual activity.

Besides, along with the on-screen virtual world, technology artefacts structure the flattened and projected video gaming situation, and players’ bodily movements are, to some degree, determined by them. League of Legends usually runs on computers, so our actions are carried out with a keyboard and mouse. The e-Baseball game runs on Switch, so we use the Joy-Con to operate it. Hence, there are now dedicated gaming keyboards and mice, specialised consoles, gaming PCs, PS, Switch, and others, which are essential equipment for engaging in video games. The equipment is set up so that its own nature determines what type of actions Joy-Coning or Keystriking players must perform. In this case, again, the on-screen virtual world becomes crucial and often attracts more attention since it extends the operational implications of the set equipment and affords players a contextual meaning for their actions performed on the equipment.

Key A may be used to kill an enemy in one game or to change weapons in another; again, it requires primordial projection of players to adapt and master the manipulation. The apparent projection of the game determines the operational implications of key A and so the context in which the player presses A. The contextual meaning of a player’s action of pressing the A key, for example, is not the same as if I am typing here and pressing the A to write the word ‘aim’. If the apparent projection (on-screen virtual world) is ultimately limited by human creativity, so is the motor signification of the devices. This deduction aligns with the new technological determinism of Du Toit and Swer (2021): ‘digital technology artefacts may at once open up new horizons of experience while also concretely determining values, systems of rationality, and thought’ (p. 30). In the case of video gaming, what is determined includes the pattern of bodily movements: Joy-Coning, or Keystriking, the abstract attitude of practices, and the further possibilities for movement development.

Conclusion

Video games have their own values, and elite esports performance also undoubtedly involves skilful strategic equipment manipulation. Nothing in this article denies this. The point to highlight is that there is a well-recognised distinction between video gaming and other regular physical activities, namely the difference between the virtual and the non-virtual. My question has been: to what extent does the presence of virtuality shape the bodily movements in videogaming practices?

Built upon Merleau-Ponty’s idea of embodiment, this article has shown that digital virtuality renders the situations encountered in playing video games as flattened in a spatial sense and as projected on two levels: on a primordial level in terms of players’ practice and an apparent level in terms of the video game itself as a product. This leads gamers to take up an abstract attitude. The gaming practice, in general, affords a determined and constrained pattern of bodily movements in the present, as well as limited possibilities for future movement development.

If we understand consciousness as ‘I can’ rather than ‘I think’, movement as the way by which humans take up the world (as Merleau-Ponty argues), it is important to recognise the impact that digital virtuality may have on bodily movements, especially in the case of the esports/sports debate. While this article does not specifically address the difference between sports and esports, it contributes to the debate by offering insights into digital virtuality and correlated bodily movements in video game playing. For future research, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology could also be applied to consider the ontological significance of movement and a new perspective on the value of sport and other physical activities, as providing various concrete lived situations that are different from basic everyday life, forcing us to move in and take up the world in enriching and exceptional ways.