Dr Felix Schniz is co-founder and director of the Game Studies and Engineering master’s programme at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. An interdisciplinary game studies scholar at heart, Felix has drawn on – and cooperated with colleagues in – philology and literary studies, theories of modernity and cultural studies, philosophy, pedagogy, and psychology. He currently operates from the Department of Information Technology at the University of Klagenfurt. After asking ‘What is a Videogame Experience?’ in his dissertation, his current research focuses on the meaning of experience, genre theory, and the importance of subjectivity in research on video games, analogue games, and virtual worlds.
Self/Exploration in the Ludic Atelier: Consistency and Immersion in the Experience of the Artist-Avatar
FROG 2026 – Talk
While we tend to understand the avatar in terms of an artwork – one imagines avatars as character portrays or a blank canvas, for instance (cf. Schallegger 2016, 44-45) – we rarely acknowledge them as artistic entities themselves. This is, in fact, a double oversight: the player-avatar compound, central to a video game’s immersive quality, is a node of creation and manipulation.
The artistic capabilities of players as artist-avatars are the focus of this presentation on the player-avatar compound. Based on Mirt Komel’s philosophical-aesthetic befinding of games as the 8th art (cf. Komel 2024), we explore the hypothesis that avatars as artists allow for a better grasp on aesthetic video game experiences. Defining the video game experience as one of self-realisation and potential (cf. Feige 2015, 173; cf. Schniz 2025), we explore the nuances of this relation in three case studies. Layers of Fear (2016) exemplifies the trop of the protagonist as artist. In THE AWKWARD STEVE DUOLOGY (2017), the solo developer embeds himself as his own in-game avatar. The meditative geometry game Engare (2017), finally, represents a video game in which the triangle of artist, protagonist, and player fades into a canvas-like game-state.
Subsequently, we extrapolate our insights gained from these case studies and apply them to the challenging artistic creation of virtual play spaces. Central to the player-avatar compound are the state of immersion and the coexistence with the world (cf. Jerald 2018, 45-52), rendering it not just a technical achievement but an aesthetic one. The rules of digital and real worlds differ, which raises the question of coherence in aesthetics: how is consistency defined in art, and where does visual fidelity help or break the player-avatar experience? By highlighting how NVIDIA DLSS 5 pushes towards ultra-realism while risking fracturing the designed immersive experience rather than deepening it, we explore how ‘closer to reality’ does not automatically translate to a ‘closer to authenticity.’
These showcases serve as basis for meaningful inquiry and discussion about the artist-as-protagonist relation to video games. A final discussion ought to question the role of subjectivity and the crackles of imperfect technologies in these aesthetic assumptions, and to draw a picture for further artistic inquiries.