ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Csikszentmihalyi's theory of optimal experience with Kant's vision of the sublime as a reaffirmation of reason, to contextualize the promise of empowerment through game design. By examining the limits of subjective consciousness in the interplay between action and passion, intentionality and surrender, Csikszentmihalyi's concept offers ground for the conceptualization of the gamified sublime. The chapter examines the empowering effect of flow as a method of structuring the contents of consciousness in the context of Kant's understanding of the sublime as an experience that "awakens the feeling of a supersensible faculty in us". It focuses on the overpowering effect of flow as a loss of self-consciousness in view of Freud's treatment of freedom as submission to instinctual desires. The non-distinction between "the inner" and "the outer" in that very moment is a kind of freedom founded, simultaneously, upon mastery and submission, because the autonomy of the self is hardly more important than the possibility of its transcendence.
