Shikyu: A Geometric Model of Play via Phenomenological

Abstract

The object-centered definition of games, symbolized by Wittgenstein's “language games” and based on enumerating game elements, constantly generates borderline and exceptional cases, making it difficult to function as a practical definition in actual development settings. This paper suspends judgment (epoché) on the evaluation of objects in game definitions and performs a phenomenological reduction focusing on the subject's cognitive activity. This allows us to reconstruct the structure of play as a model capable of visual and geometric prediction and generation. Methodologically, we connect Caillois's four-quadrant definition to the “focus zone”—a cognitive science-based development of literary theory's focalization—and define it as the “private sphere,” a model of the subject's cognitive experience. This private sphere model enables visual representations such as geometric answers to the relationship between narratology and ludrology, and definitions based on the typology of emotional shifts like joy, anger, and pleasure. Ultimately, it plots a wide range of play examples from classical to contemporary abandonment and game commentary, verifying the model's validity as a unified analytical framework.