Everyday Otherwise: Video Games as Method and Metaphor I 8 Weeks Theoretical Seminar + 2 Days Workshop with Sascia Pellegrini
Everyday Otherwise: Video Games as Method and Metaphor
8 Weeks Theoretical Seminar + 2 Days Practice-Based Workshop with Sascia Pellegrini
The 8-week seminar explores video games as a way of thinking through everyday life. Each week pairs specific games with readings from media theory and phenomenology, moving through themes like perception and space, embodiment and vulnerability, memory and loss, care and intimacy, gender and identity, urban anxiety, otherness, and ecology. The 2-day workshop is optional and stands on its own. You don't need to have taken the seminar to join. It takes a closer look at a few specific games, and participants are expected to bring creative work to share and discuss.
8 Weeks Theoretical Seminar Overview
Combining media theory with the philosophy of lived experience (phenomenology), this course explores how video games can act as both a metaphor for and a critique of everyday life. Over eight weeks, we’ll engage with urban spaces, otherness, virtual reality, and the environmental crisis, while also observing the creative possibilities games offer—open worlds, imagination, and discovery.
Designed for anyone curious about games and their ties to contemporary culture, art, literature, feminist thought, media theory, perception, or creative practice, the course builds its argument through narrative games and themes of bodily perception, affect, care, memory, and the fabric of daily experience. We’ll make philosophical ideas accessible and emotionally resonant, always rooted in lived reality. Themes range from memory, embodiment (and emplacement), vulnerability, grief, intimacy, and care, to identity, everyday space, female experience, urban anxiety, and more—always examined as felt, living realities.
To ground these discussions, we’ll consider excerpts from video games such as: Inside, Stray, Life is Strange, Relooted, Journey, Gris, Spiritfarer, Unpacking, What Remains of Edith Finch, Superliminal, Before Your Eyes, Celeste, A Short Hike, Cairn, The Stanley Parable, Death Stranding, Detroit: Become Human, Beyond: Two Souls, The Exit 8, and Platform 8.
Along the way, we’ll be in dialogue with thinkers such as Donna Haraway, Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva, Bernard Waldenfels, Bernard Stiegler, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Kitaro Nishida, Monique Linard, Carolin Marchant, Gilbert Simondon, Michel Serres, Luce Irigaray, and others.
Each week, a curated list of readings and reflective prompts will help you deepen your engagement and prepare for the next session. By the end of the course, you’ll have a richer vocabulary for discussing games as cultural and social artifacts and a deeper understanding of how play shapes—and is shaped by—everyday emplaced experiences of life.
Weekly Breakdown
Week 1: Perception, Space, and the Fabric of the Everyday
How do games make us see and feel the spaces we inhabit?
Games: Unpacking, Superliminal, A Short Hike
We begin with the building blocks of lived experience: perception, domestic space, and the quiet acts of daily life. These games reframe the familiar—unpacking boxes, optical illusions, a walk in the hills—as sites of meaning.
Week 2: Embodiment, Vulnerability, and Emotional Gravity
What does it mean to inhabit a body—and to feel its weight, limits, and longings?
Games: Gris, Celeste, Cairn
Through color, struggle, and ascent, we explore grief, anxiety, and the body as the ground of emotional experience. Thinkers on embodiment and affect will help us read these climbing forms as metaphors.
Week 3: Memory, Loss, and the Stories Objects Carry
How do games hold personal and collective memory—and what does it mean to reclaim a heritage?
Games: What Remains of Edith Finch, Before Your Eyes, Relooted
We examine memory at multiple scales: the intimate, fleeting recollections of a single life; the grief woven through family and home; and the cultural memory violently disrupted by colonialism. Objects, spaces, and traces become the language of loss, recovery, and re-appropriation.
Week 4: Care, Intimacy, and Relational Worlds
How do we care for others, and how are we cared for in return?
Games: Spiritfarer, Journey
These titles foreground connection, companionship, and letting go. We’ll discuss care as a practice and a philosophy, drawing on feminist and ethical frameworks.
Week 5: Female Experience, Identity, and Everyday Activism
How do games represent and complicate female identity and agency?
Game: Life is Strange, Beyond: Two Souls
We focus on adolescence, choice, friendship, and the quiet politics of daily existence through a lens attentive to gender, time, and lived experience.
Week 6: Urban Anxiety, Control, and the Limits of Freedom
How do virtual cities mirror our fears and desires about power, surveillance, and autonomy?
Games: Inside, Stray, The Stanley Parable
Atmospheres of control, dystopian architecture, and the illusion of choice open onto questions of urban space, technology, and the boundaries of the self.
Week 7: Otherness, the Uncanny, and Encounters with the Non-Human
What happens when the familiar becomes strange—or when we meet beings outside our usual frame?
Games: The Exit 8, Platform 8, Detroit: Become Human
Liminal spaces and human-machine encounters invite us to rethink otherness, empathy, and what it means to share a world.
Week 8: World-Building, Ecology, and Metaphors of Connection
How can games model new ways of living with the earth and with each other?
Games: Death Stranding, Stray, Journey
We close by asking how the open-world metaphor becomes a practice of hope, cooperation, and environmental attunement—tying threads from the whole course together.
2 Days Practice-Based Workshop Overview
This workshop deepens the intersection of media theory, phenomenology, feminist thought, and artistic practice in game studies by closely reading the philosophical and narrative landscapes of three case studies: Beyond: Two Souls, Disco Elysium, and Stray. Together, these games trace an arc from embodied intimacy and psychic fragmentation to urban estrangement and ecological entanglement.
Working through these titles, we develop our argument around narrative form and the textures of lived experience: bodily sensitivity, the temporal and spatial horizons of perception, memory, emplacement (in David Howes’ terms), and the fabric of daily life—affect (in Massumi’s sense), care, identity, intimacy, and more.
We will engage in close dialogue with four key thinkers, among others: Donna Haraway—the Chthulucene, the Cyborg Manifesto, natureculture, and situated knowledge; Julia Kristeva—the chora as pre-linguistic bodily drive, and desire in language; Bernard Waldenfels—the phenomenology of the alien, otherness, and the thresholds of attention; Luce Irigaray—an ethic of touch, desire, and gendered bodies. We also draw on Don Ihde’s post-phenomenology of technology to frame how games mediate perception, embodiment, and world-relations.
The workshop weaves discussion, individual reflection prompted by guided questions, small-group tasks, and solo activities, all grounded in the narrative, philosophical, and perceptual material we explore. By the end, you will have gained a richer vocabulary for discussing games as cultural and social artifacts, a sharper grasp of fundamental concepts in post-phenomenology and post-feminist theory, and a deeper awareness of how play shapes—and is shaped by—the emplaced experiences of everyday life.
Workshop Breakdown
Day 1: Bodily Thresholds and Fractured Selves (6 hours: morning/afternoon)
9:30–10:30 | Session 1 — Introduction: Cyborg Bodies and Post-Phenomenological Mediation
We open with a feminist and post-phenomenological framework, pairing Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto with Don Ihde’s human-technology-world relations. Haraway’s cyborg—a hybrid of machine and organism—gives us a way to think the body as always already technological and the self as radically “other-than-human”. Ihde complements this by offering a fine-grained vocabulary for how technologies mediate our perception, embodiment, and relation to the world (embodiment, hermeneutic, and alterity relations). Together, they equip us to ask: What kinds of bodies do games produce, and what forms of mediation make those bodies possible?
10:30–11:15 | Session 2 — Bodily Sensitivity and the Ethics of Touch:”Beyond: Two Souls”
Through Beyond: Two Souls, we explore the entanglement of body, disembodied presences, and intimacy. With Irigaray’s ethic of touch and Kristeva’s chora—the pre-linguistic, rhythmic space of bodily drives—we examine how Jodie and Aiden trouble boundaries between self and other, inside and outside, flesh and spirit. The game becomes a site to think desire, vulnerability, and gendered embodiment.
11:30–12:15 | Session 3 — Straying from the Human: Otherness and the Urban Unfamiliar: “Stray”
Playing as a cat in a post-human city, Stray invites a radical shift in perspective. Building on the cyborg foundation, we now work with Haraway’s situated knowledge, natureculture, and the Chthulucene to rethink the boundary between human and non-human. Waldenfels’s alienness helps us read the city and its robot inhabitants as encounters with a responsive other. Ihde’s alterity relation articulates the experience of playing as an animal body while remaining a human player.
13:30–14:15 | Session 4 — Memory, Alienation, and the Threshold of Self: “Disco Elysium”
Disco Elysium offers a shattered mind as a narrative space. Here we engage Waldenfels’s phenomenology of the alien—the self as already strange to itself—and Kristeva’s desire in language, as the protagonist’s internal chorus of skills competes for attention, constructs memory, and negotiates identity. Ihde’s hermeneutic relation helps us read the game’s interface as a technological mediation of thought and selfhood.
14:15-17:00 | Small Groups Activity: choose one moment from any of the three games and compose a short narrative or visual “map” of its affective and spatial dynamics. As mapping the urban spaces in the game, or of an alternative urban space (real or fictional) think different modes of emplacement and otherness. Groups will develop a short “micro-phenomenology” of one location, drawing on Haraway and Waldenfels, exploring how the different “voices” enacts attention, desire, or alienation.
We’ll collectively share and discuss the group work on the following day.
Day 2: The Non-Human, Otherness, and Ecological Entanglement (3 hours: morning only)
9:30-11:30 | Session 5 — Sharing of Group Work
In this session we will share work in progress, followed by feedback, discussion and observations.
11:45–12:45 | Session 6 — Affect, Emplacement, and Post-Feminist Cartographies
In this final session, we bring together the workshop’s strands. Using Howes’s emplacement and Massumi’s affect, we reflect across the three games: how do they each produce specific sensory and emotional atmospheres? How do they materialize care, grief, hope, and resistance? This session emphasizes the integration of post-feminist and post-phenomenological approaches to daily life and bodily experience. We’ll revisit the cyborg as a figure of possibility, Ihde’s technology relations, Haraway’s call for response-ability, Irigaray’s ethics of difference, and Kristeva’s semiotic, asking how play might refigure everyday emplaced life.
Notes
A reading pack will be provided in advance, featuring selected excerpts from Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto and Staying with the Trouble, Ihde’s Technology and the Lifeworld, Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language and Desire in Language, Waldenfels’s Phenomenology of the Alien, Irigaray’s An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Howes’s Sensual Relations, and Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual.