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Experiential Metaphor

8 min read

Experiential Metaphor

Summary

An experiential metaphor is an analogy between what a game feels like to play, moment-to-moment, and what a real-life abstract experience (grief, addiction, depression, love, marginalisation) feels like to live through. It works not by depicting the experience narratively but by structuring gameplay so that the player’s actions and sensations recreate the phenomenological quality of the source experience. The concept is developed by Doris C. Rusch in Making Deep Games (2017), drawing on cognitive linguistics — specifically Lakoff & Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By (1980) and Johnson’s The Body in the Mind (1990) — and is the central mechanism by which deep-games achieve their communicative goals (Rusch, Making Deep Games, see source-making-deep-games).

Key ideas

Structural vs experiential metaphor

Rusch distinguishes two types of metaphor relevant to game design:

  • Structural metaphors — understanding one abstract concept in terms of another (e.g., “argument is war”: we attack positions, defend claims, shoot down ideas). These operate at the level of conceptual framing. In game terms, a structural metaphor explains how something works: the rules of a marriage game might model the dynamics of negotiation and compromise.
  • Experiential metaphors — analogies grounded in the felt quality of an experience. These operate at the level of embodied sensation and emotional texture. An experiential metaphor asks: what does playing this feel like, and does that feeling match what the target experience feels like?

The key insight is that structural metaphors alone are insufficient for deep games. A game can accurately model the structure of a phenomenon (divorce, addiction, depression) without producing any felt understanding of it. Deep games require experiential metaphors.

Experiential gestalt

The theoretical foundation is the experiential gestalt — a concept from Johnson (1990). Every experience, concrete or abstract, has an underlying abstract structure with the following dimensions:

  • Participants — who or what is involved
  • Parts — component sub-experiences
  • Stages — how it unfolds over time
  • Linear sequence — the causal order of events
  • Purpose — what the experience is for or what it accomplishes

This gestalt can be shared across structurally similar experiences even when their surface content is entirely different. Designing an experiential metaphor means finding a gameplay gestalt that is congruent with the gestalt of the source experience — dimension by dimension.

”How it works” vs “what it feels like”

This is the central practical distinction in Rusch’s framework. She uses Rod Humble’s The Marriage (2006) as an illustrative case:

  • The Marriage accurately models how marriage works: two entities must balance independence and togetherness, external forces push them apart, they must actively tend the relationship. The rules are structurally coherent.
  • However, the game does not communicate what marriage feels like: the intimacy, the frustration, the comfort, the loss of self, the specific texture of long-term love. The gestalt of the play experience does not match the gestalt of the lived experience.

Rusch argues this is not a flaw in The Marriage specifically — it illustrates a general design challenge. Getting the structure right and getting the feel right are two separate problems, and deep games must solve both.

Coherence and consistency

Following Lakoff & Johnson’s principle that structural metaphors must be coherent, experiential metaphors must be coherent dimension-for-dimension. You cannot mix incompatible gestalt mappings within the same game. Each dimension of the gameplay gestalt (what you do, how it feels, what you gain or lose, how it ends) must map consistently onto the same dimension of the source experience.

Incoherent mappings produce games that feel confused or dishonest — they gesture at a theme without actually illuminating it.

Embodied enactment

The power of experiential metaphors lies in their embodied, enactive nature. The player does not merely observe or read about the source experience — they perform actions that produce feelings structurally analogous to it. This is why games are uniquely suited (more than film or literature) to certain kinds of emotional and psychological communication: the first-person enactment creates a qualitatively different kind of understanding.

Rusch connects this to broader phenomenological and cognitive-linguistic traditions: the body is the primary site of meaning-making, and bodily-felt experience is the ground of abstract understanding.

In practice

Designing an experiential metaphor

  1. Identify the source experience. Be specific: not “loss” but “the numbness that follows sudden bereavement.” Not “addiction” but “the way cravings narrow your field of attention.”
  2. Map the gestalt. Articulate the participants, parts, stages, sequence, and purpose of the source experience. What are its characteristic feelings at each stage?
  3. Find an analogous gameplay gestalt. What mechanic produces the same phenomenological quality? Look for structural congruence, not surface resemblance. The goal is not to simulate the source (which is almost never possible) but to find an analogue.
  4. Test the mapping. Have players who know the source experience play and ask: does this feel right? Does it feel like it illuminates or distorts?
  5. Maintain coherence. Every mechanic you add should reinforce the same mapping, not introduce a competing one.

Case studies

  • God of War II grappling hook (Rusch’s example) — The grappling hook mechanic, where the player must commit to a leap before securing a hold, embodies the gestalt of transition: risk, commitment, irreversibility. Rusch uses this as an example of how an ordinary game mechanic can function as an experiential metaphor for something beyond its literal function.
  • Angry Birds — Rusch notes this as a structural metaphor (revenge/retaliation logic), but one that does not reach the level of experiential metaphor for any deep human condition.
  • Elude (MIT Gambit, 2010) — The three-zone vertical structure (flow at top, ordinary life in middle, depression pulling down) creates an experiential metaphor for depressive states: the downward pull is felt, not described; the way small triggers send you spiralling is mechanically enacted.
  • Papo & Yo (Minority Media, 2012) — The monster who transforms when encountering frogs (his drug) enacts the experiential gestalt of living with an addicted parent: the loved one’s transformation is sudden, unpredictable, dangerous, and outside the child’s control. The player feels the powerlessness.
  • Depression Quest (Zoe Quinn, 2013) — Greyed-out but visible options enact the gestalt of depression’s narrowing of perceived possibility: you can see what a non-depressed person would do; you cannot do it.
  • Grimm / Left Behind — cited by Rusch as examples of allegorical games with clear experiential metaphors operating across the full game arc.

(Rusch, Making Deep Games, see source-making-deep-games)

Evidence

Rusch grounds the theory explicitly in cognitive linguistics:

  • Lakoff & Johnson (Metaphors We Live By, 1980) — established that abstract thought is fundamentally structured by metaphor rooted in bodily experience. “Time is money,” “argument is war” are not decorative: they organise how we reason.
  • Johnson (The Body in the Mind, 1990) — developed the theory of image schemas: pre-conceptual, kinaesthetic patterns (container, path, balance, force) derived from bodily experience that structure abstract understanding. These are the raw material of experiential gestalts.
  • Rusch extends this into game design: if abstract understanding is rooted in bodily-felt experience, then games — which produce bodily-felt experience — are uniquely positioned to create abstract understanding through enactment.

Implications

  • Metaphor selection is the core design decision. Getting the right experiential metaphor is more important than any specific mechanic. Once the metaphor is right, many different mechanics could serve it; without the right metaphor, no mechanic will produce the intended meaning.
  • Surface resemblance is not enough. A game about cancer that looks like hospitals and doctors but does not enact the felt experience of helplessness, uncertainty, or bodily betrayal has not achieved an experiential metaphor.
  • Experiential metaphors can fail. A mapping that seems structurally sound may not produce the right felt quality in players. Testing with people who have the source experience is epistemically necessary.
  • The mechanism works across scales. Individual mechanics can carry experiential metaphors (a grappling hook for transition); so can entire games (Elude for depression).

Open questions

  • Are some human experiences simply too complex or too subjective to admit stable experiential metaphors? Or is this always a design challenge rather than a fundamental limitation?
  • How does cultural specificity interact with experiential metaphors — are gestalt structures universal (as Lakoff & Johnson argue) or culturally variable?
  • Can a single game carry multiple, non-competing experiential metaphors simultaneously?
  • What is the relationship between experiential metaphor and flow? Does deep engagement in flow suppress or amplify the experiential metaphor?

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