Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: The sublime remains in game studies a concept most often linked to visual spectacle, spatial scale, and cinematic immersion associated with the medium's post-1990s technological development. This article challenges that orientation by arguing that sublimity in video games emerges less from representational excess than from moments of systemic failure. Drawing on aesthetic theory, philosophy, and game studies scholarship, it reconceptualizes the glitch as a central and transhistorical site of the digital sublime. Rather than treating glitches as frustrations, the article frames them as structurally revealing events. Through analyses of Pac-Man 's level 256 killscreen and failure states such as death loops in Fallout: New Vegas , it shows how glitches produce similar affective conditions that closely parallel classical accounts of the sublime.
Source: Games and Culture
Author: Steven Kielich
Institution: University of Rochester
Language: English
Topic: Digital Games and Media
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7166708653