Beyond Social Structures and Subjective Frames: Situations in the Experience of Video Games
The paper starts from the assumption that human experience is fundamentally structured by the situations to which we tacitly relate. When playing a 2D platformer, we immediately perceive a gap as an abyss and feel the tendency to press the jump button; in a VR rhythm game, by contrast, we experience blocks flying toward us as objects to be struck, prompting coordinated movements of hands and body. In both cases, we already occupy specific situational stances that operate as mediating frames of readiness and anticipation, prestructuring the “landscape of affordances” (Rietveld & Kiverstein) we encounter.
Philosophical accounts of situations tend to fall into two camps. Subjectivist approaches construe situations as interpretative frames imposed upon an otherwise neutral perceptual field. Objectivist or structuralist accounts, by contrast, maintain that the meanings, affordances, and normative structures we encounter are not subjectively projected but already “out there” in the world—intersubjectively constituted, and in this sense objective. On this view, situations are meaning structures constituted by social rules, and can be perceived adequately or inadequately.
I will argue that structuralist theories of social situations are inadequate for three reasons: (1) they cannot account for situational misalignment—cases in which agents inhabit different situations while ostensibly sharing the same setting; (2) they overlook the dynamic experiential processes through which immersion in situations unfolds; and (3) they presuppose, rather than explain, the conditions under which agents succeed in jointly inhabiting a common situation. I propose to conceptualize situations neither as merely subjective frames nor as objective social structures, but as belonging to a distinct third category not captured by Searle’s epistemic/ontological subjectivity/objectivity distinction.