“I Kant Play This”: Rethinking Sublimity Through Video Game Glitches

Introduction

The sublime occupies a familiar yet unsettled position within game studies. Scholars have invoked the term to describe moments of awe, wonder, and perceptual overwhelm produced through digital play, often drawing upon Burkean and Kantian traditions (King & Krzywinska, 2005; Kirkland, 2021; Martin, 2011; Mortensen & Jørgensen, 2020; Vella, 2015). In practice, the concept has most often been mobilized in relation to spectacle—visual scale, spatial vastness, and immersive vastness—qualities commonly associated with advances in graphical processing, three-dimensional environments, and cinematic presentation following the mid-1990s (Andiloro, 2025; Barrett, 2025; Frasca, 2003; Klevjer, 2023; Leonard, 2022; Parker, 2017; Sharp, 2023; Sicart, 2011; Spokes, 2020; Trifonova, 2018; Veale, 2012; Wills, 2023; Wolf, 2003; Wolf, 2008; Wolf, 2023).

This emphasis is historically intelligible. In the latter half of the 1990s, advances in hardware, expanded memory, and the adoption of CD-ROM storage enabled the integration of more explicitly filmic techniques, prompting a significant shift in the medium that reshaped “narrative structure, player agency, and thematic engagement” (Barrett, 2025, p. 2). At the same time, the industry increasingly leaned toward cinematic conventions, including “pre-rendered digital cutscenes, specific framing, montage, letterboxing, and professional voice acting,” resulting in a hybrid form that moved between passive spectacle and interactive participation (Andiloro, 2025, p. 44). These developments contributed to the perception of video games as a more mature cultural medium. ¹ With new spatial and temporal configurations, games released after the mid-1990s began to challenge players’ ability to clearly perceive boundaries and limits within game worlds, encouraging deeper immersion in increasingly hyper-real virtual environments (Trifonova, 2018). This immersive quality has been described as producing a sensation of being enveloped within an apparently boundless spatial field, reinforcing the impression of expansive, continuous worlds (Rosenblum, 2005).

By the early 2000s, advances in home computing power allowed games to render much greater depth along the z-axis, significantly extending how far players could see into virtual space, offering increasingly immersive and visually convincing worlds, resulting in the repositioning of the medium at the forefront of interactive visual media (Wolf, 2009). This expansion of spatial depth, combined with more interconnected and diverse game environments, had a notable impact on players’ perception, presenting them with broader, more detailed worlds composed of linked locations (Perron & Wolf, 2009; Wolf, 2009). In this context, titles such as Grand Theft Auto III (Rockstar Games, 2001) can be seen as crystallizing the medium's aesthetic and technological maturation. Celebrated for its innovative gameplay and cinematic approach to storytelling (Klevjer, 2023), the game was renowned above all for its setting, Liberty City. Leonard (2022) identifies the game's spatial and temporal design as a major turning point in the evolution of game design, while Frasca (2003) highlights its emphasis on expansive urban space and player freedom. Rockstar Games later reinforced this image by presenting Liberty City as a vast, dynamic, and unpredictable environment (Rockstar Games, 2011). In the wake of such titles, discussions of the sublime in video games increasingly coalesced around scale, immersion, and representational excess.

Yet, this trajectory has framed sublimity on technological maturity, marginalizing earlier games and alternative modes of sublime experience. This essay challenges the assumption that sublimity depends upon visual magnitude or representational complexity. If the sublime is defined in video games by moments of excess (Mortensen and Jørgensen, 2020), overwhelming incomprehension (Kim, 2023), and failed mastery (Martin, 2011; Vella, 2015), then it need not be confined to designed spectacle. Instead, it may emerge most forcefully when games fail.

Central to this study is the claim that the glitch—an unintended breakdown in a game's functioning—offers a more historically inclusive and theoretically productive framework for understanding the sublime in video games. Glitches interrupt mastery, destabilize systems of play, and confront players with the limits of cognition and comprehension (Bainbridge & Bainbridge, 2007; Conway, 2013; Jurgensen, 2018; Leino, 2012; Nguyen, 2017; O’Grady, 2013). Notably, the language used to describe glitches—loss of control, alienation, disorientation—closely mirrors that of the sublime (Meades, 2015; Morley, 2010; Shinkle, 2012; Shinkle, 2013), suggesting a shared structure rooted in excess, breakdown, and failure (Lyotard, 1985; Morley, 2010; Žižek, 2008). Rather than treating this resemblance as merely metaphorical, this essay argues that glitches instantiate a specifically digital mode of sublimity grounded in systemic collapse rather than representational awe.

Approaching glitches as objects of interpretation rather than peripheral anomalies reframes digital sublimity as a structural feature of the video game medium rather than a byproduct of representational ambition (Conway, 2013; Nguyen, 2017). This shift redirects critical attention away from what games display toward what they cannot fully control, contain, or stabilize. Focusing on early examples such as the Pac-Man (Namco, 1980) kill-screen glitch—a sublime phenomenon analyzed in a later section of this essay—this study intervenes in game studies discourse by demonstrating that encounters with sublimity were always already possible in pre-1996 video games, even in those simplistic and most technologically constrained titles.

This intervention challenges dominant scholarly approaches that locate the sublime primarily in relation to spatial boundaries or virtual environments. When sublimity is defined mainly in terms of the limits of game space or the properties of simulated worlds (Vella, 2015; Spokes, 2020), it becomes dependent on the extent to which particular games can generate intense, lasting affective experiences that approach what might be understood as the sublime (Spokes, 2020). Such frameworks implicitly privilege technologically advanced games and situate the sublime at the edges of virtual worlds rather than within the game's underlying systemic operations.

This essay, then, argues that sublimity in video games emerges most forcefully not at the limits of representation but at the point of systemic failure. Attention must therefore shift to what lies beneath the surface of the game itself: what it fails to show, what it inadvertently reveals, and what it cannot fully suppress. As shall be made clear, failure, in this sense, lies at the heart of both the sublime and the glitch. For Jurgensen (2018), when glitches disrupt gameplay, they undermine the player's sense of control and agency, producing a feeling of alienation from the game world; they also note that games with frequent glitches tend to generate forms of failure that feel improper or unintended, rather than meaningfully integrated into the experience. The shared vocabulary of loss, alienation, and incomprehensibility common to both glitch discourse and theories of the sublime signals a deep structural affinity between the two.

This perspective also addresses objections that the sublime cannot be universally applied to all video games (Kim, 2023; Spokes, 2020). Such claims overlook the fact that all games, regardless of historical period, genre, or technological complexity, are capable of glitching. Unlike cinematic techniques, expansive landscapes, or three-dimensional realism, glitches traverse the medium's history, making them a mechanism through which sublimity can be recognized in both pre- and post-1996 games. Following scholars such as Leino (2012), Conway (2013), and Nguyen (2017), this essay treats software bugs and glitches not as mere irritations, accidental faults, or “ludic anomalies,” but as legitimate objects of scholarly thought.

This argument resonates with David O’Grady's account of technological breakdown, drawing on Martin Heidegger's analysis of tool failure. O’Grady emphasizes that malfunctions and absences force users to reconsider the very technologies that typically operate transparently in daily experience (O’Grady, 2013). Similarly, when a game glitches, the familiar structures of the medium become suddenly visible, much like Heidegger's example of a broken hammer revealing the surrounding environment in a new way (Heidegger, 2008). The glitch thus renders the medium suddenly opaque, revealing its contingency and exposing the fragile scaffolding beneath what is ordinarily experienced as seamless and controlled. In this moment of destabilization and excess, a digital form of the sublime emerges—one defined not by intentional spectacle but by an overwhelming encounter with the game's own limits.

The present inquiry therefore reconceptualizes the glitch not as a source of frustration or design failure but as an analog to the sublime itself. By foregrounding breakdown rather than display and instability rather than immersion, this essay offers a more inclusive, historically grounded, and structurally rigorous account of digital sublimity. In doing so, it positions the glitch at the center of the medium's aesthetic and experiential possibilities, reframing failure as a key site through which video games confront players with the limits of control, comprehension, and technological mastery.

A Glitch in the System

Despite its contemporary ubiquity, the term glitch is a relatively recent addition to our cultural vocabulary. Popularized in the 1960s, “glitch” is etymologically linked to the German glitschen, meaning “to slip,” and the Yiddish glitshn, meaning “to slide” or “to skid” (Vespe, 2019). Even at the level of language, then, the glitch signals instability: a loss of traction, a failure of smooth progression.

To grasp the concept’s broader force, however, it is useful to turn beyond technical discourse. A revealing formulation appears in David Chase’s The Sopranos (1999– 2007). In the 2002 episode “No Show,” Silvio Dante (Steven Van Zandt) is confronted by Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) over an unauthorized act of violence. While multiple crew members insist Silvio approved the action, Silvio denies having done so. Pressed to explain this contradiction, he offers a line that, in its bluntness, distills the logic of the glitch: “Timeline got fucked up” (Chase et al., 2002, 53:20).

Silvio's explanation isolates the phenomenon's conceptual core. A glitch names the moment when temporal continuity—our assumption that events unfold in a coherent and intelligible sequence—breaks down. It is the interruption of narrative causality, the failure of the story we tell ourselves about how things happened and why. What surfaces in such moments is not merely error but the exposure of the artificial stitching that ordinarily holds experience together.

In this sense, glitches can be understood as antihermeneutical operations. Like the schizophrenic experience described by Fredric Jameson in Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, glitching involves a “breakdown of the signifying chain,” a divergence within an otherwise procedural conception of temporality and logic (Jameson, 1991, p. 27). Rosa Menkman similarly defines a glitch as a “break from an expected or conventional flow of information or meaning within (digital) communication systems that results in a perceived accident or error,” noting that it occurs when there is “an absence of (expected) functionality, whether understood in a technical or social sense” (Menkman, 2011, p. 9).

Taken together, these accounts suggest that a glitch does not simply interrupt a system from the outside. Rather, it reveals a fault line internal to the system's operation. To return once more to Silvio's phrasing, the glitch is the moment when the “timeline” itself becomes “fucked up,” when coherence fails and the disorder it normally conceals surges into view.

Glitch as Parapraxis

This structure of disruption has a revealing analog in psychoanalysis. A similar logic governs the Freudian slip, or parapraxis: the moment when a word “sometimes escapes one and a quite wrong substitute occurs to one in its place” (Freud, 2024, xv). The glitch can be understood as a technical analog to this linguistic rupture—a technical parapraxis.

Parapraxis is, as the joke goes, when you say “one thing but mean your mother” (Chandler and Munday, 2020, p. 349), when a compliment about a woman's “boots” becomes one about her “boobs.” These moments of slippage—when “unconscious thoughts” escape “censorship and” influence “the realm of conscious action,” when thought betrays language (Buchanan, 2010, p. 360)—undermine the subject's presumed sovereignty over speech. In the slip, one encounters the unsettling recognition that discourse is not entirely one's own. As Mary Gossy observes, “The slip signifies that its author is not an authority, because even that author's own discourse is out of control” (Gossy, 1995, p. 25). The threat of parapraxis lies in this exposure: the subject discovers that language, the very medium through which authority is asserted, harbors an unruly autonomy, that the speaking subject's “authority is most threatened by something that exceeds it” (Gossy, 1995, p. 88).

Todd McGowan captures this dynamic when he describes parapraxis as “the intersection of lack and excess” (McGowan, 2017, p. 44). The slip is excessive because it expresses more than the subject intends; it reveals lack because it discloses the subject's inability to coincide fully with itself; its “slips” mark “the point where I exceeded myself and yet remained myself” (McGowan, 2017, p. 140). Parapraxis is thus a confrontation between the subject and the otherness of their own language. Exposing the “foreign tongue” (Gossy, 1995, p. 57) embedded within speech, it is this linguistic double that is simultaneously me and “Not me” (Kristeva, 1982, p. 2).

The glitch operates according to the same logic. Like the slip, it stages a confrontation with internal division, puncturing the illusion of seamless authority and exposing the fracture that authority exists to conceal. The glitch does not merely interrupt a system's functioning; it reveals that the system was never fully coherent to begin with. In doing so, it forces an encounter with excess, loss of control, and internal otherness—conditions that will prove central to understanding the glitch as a site of digital sublimity.

The Instability of Sublimity

I now wish to argue that the modern conception of the glitch finds a meaningful parallel in the aesthetic and philosophical category of the sublime, particularly in the Kantian tradition. Although Kant never uses the term—indeed, the word did not yet exist—the language through which he articulates the sublime in the Critique of the Power of Judgment frequently resonates with the same logic of breakdown, discrepancy, and discontinuity that defines the glitch.

This resonance becomes clearer once we recall how Kant distinguishes the beautiful from the sublime. “Since Burke, the concept of the beautiful has been set against the concept of the sublime, more often than not as a point of theoretical contrast” (Shaw, 2006, p. 9). Robert Doran, quoting the First Introduction to Kant's third Critique, notes how “In the judgment of the beautiful, the feeling of pleasure or satisfaction in purposive form … is a result of the harmony produced between the faculties of the imagination {the faculty of presentation} and the understanding …” (Doran, 2015, p. 209). Beauty, in this sense, depends upon a “nonhierarchical, and thus harmonious, relation” between faculties (Doran, 2015, p. 212).

To judge something as beautiful is not merely to find it pleasing, but to experience “the activity of the mind in response to phenomena available to our senses” (Hughes, 2010, p. 12). Beauty provides “an ordered form to perception” (Vella, 2015), a moment of fluid reciprocity between imagination and understanding. Put differently, “We are struck, we know not how, with the symmetry of any thing we see, and immediately assent to the beauty of an object, without enquiring into the particular causes and occasions of it” (Addison, 1970, p. 176).

The sublime, by contrast, emerges precisely where this reciprocity fails. Disharmony is not incidental to sublimity but constitutive of it. The sublime arises when perception misfires, when the faculties no longer cooperate smoothly. The prefix sub- in sublime refers not to elevation but to what lies “below … the limen, the limit of one's perception” (Mishra, 1994, p. 39). The sublime thus names an encounter in which the coordinates that secure the subject's orientation collapse. It is not simply a matter of magnitude or grandeur, but of structural failure—when imagination falters before what cannot be adequately presented. Kant famously describes this as an experience that does “violence to our imagination,” revealing a rift within the very faculties that, in judgments of beauty, appear to function seamlessly (Kant, 2000, §23, p. 129).

If the glitch reveals that a procedural timeline was never stable, the sublime discloses that the demand for stability itself is impossible to satisfy. Its terror—and fascination—lies in this collapse of mastery, in the exposure of the frameworks through which we attempt to render the world intelligible. In this sense, the sublime operates as the aesthetic register of the glitch: an encounter with excess that exceeds representation and control.

This logic of failure is made explicit in Slavoj Žižek's Lacanian rereading of Kant in The Sublime Object of Ideology. Žižek draws a parallel between Kant's account of the sublime and Lacan's concept of the Real, emphasizing that both resist symbolization and remain ontologically unstable (Žižek, 2008). In this framework, sublimity involves elevating an object to the status of the impossible “Thing,” a something that exceeds empirical reality and cannot be fully represented or even properly presented (Žižek, 2008, p. 229). The sublime object thus marks the point at which representation breaks down, confronting us with its own limits and impossibility (Žižek, 2008). Kant similarly describes the sublime as a paradoxical experience in which the imagination fails to adequately grasp the magnitude before it, producing in the subject an initial sense of displeasure, yet this very failure gives rise to a new form of pleasure grounded in reason's recognition of its own higher vocation (Kant, 2000, §27, p. 141). Žižek extends this insight by arguing that the sublime emerges precisely when imagination is pushed to its limits and all finite determinations begin to dissolve (Žižek, 2008, p. 230). From this perspective, failure is not incidental to the sublime but constitutive of it.

The analogy between sublimity and the glitch now comes into focus. Kant's sublime exposes a breakdown in the coordination of Imagination and Understanding, that is, “the chasm between reason's impossible demand and the inadequacy of the sensible presentation (the imagination) that occasions it” (Doran, 2015, p. 229). The glitch similarly exposes a breakdown in the coordination of systems—technical, narrative, temporal, or cognitive—that ordinarily appear seamless. In both cases, disruption does not produce instability so much as reveal that instability was already structuring experience.

Digital media renders this logic materially perceptible. While the sublime was historically associated with natural phenomenon, the overwhelming force that gives rise to the contemporary sublime is increasingly technological rather than natural (Meades, 2015; Morley, 2010). This shift marks a transition from an earlier, more operatic conception of the sublime to a distinctly technological one, a distinction developed by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe in Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime.

Gilbert-Rolfe's argument contends that the sublime has been reconfigured as technological forms displace natural ones (Gilbert-Rolfe, 1999; Meades, 2015). Consequently, the sublime's sense of overwhelming infinity and inscrutability, once tied to nature, is now experienced through technology (Gilbert-Rolfe, 1999). Where Romanticism located the sublime in dramatic and chaotic landscapes, it is in technology's blankness and emptiness that we locate sublimity. In this context, our modern engagement with the sublime resembles what Gilbert-Rolfe calls “Heidegger's nightmare” (Gilbert-Rolfe, 1999, p. 48). ²

Technology becomes most profoundly sublime when it fails. Even when functioning as intended, phones, consoles, circuits, and processors possess an inherent opacity or unknowability. As unpredictable as they are powerful, when these systems and devices short-circuit, glitch, or cease to function, they become actively terrifying. It is precisely in these moments, when authority over the machine collapses, that sublimity emerges (Meades, 2015; Gilbert-Rolfe, 1999).

Unsurprisingly, discussions of glitches in video games frequently adopt a vocabulary akin to that used for parapraxis, emphasizing disruptions in the flow of signification (Nunes, 2011; Papows, 2010). As “audiovisual disruption[s] of gameplay,” often involving “a synchronization problem, or a runtime error, a temporal slip in the communication between the software, the operating system, and the hardware of a computer gaming system” (Schlarb, 2021, p. 424), glitches are “a Brechtian rupture in the always-delicate membrane of the digital game's fictional coherence … the ghost in the machine that haunts all claims to productivity, efficiency, and ultimately control. [They reveal] the machine's autonomy and refusal to be controlled” (Conway, 2013, pp. 23–24).

Because video games are material and digital constructs, they are vulnerable to glitches ranging from “frozen controls, visual lag, screen tearing, [and] looping of avatar action” to full crashes and system breakdowns (Schlarb, 2021, p. 425). Like parapraxis, these failures mark moments of desynchronization—here, between a game's digital and material construct, a boundary typically concealed by assumptions of seamless performance (Schlarb, 2021).

A glitch reveals “not only a system's failure, but also its operational logic” (Nunes, 2011, p. 3). Bainbridge and Bainbridge identify the most common form of this failure as “a discrepancy between the software's display model and its world model” (Bainbridge & Bainbridge, 2007, p. 64). When these models fall out of sync—when presentation no longer aligns with underlying structure—the system exposes its seams.

This moment of exposure is precisely where the glitch becomes sublime. When a game's onscreen image can no longer sustain order and form, the hidden logic of the system surfaces (Vella, 2015). What confronts the player is not simply malfunction, but the revelation of limits—of representation, control, and coherence. In this sense, the glitch does not merely resemble the sublime; it instantiates it.

Pac-Man's Killscreen

Glitches are pervasive within digital games. As Dan Houser, co-founder and former vice-president of Rockstar Games, remarked in a 2025 interview with Lex Fridman, video games “are massive four-dimensional mosaics that are intensely complicated and have to work in lots of different ways” (Fridman, 2025, 10:05). Rockstar's most ambitious title, Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018), which “introduces us to the Van der Linde gang, a motley group of outlaws who are running from the law in a fictionalized version of 1899 America” (Vanderhoef and Payne, 2022), is “possibly the largest and most detailed digital representation of the myth of the American frontier and the West” (Bello, 2024). Houser revealed in a 2018 interview with Vulture that the game contains a script of roughly “2,000 pages,” has “300,000 animations,” includes “500,000 lines of dialogue,” and is assembled through “many more lines of code” (Goldberg, 2018). These components must operate in concert to produce what Houser describes as a “seamless, natural-feeling experience in a world that appears real,” one that “[unfolds] around you, dependent on what you do” (Goldberg, 2018).

Although Houser speaks specifically of vast, open-world titles with numerous interlocking systems, like those he helped produce during his tenure with Rockstar, his observation applies more broadly. Every video game, from the most complex to the most rudimentary, is a fundamentally fragile system. Even the simplest games can suffer serious, game-breaking glitches.

Pac-Man (Namco, 1980) provides a concise and historically instructive illustration. “There are two well-known bugs in the game,” one being relatively benign and the other catastrophic (Konzack, 2021, p. 763). The first “allows Pac-Man to pass through a non-blue ghost without losing a life, stemming from a flaw in the game's tile-based collision-detection logic (Konzack, 2021, pp. 763–764). In other words, if Pac-Man and a ghost switch tiles simultaneously, the game cancels the collision between the two sprites, a quirk frequently exploited by speedrunners (Konzack, 2021).

More infamous, however, is Pac-Man's “killscreen glitch,” which occurs upon reaching level 256. After completing 255 increasingly difficult levels, the player encounters a “garbled mess on the right side of the maze” (Pac-Man Wiki, n.d., "Map 256 Glitch"). Because the level counter uses an 8-bit integer, the highest value it can store is 255; when it rolls over to 256, an integer overflow causes the game to attempt to draw 256 fruits on the screen (Pac-Man Wiki, n.d., "Map 256 Glitch"). The result is that play is no longer possible, shattering the persistent belief that Pac-Man is “playable ad infinitum” (Newman, 2016, p. 13).

The killscreen demonstrates that glitches are not peripheral anomalies but structural vulnerabilities inherent to digital systems (Fizek, 2022). Even a minor misalignment between design intention and computational execution can puncture player expectations and collapse a game's apparent continuity. The killscreen thus condenses the broader significance of the glitch: it renders visible the system's hidden limitations, which ordinarily remain masked by the illusion of seamless functionality. Glitches arise from the fundamental tension at the core of every video game, where “representation and computation fold into one another” (Fizek, 2022).

This tension is not unique to games but is fundamental to all media forms. Each medium depends on a constitutive gap: radio between sound and silence, film between what is visible and what remains unseen, and literature between what is articulated and what is left unsaid (Fizek, 2022). What sets video games apart, however, is the intensity and layering of these tensions. Video games are uniquely complex because they operate through a persistent interplay between “representation and computation,” between what appears on the screen and the processes that generate it (Fizek, 2022). When this relationship breaks down, when the distinction between surface-level representation and underlying systems collapses, the result is a glitch (Fizek, 2022). In the moment when the threshold separating the “surface” from the “subface” gives way, what surfaces is not simply error, but an encounter with excess (Fizek, 2022).

In this sense, the glitch operates as a digital instance of the sublime. If the sublime is “the paradox of an object which, in the very field of representation, provides a view, in a negative way, of the dimension of what is unrepresentable” (Žižek, 2008, p. 230), then the glitch stages precisely this paradox: a system's internal limit erupting within its own presentation.

Pac-Man's killscreen offers a paradigmatic example. The screen splits in two. On the left, ordered gameplay persists—the rule-bound domain of the beautiful. On the right, we have the impressive negativity of the sublime; symbols fragmented into chaotic excess, forming an object without coherent form. Jacques Derrida captures this distinction in his “Parergon” essay, where he writes that “the presence of a limit is what gives form to the beautiful,” while the sublime appears as an “object without form” marked by the “without-limit” (Derrida, 1987, p. 127). The killscreen literalizes this contrast: one half remains framed and playable; the other breaks into unbounded disarray.

Derrida's metaphor of the dam clarifies this transition. The parergon functions as a limiting frame that “determines the formality of the beautiful object” (Derrida, 1987, p. 74). “The beautiful,” he writes, “in the finitude of its formal contours, requires the parergonal Edging” (Derrida, 1987, p. 128). The sublime, by contrast, strains against this limit through “magnitude” and “absolute excess” (Derrida, 1987, p. 136). Derrida describes the moment “the dam bursts and there's a flood,” when “no more play (Spiel) but seriousness (Ernst)” governs the imagination (Derrida, 1987, p. 128). Pleasure becomes attraction mixed with repulsion. Pac-Man's killscreen mirrors this dynamic: the right side of the screen exemplifies what Derrida calls “the measure of…unmeasure,” an “excess” that “opens an abyss (Abgrund)” (Derrida, 1987, p. 129). What was once a playful object becomes simultaneously attractive and repulsive, and it is “this attraction/repulsion of the same object,” Derrida insists, that constitutes the structure of the sublime (Derrida, 1987, p. 129).

Arthur Schopenhauer, too, articulates a closely related threshold. Beauty, he argues, possesses “definite and distinct form” and presents “Ideas” with clarity (Schopenhauer, 1969, p. 200). Yet every beautiful object harbors a latent other side that threatens the subject with “immeasurable greatness” (Schopenhauer, 1969, p. 201). Sublimity emerges when this hidden side becomes visible, producing “exaltation” (Schopenhauer, 1969, pp. 201–202). Because beauty conceals the forces that sustain it, the transition between beauty and sublimity is fine and fragile (Schopenhauer, 1969); beauty always contains “the faintest trace of the sublime” (Schopenhauer, 1969, p. 203).

Schopenhauer's examples anticipate cinematic techniques later identified by Žižek in the work of David Lynch. Lynch's signature maneuver descends from an idealized establishing shot into the disturbing “proximity of the real” (Žižek, 2025, p. 1). In Blue Velvet (1986), the camera penetrates the manicured lawn to reveal the chaotic vitality beneath—visually staging the passage from beauty to sublimity. Žižek radicalizes this logic: the sublime object “cannot be approached too closely” (Žižek, 2008, p. 192). Sublimity involves transgression, the collapse of the boundary between “exterior” and “interior,” between “extreme externality” and “utmost intimacy” (Žižek, 2025, p. 3).

This same structure animates Pac-Man's killscreen glitch. By pushing too far into the game, the player encounters a limit the system cannot sustain. Like Lynch's descending camera, the glitch reveals the game's hidden numerical infrastructure—the Schopenhauerian “Ideas” that constitute its reality. Pac-Man is pleasurable because it conceals its computational substrate, as all games must. But when the game breaks—when the player keeps moving and gets too close to some threshold—the concealment fails. What emerges instead is an encounter with what Schopenhauer calls “the vanishing nothingness” of the game's hidden ontology (Schopenhauer, 1969, p. 206).

Death Looping

Other early video games, including Donkey Kong (Nintendo, 1981) and Tetris (Nintendo, 1989), also contain killscreens caused by programming errors that render these games unplayable beyond a certain point and therefore technically unbeatable. Despite enormous advances in graphics, physics, artificial intelligence, and world-building, contemporary games remain vulnerable to analogous forms of catastrophic breakdown. Indeed, the more complex a video game becomes, the more susceptible it is to systemic failure. Olli Tapio Leino illustrates this persistence in his 2012 essay on the “experience of being stuck in a death loop” in Fallout: New Vegas (Obsidian Entertainment, 2010), where the logic of the killscreen reappears in a distinctly modern form (Leino, 2012).

A death loop occurs when a game autosaves at the precise moment of the player-character's death. Reloading the save produces immediate death, which triggers another reload, locking the player into a cycle of instant failure. The save system, ordinarily designed to preserve progress, reverses its function and becomes a fail-state (Hanson, 2023). Unless an earlier save exists, the player cannot proceed and the game becomes unplayable. The death loop thus “render[s] it…impossible for the player to continue playing” and operates, like the killscreen, as an ersatz “Game Over,” a “signifying situation in which the materiality is transformed so that the amount of available choices … is reduced to zero” (Leino, 2012).

Karin Wenz characterizes such moments as events in which the player is “pushed out of the game” and compelled to renegotiate their relationship to “the ludic experience” (Wenz, 2023, p. 387). Death loops halt play and reassert the seriousness of the technological substrate beneath the game's representational surface. In Derrida's terms, they involve both “sacrifice and theft” (Derrida, 1987, p. 131): the sacrifice of hours invested and the theft of accumulated progress. Leino, however, provocatively reframes the experience by treating the “bug as a feature,” that though “disappointed,” he found the death loop “interesting” and “genuinely captivating” (Leino, 2012). Even without invoking the sublime directly, Leino's account bears its unmistakable marks: the glitch reveals his “humble place in the human-technology circuit,” where human agency fails to compete with the machine's indifferent determinism (Leino, 2012).

This encounter aligns closely with what Torill Elvira Mortensen and Kristine Jørgensen identify as the basic structure of the sublime: an overwhelming confrontation with something exceeding human scale and comprehension (Mortensen and Jørgensen, 2020). In the context of contemporary video games, they link sublimity to transgressive moments that provoke intense and affective emotional responses—instances in which players are shocked or unsettled by events that might otherwise seem unremarkable yet still register as striking or awe-inducing (Mortensen and Jørgensen, 2020). The death loop exemplifies this dynamic, functioning as a form of failure that foregrounds the mismatch between the player's cognitive expectations and the underlying operations of the system (Shinkle, 2012). In doing so, it produces a sense of incommensurability that is central to the experience of the sublime.

In this way, death loops generalize the logic of Pac-Man's killscreen. Both convert functional failure into ontological disclosure. They reveal the technological substrate not as a neutral support for representation but as an active—and at times antagonistic—participant in play. Game failures, whether the killscreen that renders Pac-Man unbeatable or the autosave loop that immobilizes Fallout: New Vegas, become critical events that shatter what Shinkle calls the “seamless bond between the technology and user” (Shinkle, 2013). The rupture renders the player powerless while foregrounding both the system's hidden complexity and its inhuman indifference.

Rather than encountering software designed to regulate and dampen affect, players encounter in glitches a form of the digital sublime. These moments of breakdown introduce a kind of illogicality that elicits a visceral, intuitive response exceeding rational comprehension (Shinkle, 2013). In such instances, the player comes face to face with an impersonal and opaque technological force—an intelligence that feels both inexpressive and radically other (Shinkle, 2013). These moments of failure disrupt the coherence of the system and the seamlessness of play, and, in doing so, bring the sublime to the forefront (Meades, 2015).

Conclusion

This essay has argued that glitches—far from being marginal technical curiosities—constitute a central aesthetic and theoretical resource for understanding the sublime in video games. Drawing together theories of the glitch, parapraxis, technological failure, and Kantian sublimity, it has shown that moments of breakdown disclose the structural instability underlying both digital systems and aesthetic judgment itself. Whether in the integer overflow that produces Pac-Man's level 256 killscreen or the recursive failure of the death loop in Fallout: New Vegas, glitches stage encounters with loss of control, perceptual disorientation, and systemic excess that closely mirror the affective and philosophical dynamics historically associated with the sublime.

Against dominant tendencies in game studies, which have often equated sublimity with visual scale, spatial vastness, or cinematic spectacle, this essay has advanced a different claim: sublimity in games does not depend on representational grandeur or technological sophistication. It emerges most forcefully when games fail—when their presumed coherence collapses and their hidden logics surface. By foregrounding the glitch as a structural and transhistorical feature of the medium, the analysis has demonstrated that early video games are not aesthetically impoverished precursors to contemporary titles, but theoretically generative sites in which encounters with the sublime already occur. The glitch thus enables a medium-wide account of digital sublimity that cuts across the history of video games, rather than confining aesthetic significance to the post-3D era.

The essay has further reframed the glitch as an analog to psychoanalytic parapraxis. Like the Freudian slip, the glitch reveals that authority—whether linguistic, subjective, or computational—was never complete. Both expose the illusion of mastery by staging moments in which systems exceed their intended boundaries and betray their own internal divisions. In video games, this logic clarifies the glitch's affective force: players are confronted with the unsettling recognition that the machine is not merely a tool to be controlled, but an autonomous system capable of refusal, excess, and expulsion. In such moments, play gives way to seriousness, and pleasure becomes inseparable from frustration, awe, or even terror.

Situated within broader media theory, this argument aligns video game glitches with accounts of the technological sublime effectively articulated by theorists and thinkers such as Gilbert-Rolfe, Morley, Meades, and Shinkle. If earlier theories of the sublime were oriented toward nature's vastness or transcendence, contemporary experiences of sublimity increasingly arise from encounters with complex, opaque, and failing technological systems. Video games—simultaneously representational and computational, playful and rigidly procedural—render this logic unusually explicit. When a game glitches, the parergonal frame of play fractures, and the player glimpses what Derrida calls the “unmeasure” beneath form: the numerical, algorithmic, and material substrate that ordinarily remains concealed (Derrida, 1987, p. 129).

The contribution of this inquiry, then, lies not merely in identifying glitches as instances of the sublime, but in proposing a shift in how game and media studies approach aesthetics, history, and failure. Rather than treating breakdown as an interruption to meaningful analysis, glitches should be understood as diagnostic events that reveal how games function, how they fail, and how they structure subjectivity and affect. Such an approach resists teleological narratives of technological progress and aesthetic maturity, favoring instead frameworks that cut across historical periods, platforms, and levels of technical complexity.

By proposing the glitch as the most consistent and historically expansive site of sublimity in video games, this essay invites critical attention not only to what games show, but to what they cannot contain; not only to moments of play and mastery, but more significantly to moments of unplay and collapse. Glitches remind us that video games are fragile systems sustained by invisible tensions, and that it is precisely when those tensions surface—when, to return once more to The Sopranos, the “timeline gets fucked up”—that video games most forcefully confront players with the limits of representation, control, and reason. In these ruptures, failure becomes revelation, and the sublime appears not at the height of spectacle, but at the point where the system breaks.