Ästhetik des Computerspiels

This article examines the functional logic of metalepsis in digital-interactive me dia. Drawing on Gérard Genette’s concept of boundary transgression between diegetic levels, it argues that interactivity fundamentally transforms how metalepsis operates: since interaction already conventionalizes boundary crossing, digital-interactive metalepsis must first render the boundary itself visible before any transgression can be experienced. Building on Theresa Krampe’s three-tier model of Gameworld, Game System, and Platform, the article distinguishes three types of metaleptic “breaking points”: ludonarrative metalepses, which simulate foreign design logics to create the illusion of a fourth wall; systemic metalepses, which expose the normally transparent architecture of interfaces and game mechanics; and reality-based metalepses, which incorporate the actual material platform of execution. All three forms depend on the players’ culturally acquired referential knowledge, making digital-interactive metalepsis a historically contingent aesthetic phenomenon whose conditions of intelligibility shift alongside the medium itself.

This article examines Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding as a self-reflexive meta-game that renders the conditions of play perceptible at the levels of space, network, genre, and ludic form. Against the frictionless mobility and transparent control regimes of any digital games, Death Stranding re-materializes walking as a burdened, precarious, and ethically charged practice. Its landscapes are not passive backdrops but resistant interspaces; its networks are infrastructures of both connection and absence; and its genre position between walking simulator and fumblecore produces a form of counter-countergaming. Read through theories of medial self-reflexivity, spatiality, networking, and play, the game appears as an aesthetic model of play and of interpretation itself: a tentative movement through unstable terrain in which new connections can be traversed, formed, and entered into.

The thematically somber and notoriously difficult Dark-Souls-Games are among the most influential in recent gaming history. Taking into account both the original game trilogy and examples from the subgenre it spawned (“Soulslikes”), this paper deciphers and describes how these games’ aesthetics (how they look and sound), their storytelling (how they transport their narratives), and their mechanics (how they ‘feel’ to play) build up to an integrated, consistent poetics. These poetics are marked by two interlocking dynamics: drawing from Romantic and Baroque aesthetics, all signification in these games tends towards an immense poetics of deferral and absence; simultaneously, all interaction in these games requires intense concentration and presence. The simultaneity of concentration and deferral, presence and absence, reaches maximum density in the motif of the ruin, arguably the most characteristic poetical device of all Souls and Soulslikes.

In this paper, I propose a new interpretation of Wittgenstein’s remarks on family resemblance in the Philosophical Investigations: Contrary to the standard view, family resemblance is a relation between concepts rather than between objects. This interpretation opens up new possibilities for the productive use of the concept of family resemblance in concrete semantic investigations of natural-language predicates. I demonstrate this through a semantic investigation of the predicate “x is a game”, which is intended to include, amongst other things, a definition of the concept of games, as well as a discussion of elliptical and metaphorical uses of the predicate “x is a game”. Finally, I argue that computer games can only be called games in an elliptical use of the predicate “x is a game”.

This paper proposes a normative definition of play drawing on the aesthetic tradition. Play is a special form of free action that is process-oriented and rule-modifying. As a free action, play unfolds under certain conditions and unpredictability; yet it uniquely foregrounds its own execution, during which rules change. The definition systematizes forms of play beyond game-playing, including childhood play and art, offers a more plausible criterion for borderline cases (e.g., gamification and professional sport), and theoreticizes that play involves more than mere rule-following.

Contemporary theater is undergoing a transformation. Digital formats, in which audiences and performers are no longer necessarily present in the same place at the same time, demonstrate that the practices and rules governing theatrical performance have changed. Consequently, the very concept of theatrical performance has evolved as well. Drawing on a socio-ontological approach, this essay proposes a way of theoretically accounting for these changes. It argues that certain digital formats continue to exhibit synchronous co-presence despite the absence of physical co-presence. Live streams or virtual reality performances should therefore not hastily be classified as mere film, video, or video game events. A concluding taxonomy aims to provide an overview of the multitude of digital formats and shows that contemporary theater no longer exists in a single performance form, but in varying degrees of synchronous co-presence.

Theater and digitality are not opposites; rather, they form a productive relation ship of mutual enhancement. The integration of technology into theatrical practice has a long history, the logical continuation of which is the use of immersive technologies. This article describes the artistic and institutional practice of digital theater at the Staatstheater Augsburg, ranging from virtual and mixed reality to interactive participatory formats and augmented reality applications in public space. It situates these developments within an overview of comparable initiatives in the German-speaking theater landscape. In doing so, it demonstrates that digital technologies do not endanger theatrical forms of expression but transform them: they enable new forms of proximity, shifts in perspective, and active participation, reach previously untapped audiences, and improve the structural accessibility of theatrical offerings.

Johannes Hees-Pelikan: Johann Jakob Bodmers Arbeit an der Ästhetik, Göttingen: Wallstein 2024, 464 S. Judith Siegmund: Künstlerisches Handeln in digitalen und postkolonialen Umgebungen. Eine Kunstphilosophie, Hamburg: Meiner 2025, 251 S. Judith Siegmund/Florian Klinger/Marie Rosenkranz (Hrsg.): Handeln in den Künsten, Bielefeld: transcript 2026, 234 S. Dirk Hartmann: Kunstdeutung [§ 26, (6)], in: Neues System der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundriss, Bd. 5, Paderborn: Brill | mentis, 2024, 241 S.