Philosophy of games

Abstract

What is a game? What are we doing when we play a game? What is the value of playing games? Several different philosophical subdisciplines have attempted to answer these questions using very distinctive frameworks. Some have approached games as something like a text, deploying theoretical frameworks from the study of narrative, fiction, and rhetoric to interrogate games for their representational content. Others have approached games as artworks and asked questions about the authorship of games, about the ontology of the work and its performance. Yet others, from the philosophy of sport, have focused on normative issues of fairness, rule application, and competition. The primary purpose of this article is to provide an overview of several different philosophical approaches to games and, hopefully, demonstrate the relevance and value of the different approaches to each other. Early academic attempts to cope with games tried to treat games as a subtype of narrative and to interpret games exactly as one might interpret a static, linear narrative. A faction of game studies, self‐described as “ludologists,” argued that games were a substantially novel form and could not be treated with traditional tools for narrative analysis. In traditional narrative, an audience is told and interprets the story, where in a game, the player enacts and creates the story. Since that early debate, theorists have attempted to offer more nuanced accounts of how games might achieve similar ends to more traditional texts. For example, games might be seen as a novel type of fiction, which uses interactive techniques to achieve immersion in a fictional world. Alternately, games might be seen as a new way to represent causal systems, and so a new way to criticize social and political entities. Work from contemporary analytic philosophy of art has, on the other hand, asked questions whether games could be artworks and, if so, what kind. Much of this debate has concerned the precise nature of the artwork, and the relationship between the artist and the audience. Some have claimed that the audience is a cocreator of the artwork, and so games are a uniquely unfinished and cooperative art form. Others have claimed that, instead, the audience does not help create the artwork; rather, interacting with the artwork is how an audience member appreciates the artist's finished production. Other streams of work have focused less on the game as a text or work, and more on game play as a kind of activity. One common view is that game play occurs in a “magic circle.” Inside the magic circle, players take on new roles, follow different rules, and actions have different meanings. Actions inside the magic circle do not have their usual consequences for the rest of life. Enemies of the magic circle view have claimed that the view ignores the deep integration of game life from ordinary life and point to gambling, gold farming, and the status effects of sports. Philosophers of sport, on the other hand, have approached games with an entirely different framew...

Play and games: An opinionated introduction

“…Given that another survey paper in this area was recently published in these pages by Thi Nguyen (Nguyen, ), I should say at the outset how the present paper differs from Nguyen's and how the two are related. First, whereas Nguyen puts to one side any analysis of what I call play “full‐stop,” the analysis of play in this sense and an exploration of its relation to playing games is one of the main topics of the present paper.…”

“…Once again, Nguyen himself (rightly in my view) thinks that though the existing literature does emphasize the variety of forms of game play, what is needed is a more unified approach, concluding his paper by remarking, "the most important work lies ahead, in synthesizing insights across these disciplines." (Nguyen, 2017, conclusion, emphasis added). Nguyen's paper and mine are best seen as supplementing one another in the following way.…”

Seeing new in the familiar: intensifying aesthetic engagement with the city through new location-based technologies

“…This is considered to be a drive or need common and shared to a certain degree by all individual human beings. Games have traditionally provided a medium and new opportunities for experimentation by providing a "magic circle" in which new roles, rules and opportunities for actions have been possible (Nguyen 2017). AR games are also forerunners in the use of new technologies and it is likely, that many of the features that will define future urban wayfinding tools have first been experimented in the form of AR and advanced geospatial games.…”

Why Gamers Are Not Performers

“…I skate over many fascinating issues in the philosophy of games here. For an introduction to some of these, see Bernard Suits's classic The Grasshopper (), which includes precise accounts of failing to play a game by trifling, cheating, and spoilsporting, and Thi Nguyen's excellent recent overview of the philosophy of games ().…”

“…I ignore such considerations in keeping with my liberal approach to what counts as a video game in this article. See again Suits () and Nguyen ().…”