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

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.