THE LIMINALITY OF GAME EXPERIENCE: «DOWN THE RABBIT-HOLE» AS A MODEL FOR THE TRANSITION TO THE DIGITAL WORLD

Abstract

The article is devoted to a philosophical analysis of the liminality of video game experience as a distinctive mode through which the subject enters the digital world. The study is based on the premise that the figure of Alice, created by Lewis Carroll, together with the motif of "falling down the rabbit hole," can serve as a conceptual model for the transition between different ontological modes of experience. From this perspective, the journey into Wonderland represents a structure that describes the loss of established cognitive coordinates, the acquisition of new modes of orientation, and the gradual constitution of the subject within a virtual environment whose rules become intelligible only through interaction.

The theoretical framework of the study combines the concept of liminality developed by Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner, Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of experience, Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutic conception of play, and contemporary contributions to game studies concerned with the phenomenology of video games, the ergodicity of digital texts, and immersion in virtual worlds (Espen Aarseth, Jesper Juul, Miguel Sicart, and Jan Valo). Since the gaming process transforms the nature of experience, the ways in which players orient themselves in the world, and the principles underlying their interaction with it, the approaches discussed above provide grounds for understanding video games as spaces in which players temporarily move beyond habitual modes of perceiving and engaging with reality.

The article further examines the transition into the virtual world as an ontological event involving a shift in the mode of presence, a transformation of subjectivity, and the appropriation of the normative structures that govern the digital environment. The figure of Alice performs a heuristic function by representing a universal structure of entering a world organized according to different principles of spatiality, temporality, causality, and meaning-making. Accordingly, liminality is interpreted as a constitutive condition of video game experience rather than merely as a characteristic of the transition between two states.

The scientific novelty of the study lies in its philosophical conceptualization of Alice as a model of digital liminality and in its justification of applying the anthropological theory of liminality to the analysis of video games. The proposed approach expands the conceptual framework of the philosophy of digital culture by opening new perspectives for understanding video game experience through the categories of ontology, phenomenology, subjectivity, and the spatiotemporal organization of digital worlds.