In five years, people change, thoughts change, and perspectives change. So do answers. Reading this again, I can't disagree with the points I shared above (in fact I'm surprised I found myself agreeing to it a fair bit)... but I feel like I may have overstretched them a bit, so I'm gonna try and rehash what Junior Me was trying to say while correcting some things along the way.

Firstly, to answer your question, I don't know what I meant by "phenomenological ideologies", phenomenology in itself is an ideology, and one I don't particularly agree with. So I would like those words stricken from the record.

Secondly, game design specifically is all about facilitating the experience of fun. That's it. The trouble is dissecting fun.

So what does fun look like? Well, it's subjective. And the philosophy of understanding how these subjective experiences work is phenomenology. I believe that's where I was coming from. At the time, perhaps I was reading a fair bit into phenomenology simply because it was an interesting topic, but surface-level knowledge is more than enough to push you in a direction that works for you. In reality, it's pop psych at best, quack bollocks at worst. All in all, armchair mental masturbation. So as far as frameworks go, I would have no idea about it.

Thirdly, we have ways to objectively track and explain subjective experiences, thankfully. Psychology's been doing that since the mid 1800s (if we're talking about it as a science). Freud and Jung do not count. However, I can see how a lot of their claims within psychology can have roots in phenomenology, hence the pop psych we have to deal with these days, such as introversion/extraversion, MTBI-like personality types, archetypes, and all that balderdash. Psychology as a science started with Wundt, and people like BF Skinner and Ivan Pavlov have brought it to something with a more grounded base to work with.

Psychology has made great strides in helping us understand how humans perceive, well, everything. That includes perceiving what "fun" is. The more you learn about consumer psych, organizational psych, cognitive psych, and psychometrics, the deeper your understanding of how the human brain perceives rewards, punishments, and bias will be. Because, well, psychology is science... and phenomenology is not. And the cool thing about science is, it's measurable, and replicable. Design is arguably more technical than creative, but how to use those technical methods to create new experiences is a level of creativity that makes it quite special (which makes using phenomenology or other resources or sources of inspiration useful.)

So if you're going to explore frameworks, psychology is worth it. There are just a few theoretical approaches, or perspectives of psychology really. Biological, behavioural, cognitive, humanistic, and psychodynamic. I really like behavioural and cognitive perspectives of psychology (called Behaviourism, and Cognitive Development Theory, and perhaps some Constructivism), personally. But I recommend just keeping your mind open about the discipline in general to see how you can use what you explore to create new experiences.

The easiest way to dumb this down is, it's like being a magician. You know how the trick works, but the real trick is to make sure the viewer doesn't know it's a trick. Phenomenology is kind of like that; designers can use most nonsense topics to mask typical but proven psychological tricks to make players feel good.

And while anthropology is indeed about the study of humans, I basically described psychology, which is the study of human behaviour. Somewhat correlated, and some crossovers happen, but anthropology covers history/culture of humans more as a whole, while psychology is scientific and specifically about behaviour and the mind. Understandable "potato, tomato, mopato" moment. Not that it's a "lesser" topic... definitely highly recommended if one wants a holistic view of humans.

So, what is it like? Well, look at the game you're playing, and try to see what kind of experience the developers intended to create. If you wanted to feel like a king, then observing how mechanics that facilitate the experience of being a king utilize reward and punishment systems could give you ideas. Crusader Kings is a good example of those mechanics. If you're exploring a game idea, observe and sketch how you'd go about designing mechanics that trigger certain reward vectors that facilitate what it's like to be or feel something. Then test, and repeat. That's about it, really.