I’m talking about qualia, and it’s notoriously difficult to discuss coherently, because these phenomena are completely internal, and can only be referenced by assuming that others have the same situation.
Some people do claim that the concept is meaningless, that none of this exists, because it’s so hard to talk about. I think that’s a map-territory confusion. It seems clear to me that the fact that I have an internal experience is the only thing I have direct personal evidence of; everything I observe beyond that is in part an inference from the observed phenomena of qualia. I can’t prove them to anyone else, but other people talk as if they’re experiencing them too, so that’s at least something.
The fact that this is so difficult to define and discuss is exactly the problem. To your question, what happens to my physical brain has a profound effect on my internal experience, and it seems that my ability to reason about my experiences is somehow integrated in the experiences themselves. So it seems very unlikely that a game of pong has any experience, or if it does, it seems likely that it’s so extremely poorly glued together that it might as well not be an experience. You could ask the same question about an insect.
I find it really troubling that we have so little idea where this comes from, but I find it more troubling that people are so quick to dismiss it, simply because the subject is difficult to pin down.