ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author shows what digital games mean via an anima ludus, and how this affords or deters psychological reactivity as described by Luke Hockley. Being-in-the-game-world is then, in potentia, a psychologically significant experience, but it can never be reduced to recliner chairs, button presses, the screen, the sound, the mind, the body. Throughout the cited article, Espen Aarseth certainly intends to dispel the notion that games are ‘texts’, which, in his view, is dangerously close to a narratological reductionism. Cartesian metaphysics provides a deceptive bed which both Jung and the field of Game Studies often fall into, one that Procrustes would applaud: chopping, stretching and manipulating the corpus of the field with little justification. In The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch opines ‘prudence, caution, and calculation, so prominent in everyday life but so inimical to the spirit of games, come to shape sports as they shape everything else’.
