PHENOMENOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF VIDEO GAME

Abstract

In the era of digitalization, globalization, and the fourth industrial revolution, human knowledge is rapidly increasing every day, and the amount of information and data being generated is growing at unimaginable scales, transcending all barriers and becoming crucial in almost all spheres of life. Digital technologies and computers are increasingly permeating culture and everyday life, transforming traditional cultural forms and practices and creating space for profound anthropological changes. This process reaches its peak in the phenomenon of video games, which, although initially conceived as a means of entertainment, have evolved into a dominant form of virtual culture. Video games have quickly surpassed their original purpose, becoming a ubiquitous phenomenon that contributes to the creation of new sociocultural practices and the expansion of anthropological identity. With their unique virtual-interactive tools, video games open up space for a new understanding of creativity, life, freedom, art, and aesthetic values, while carrying significant political and ethical implications. Like any new phenomenon, video games are a field with insufficiently developed and systematized scientific theory, interpretation, and understanding of basic concepts. Science needs to focus on the ontology and epistemology of video games to better understand their essence and place in the contemporary world, providing answers that only the philosophy of video games, with its metaphysics as a way of understanding and describing the era of video games, can offer. This work is an attempt to identify and understand certain phenomenological and noumenal aspects of video games, thus making an additional step towards the systematic philosophical study and deconstruction of video games, one of the most important phenomena of the modern world.