Philcompass Philosophyofgamesv2 2
Philcompass Philosophyofgamesv2 2
Philcompass Philosophyofgamesv2 2
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Philosophy of games
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C. Thi Nguyen
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This is a pre-print draft. Please cite the final version, which appeared in Philosophy Compass 12 (8), 2017.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/phc3.12426/full
An expanded version of this discussion, with some further analysis, appears in Games: Agency as Art:
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/games-9780190052089
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
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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 framework. This has
lead into investigations about the normative nature of games—what guides the
applications of rules and how those rules might be applied, interpreted, or even
changed. Furthermore, they have investigated games as social practices and as forms
of life.
The philosophical study of games is presently divided across a number of very different
sub-domains, which, at present, rarely interact. The primary purpose of this article is to
I will confine myself to central questions of ontology and value. What is a game? What
are we doing when we play a game? What is the value of playing games? Several
distinctive frameworks. Some have approached games as texts, deploying theoretical tools
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 authorship and ontology. Yet others, from the philosophy of sport, have focused on
In this article, I will attempt to track these different conversations. I cannot hope to be
exhaustive. In particular, I will elide the discussion of ‘play’ in general, and focus only on
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those artifacts which we call ‘games’.1 My primary aim is to survey work inside philosophy
itself. Right next door is a new interdisciplinary field called “game studies”, largely focused
on computer games. That field includes work from literary theorists, cultural studies, new
media scholars, anthropologists, game designers, and some philosophers, and has evolved
its own internal structure and canon. That field is massive, and summarizing it is far
beyond the scope of this paper; I can only provide a few useful touchstones from game
studies that may be particularly useful to philosophers.2 Nor will I, for reasons of space and
expertise, be able to cover the rich discussion within continental philosophy on games and
play. I hope here only to convey a sense of what issues emerge from the various focused
discussions of particular types of games, and highlight those discussions which have
to be justified. I will suggest some ways in which the various conversations can learn from
There are a handful of older foundational texts that influence virtually all modern work
on games. Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens is usually considered the foundational work for
the modern study of games. Prior to Huizinga, the dominant accounts of play were
instrumental — they sought to ground the value of play in terms of certain practical
1 Randolph Feezell’s recent argument for a pluralist conception of play also function as an excellent
overview of the adjoining field of the philosophy of play (Feezell 2010).
2 (Wolf and Perron 2014) is the most recent and exhaustive survey of the game studies field.
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benefits, and framed games as useful methods for children’s education, or as outlets for
aggressive energies. Huizinga, instead, argues that the impulse to play lies outside the usual
motives of productiveness, truth-seeking, and moral correctness. Play is the direct opposite
of seriousness, and as such, does not concern itself with truth or falsity, good or evil, vice or
virtue. Famously, Huizinga characterizes play as voluntarily stepping outside of “real” life
into an alternate, temporary sphere of activity which he calls a “magic circle” of play. Inside
this magic circle, we take up new roles and new rules for behavior. What happens inside
the magic circle does not have the usual consequence outside the magic circle. If I oppose
you in the game, you ought not blame me for it once we have resumed normal life. Huizinga
suggests that there is an essential unity between games and certain other activities, like
religious ritual and theater. In all of them, we enter into a consecrated, dedicated ground,
where we suspend everyday activities, take up new roles and motivations, and, at
Roger Caillois’ Man, Play, and Games criticizes Huizinga’s unified account of play.
Caillois offers, instead, four different basic categories of play: agon, the play of competition;
mimesis, the play of make-believe; alea, the play of luck and gambling; and ilinx, the play of
vertigo and disorientation (think of children spinning and roller coasters). Some of these
forms are compatible — for example, competitive play and luck play are both present in a
game of poker. Other forms are essentially incompatible: says Caillois, make-believe play is
essentially cooperative and thus incompatible with competitive play. Importantly, Caillois
distinguishes between the play-impulse and the game-impulse. The play impulse, called
paida, is the child-like impulse towards free exploration and discovery. Paida, Caillois
argues, is then refined through the gaming impulse, called ludus. Ludus is the tendency
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towards regulation and measurement. Children gleefully rolling around in the mud,
wrestling for the sheer fun of it, is paida; adults wrestling according to rules with a judged
In analytic philosophy, the foundational work is Bernard Suits’ The Grasshopper, which
attempts to give a rigorous definition of the term ‘game’ — contra Wittgenstein’s claim that
‘game’ is undefinable. Suits offers the following definition: to play a game is to take up
unnecessary obstacles for the sake of the activity they make possible. In basketball, I take
on the goals of getting a ball through a small-ish hoop; I take up opponents and a
requirement for dribbling. This is not because getting the ball through the hoop is, in and of
itself, a valuable achievement. If that were the case, I would just show up to an empty
basketball court with a stepladder and have at it. Rather, I adopt an essentially arbitrary
goal (achieving such-and-such inside certain constraints) in order to create a new kind of
activity. Thus, playing games inverts the usual relationship of means and ends. In practical
life, we select means for the sake of an independently valuable end. In game life, on the
other hand, we select an arbitrary end for the sake of undergoing some particular means.
This leads to Suits’ argument that games are the purpose of life. The simple version of the
argument: if we imagine utopia, we imagine it free of all problems, so what else would we
do with our time but play games? And if games are the sole activity in utopia, then they
must be the purpose of life. The formal version of the argument is distinctively
Aristotelean. All practical activity that we might call “work” seeks to eliminate itself, says
Suits. Medicine, for example, seeks to eliminate disease, which would in turn eliminate the
need for the practice of medicine. Even art, Suits suggests, has a practical purpose: soothing
the ailments of the heart, which would also be unnecessary in utopia. Game-play, on the
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other hand, does not seek to eliminate itself — and so can bear the weight of being the
I will now turn to the different philosophical approaches to games that have
subsequently arisen. One might notice that what follows largely focuses on either computer
philosophical work on board games, card games, or gambling. Much of the work on the
aesthetics of games, for example, is focused solely on computer games and concerns itself
with features specific to computer games, such as the presence of a virtual world and the
in-game avatar. The weight of what follows will reflect the current preoccupations of
academic work on games, but is not intended to ratify that preoccupation. Rather, it seems
an unevenness in need of redress. I will focus on those issues that might be useful for the
One significant branch of recent thinking about computer games attempts to them using
various traditions of literary theory, textual analysis, and the analysis of representations —
treating computer games as narrative, fiction, or rhetoric. This branch sometimes gestures
at games in general, but typically takes examples almost exclusively from computer games.
The following debate was largely conducted in the interdisciplinary field which calls itself
game studies, though the issues have been taken up in analytic aesthetics.
Janet Murray’s Hamlet in the Holodeck is usually taken to be the foundational moment in
analyzing computer games as narratives. She famously interprets the video-game Tetris, in
which one desperately attempts to place rapidly falling blocks, as a commentary on the
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fast-paced, desperate nature of industrialized, capitalist life (Murray 1997). Another key
early treatment is Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext, which treats digital games as part of a
distinctive new kind of text. Cybertexts are not set sequences of signs; rather, they are
cybernetic systems which generate sequences of signs in response to input. Cybertexts, for
Aarseth, are part of a broader category, which he dubs “ergodic literature”, in which the
reader must expend nontrivial effort in traversing the text (Aarseth 1997).
Murray’s reading and others like it polarized the game studies community. The debates
that followed are now referred to as the “ludology versus narratology” debates — usually
referred to with a shudder, a memory of a horrible conflict that has, thank goodness, finally
passed. The problem, say the ludologists, is that Murray tried to apply theoretical
techniques from narrative studies directly to games without sufficient respect for their
uniqueness.
Here are some of the key arguments from early ludology. First, with a narrative, the
audience primarily interprets events, whereas with games, the player active configures of
events in pursuit of some goal (62-5; Eskelinen 2001). Another way to put it: narratives are
representations which contain information; games, on the other hand, are simulations,
which respond to input according to rules (Frasca 2003). One key feature is the radically
different experience of time between narratives and games. It will help here to distinguish
between narratological concepts of ‘story’ and ‘discourse’. A story is the actual chronology
of events in a narrative; a discourse is the order that those events emerge in the telling of
the narrative. In narratives, there is always a distinction between story and discourse; in
games, that distinction collapses (Juul 2001; Eskelinen 2001). The audience of a narrative is
told and interprets the story, while the player of a game enacts and creates a story. Thus, say
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the ludologists, the conceptual tools developed for studying narrative will not function well
for games; we need to either start afresh, or, at the very least, carefully re-consider and
The commitments of ludology, then, seem to be: first, that games are a novel kind of
entity; second, that a game is to be substantively identified with a set of rules for play; and
third, that games are to be understood through the process of play. This is not to say that
ludologists necessarily think that games can never have a narrative component. Gonzalo
Frasca’s view, for example, is that games and narratives are related, though ontologically
distinct, entities. A narrative, says Frasca, is a particular sequence of events. A game is a set
of rules, which specifies victory and loss conditions. A game, therefore, is a set of possible
sequences, rather than any one particular sequence. In other words, a game may produce
Ludology has many adherents, but many opponents. Some have argued that, though
games are not precisely the same as more traditional forms of narrative, they have
recognizably similar functions. Thus, they may be usefully be treated as slightly new
versions of familiar types, and analyzed with slight modifications to familiar tools.
One such tactic is to pivot from the narrower concept of “narrative” towards the
relatively broader concept of “fiction”. Grant Tavinor argues, using the weapons of analytic
aesthetics, that videogames can be a kind of fiction, using Walton’s theory of fiction. In
Walton’s view, all representative artworks are forms of make-believe play. In all forms of
believe, we use, say, a broomstick to imagine a horse. In adult fictions, we use words or
images to help imagine ourselves into, say, the mental state of a particular character.
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Tavinor argues that this is also precisely what’s going on in many videogames: the images
and sounds of a videogame are props for the imagination. Videogames are fictions because
they are “representational artifacts that depict situations with an imagined existence only,
and that they rely on our cognitive abilities to imagine such things” (Tavinor 2009, 44).
Notice that this avoids the specific problems raised by the ludologists about the narrative
conception of games. The ludologists complained that narratives involved a very specific
relationship between the sequence of events and its narration. But the Waltonian
conception of fiction merely involves imagined situations; there are no requirements for a
narrator or even any sequence of events at all. After all, Walton’s notion of fiction was
But, says Tavinor, videogames are a new sort of fiction, since they are interactive. A
Videogames, on the other hand, are fiction machines, which produce fictional content based
on user input. Furthermore, videogames permit players to fictionally act within fictional
worlds (55). The greatest potential for videogames to contribute to the arts, says Tavinor,
is the novel way in which this fictional interactivity can encourage emotional involvement.
In videogames, the player produces emotions, which lead to fictional actions in the fictional
world — thus their emotions become part of that fictional world. The player’s own
emotions become props for make-believe; as Tavinor puts it, the player integrates their
own emotions into the fiction, and thus becomes more deeply involved (130-42).
Jonathan Robson and Aaron Meskin have offered an even more dramatic claim in the
Waltonian vein: that video games are self-involving interactive fictions. That is, video
games are part of a special class of fiction in which, by interacting with the game, the player
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makes things fictionally true of the player herself, and not just their in-game avatar. For
example, if Jane maneuvers her Spiderman avatar to defeat Galactus in a video game, then
it is not only fictionally true that Spiderman beat Galactus, it is fictionally true that Jane
herself beat Galactus. Robson and Meskin do not claim that their category is an exact match
for videogames — pure arcade games like Tetris are not fictions in any sense, and wholly
non-technological artifacts like Choose Your Own Adventure novels also count as self-
involving interactive fictions. Crucially, Robson and Meskin claim that videogames turn out
relevance connecting Tetris and Grand Theft Auto — but self-involving interactive fictions
turns out to be a very interesting aesthetic category (Robson and Meskin 2016).
Henry Jenkins defends a narrative conception of games more directly. He argues that
the ludologists have simply been using too narrow a conception of narrative. Games can
present narratives in a different way: spatially. The ludologists’s criticism arises from the
presumption that narratives have to be temporally rigid structures. But narratives, says
Jenkins, are simply bodies of information. Films or books present that information in a
fixed sequence. A game designer distributes that information through space, and player
discovers it through temporally uncontrolled exploration. Jenkins dubs this form “narrative
architecture,” and compares game narrative to the environmental storytelling used by the
architects of Disney World, where story elements are infused into particular locations and
Another significant movement in game studies has argued for the value of games by
treating them as communications, which transmit ideas, arguments, and even critiques. Leo
Konzak, for example, argues that video games must go beyond mere entertainment — that
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video games can gain cultural importance only by expressing and presenting philosophical
ideas in game systems (Konzack 2009). Similarly, Mary Flanagan praises certain types of
games — variously called activist games, serious games, and critical games — for engaging
in political subversion and social criticism (Flanagan 2013). But in what ways might games
influential account of games as rhetoric. Games, says Bogost, are exceptionally good tools
representing real-world processes at various levels of abstraction, games can not only
model, but they can also critique (Bogost 2010). Frasca himself seem to, over time, develop
a similar view, in which games are, though not exactly like traditional representations, an
extension of that tradition. He argues that games are simulations rather than
representations, capable of expressing ideas in a more fluid and complex manner. Take for,
example, a work which attempted to make some claim about the viability of labor unions.
Traditional novelists could tell a story about the struggle of labor unions, but they are
confined to representing only a single outcome — either the unions succeed or they fail.
Imagine, on the other hand, a simulation game, where you tried to guide a labor union to
political victory. Such a game could present a whole possibility-space. It could model the
complex network of causal interactions and outcomes, demonstrate the various paths to
failure and success, and offer a more graded and nuanced representation of the chances for
success (Frasca 2003). Bogost further differentiates a simulation from a model. A model,
says Bogost, aims at accuracy — the goal of a model is generating true predictions. A
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representation, which seeks to inform a user’s understanding of the system it represents
(Bogost 2008).
More recent work in game studies has often sought a middle ground between
narratology and ludology. Aarseth himself, in a later paper, argued that ludology was never
intended as an outright ban on any use of tools from narratology, but rather to emphasize
the importance of studying the relationship between the mechanical and the semiotic in
games, and to caution against the uncritical importation of terms like “narrative” and
“story” into the study of games. Obviously, says Aarseth, there is much to be learned from
the tools of narratology, since both traditional narratives and games contain worlds, agents,
and events. To chart the space of games, Aarseth employs the narratological notions of
kernel — primary events that define a particular story — and satellites — supplementary
events that fill out the discourse. This leads to a typology of four basic game types: the
linear game (like Half-Life: fixed kernels, flexible satellites), the hyper-text game (like Myst:
choice of kernels, fixed satellites), the “creamy middle game” (like Oblivion: choice of
kernels, flexible satellites), and the non-narrative game (like chess and The Sims: no
synthesis. In Half-Real, Juul argues that games are a hybrid form: part fictional and part
real. They are real because they present real challenges and the opportunity to really win
or lose. This leads Juul to an extended consideration of the aesthetics of challenge in games.
There are at least two kinds of games, says Juul. There are games of progression, in which
the game designer has set a series of formulated challenges to the player; one paradigmatic
example is a story-driven, puzzle-based adventure game, like Myst. But there are also
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games of emergence, in which the challenges emerge indirectly from interactions of the
rules, as in Pong and chess. Juul offers the following heuristic: a game of progression may
have a massive rule-set, but the solution is often simple — a “walk-through”. Typically,
once you’ve solved a game of progression once, there’s nothing left to return to. Games of
emergence, on the other hand, often have very simple rules, but the strategy guides can fill
libraries (Juul 2004, 55-120). Note that different aesthetic pleasures may be associated
from these various game kinds. For example, games of emergence typically permit more
degrees of player freedom and thus a greater sense of self-expression in players as they
surmount the challenges, whereas games of progression can offer participation in a pre-
programmed narrative
But, says Juul, games are also fictional because they project a fictional world into which
the player imaginatively enters. Juul is particularly interested in the interface between the
real challenges and the fictional worlds. Sometimes, the rules and the fiction match up
perfectly. This is often the case with a game’s presentation of space, when the rules about
where a player can move precisely match the visual fiction. In other cases, a metaphor
helps bridge the interface. For example, an in-game character can fictionally make a
difficult serve, provided the real player makes a difficult, carefully timed button-press. The
fact that both tasks are difficult helps the player make a metaphorical substitution. But
elsewhere, rules and fiction conflict. In many games, some graphical doors can be opened,
and others cannot; here, the fiction is in tension with the permitted gameplay (163-200).
It’s clear that the ludologists are right about their opening claim: computer games are
not precisely the same as traditional narratives, and cannot be analyzed without some
adaptations to those traditional tools. But it also seems clear that some tools can be
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successfully refurbished and used to explain at least some aspects of games. But it seems
advisable to remain cautious even on this front, for it’s not clear that the refurbished tools
of rhetorical and fictive analysis can provide a complete analysis of games. For example, if
one accepted Suits’ analysis that games were essentially about struggling to overcome
obstacles, much of the discussion of games in terms of stories and fiction might seem to still
miss the point. On the other hand, many figures in game studies have rejected the Suitsian
approach precisely for failing to capture the fictive and role-playing aspects of computer
games.
I now turn to contemporary philosophy of art, which has recently concerned itself with
understanding the special features of digital art, computer art, and interactive art.
Following Lopes, I will call this category “computer art,” which he defines as artworks
which are interactive, and which are interactive because they are run on a computer (Lopes
2010, 27). Notice that, while the category of computer art may overlap with that of
computer games, they are quite distinct. Some computer games may fail to be art
depending on whatever definition of ‘art’ you happen to be committed to, and many
interactive computer art museum installation lack certain game-like features, such as
challenges or goals. But Lopes suggests that there may be a significant overlap between the
categories of computer art and computer games. Perhaps because this field is not explicitly
addressed to games as such, it is rarely referenced in the game studies literature. But the
conversation is extremely relevant, for it focuses on novel features of computer art, which
are shared by most computer games, such as the work’s interactivity, computationality, and
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the way in which these factors might affect its aesthetic properties. I will not address here
the discussion of whether computer games could count as ‘art’, which has been recently
may not upend the traditional relationship between artist and audience.
Let’s return to Flanagan’s praise of serious games, which turns on categorizing games
inside more familiar artistic forms. Flanagan makes a case for the cultural worth of games
by showing that they can function as forms of social criticism. She compares games to
certain strains of contemporary, politically active art — particularly conceptual art and
performance art. She points, for example, to Gonzalo Frasca’s game September 12th: A Toy
World, a pointedly political game where the player is presented with a distanced view of a
occasionally appear. The player’s only mode of interaction is to manipulate some on-screen
crosshairs and click a button to fire missiles from a distant missile platform. If the player
attempts to kill the terrorists, they will quickly discover the missiles cause only destruction
and death to innocent civilians, while increasing the number of terrorists. (Flanagan 2013,
239-40). Such serious games, says Flanagan, serve as both general social criticism and as
criticism of the values embodied in ordinary popular games. Flanagan dubs the practice of
designing and playing such disruptive, subversive games “critical play,” and claims that it
One worry about Flanagan’s approach is that it may not help us to come to grips with
the potentially unique aesthetic features of games. Flanagan speaks of games as a novel
form, potentially disrupting the design process, and moving art towards a nonhierarchical,
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relationships between artist and audience. She relies on a traditional communicative
model, in which one person plays the role of ‘artist’ and imbues the piece with meaning,
and another person plays the role of ‘audience’ and receives this meaning. But is this
actually the right model for computer games, given their interactivity? Paul Crowther,
argues that computer art creates a novel relationship between “author” and “audience”.
While traditional artworks permit some limited audience interactivity by, for example,
changing their position relative to the artwork, fully interactive computer art allow the
user to alter the physical or virtual structure of the artwork itself. Thus, says Crowther,
additions or changes to the artwork are only permitted by the original creator or a specially
endowed agent of the creator. In computer art, an audience member changes the artwork
itself. Thus, says Crowther, digital artworks represent a new ontological kind of artwork. In
orally transmitted artworks, such as Homer’s The Odyssey, the work is never really
In artworks such as painting, the work is authoritatively finalized, and is thus, by nature,
closed and stable. Crowther says that computer artworks are a hybrid. They have a stable,
finalized component — the program — yet part of their nature remains crucially open and
ever-changing. The computer artist relinquishes a crucial amount of control over the
finished project. This opens the door to complex sorts of collective authorship unavailable
in traditional works (Crowther 2008). In Crowther’s view, artist and audience are, in an
important sense, co-creators. This view is echoed by Annika Waern. Since games exist to be
played, says Waern, the meaning of a game doesn’t come from the game designer nor the
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game player alone. The meaning of a game comes from both; it is structured by game
Dominic Lopes rejects such views of collective authorship. The user of a piece of
computer art may interact with the artwork, but this does not make them an author, says
Lopes. The view of collective authorship seems to arise from a confusion about the exact
itself, and its displays. The display is the structured entity, which we tune into, to
appreciate the work. For an oil painting, the display and the work are extremely
ontologically close. For a novel, they are further apart — I am accessing the story by
attending to words on a page, or the voice of an audiobook. For computer art, the work and
the display are ontologically quite far apart. The display is something like a digital screen,
displaying a variety of images. The artwork is the program, its associated hardware, and
some prescriptions about its use. To think of the user as a kind of author, says Lopes, is to
confuse an artwork with its displays. But, says Lopes, the artwork isn’t the same as its
displays. A user does not create a piece of computer art by generating its displays. Rather,
The pay-off for this careful ontological work is clear. Many have argued that computer
games are a kind of art because they have similar appearances to more traditional art
forms, such as painting or cinema. But, says Lopes, this won’t actually help the case for
computer art as a genuinely novel art kind. If we argue that the game Myst is a piece of art
because of its lush graphics, then what makes it art won’t be what makes it a game, since
the graphics in and of themselves don’t constitute the game. Instead, what makes games
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unique is the interactivity of game-play; therefore a poetics of games ought to focus on how
meaning is conveyed, not through graphics or story-lines, but through play (114-18).
Similarly, games from the “serious game” movement will sometimes, though retaining the
surface features of a game, constrict and reduce interactivity for the sake of clearly
art, this might count as a success. But one might plausibly extend Lopes’ work to criticize
such games for failing, at least qua computer art, to take advantage of the interactivity of
the medium.
Each of these accounts offers a different view of the relationship between author and
audience. Despite Flanagan’s view that serious game upends the traditional relationship
between game designers and players, she still holds to a fairly traditional view of the
other hand, the interactivity of games dissolves the line between author and audience;
interactive arts are collectively authored by the game designer and the player, so they
cannot have the traditional relationship of one person filling a work with meaning and
another retrieving that meaning. Lopes’ view is an intermediate between the two. For
Lopes, there is an authoritative relationship between the author and the audience. To
experience the work, the audience must follow the norms of appreciation. However, proper
how we ought to appreciate a work partially constitute the particular work (Irvin 2005). A
novel must be read in order; a piece of computer art must be interacted with. One notable
dissenter to such a notion is Olli Tapio Leino. Leino wishes to resist what he calls the
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“ludological doctrine of interpretation” — the view, which he attributes to Aarseth, that to
understand a game, all we have to do is play it well. The ludological approach, says Leino, is
problematic for computer games scholarship because it gives the game designer too much
authority. For the ludologists, what it is to play a game is to interact with a game as the
designer intended it — to take up the prescribed goals, and use the prescribed means. To
make game-play the center of game-interpretation is to make the same mistake as treating
authorial intent as the key to textual interpretation. Instead of this essentialist approach,
and focuses on the “gameness” of games, Leino urges us to interpret the material game
artifact as it exists — which permits us to ignore the prescriptions involved with playing a
game as it was intended to be played. For example, rather than dismissing software bugs as
outside of the designer’s intent, we should treat them as reasonable objects of scholarly
interpretation (Leino 2012). I take it that Leino is, here, following the lead of those schools
of literary theory that reject authorial intent as providing a guiding norm for interpretation,
and applying those views to the interpretation of games. Where a ludologist might think
that only somebody who was playing to win was really experience the game, Leino refuses
any such restriction. But I am not so sure Leino’s views are really in tension with Lopes’.
We might take them to be describing two ontologically adjacent entities with a similar
material footprint. One is describing what it is to play the game, and the other what it is to
19
The approaches we have surveyed to this point have focused on games as an artifact
relationship to ordinary life. This line of thinking follows from Huizinga’s suggestion that to
play a game is to enter into a magic circle, set apart from ordinary life. Katie Salen and Eric
Zimmerman, in their widely read game design textbook Rules of Play, borrow the term from
Huizinga, but offer a more robust formulation. For them, the magic circle is a bounded
space for play, formally separated from everyday life. Game-play takes place in a precisely
defined space and time. When a player crosses this tightly defined boundary, they enter an
alternate world, where new rules have authority, and where actions and objects acquire
This conception of the magic circle, though popular, has come under significant fire
recently in game studies, typically from those with an anthropological or sociological bent,
who insist that this approach problematically de-contextualizes game-play. Thomas Malaby
takes aim at the idea of radical separability of game-play from ordinary-life; in particular, at
the purported view that the actions within the magic circle have no consequences outside
of the magic circle.3 Malaby argues that games are only partially bounded and that the
boundary is highly permeable. Examples abound. In gambling games, money enters and
leaves the circle. Even when there aren’t explicit financial stakes, there are often social
ones: as a result of in-game play, players may gain or lose status or renown in the ordinary
world. Malaby argues that Salen and Zimmerman’s view is founded on the normative
It should be noted that Zimmerman himself rejects this attribution. Zimmeran claims that the view of
3
games as entirely separate worlds was never really present in Rules of Play, and is something of a straw man
(Zimmerman 2012).
20
presumption that the purpose of games is play, and that play is essentially non-productive.
Malaby urges instead that we look at the actuality of games, including those many instances
in which games are taken very seriously — such as professional sports and gambling
(Malaby 2007).
Others have argued that carefully looking at the actuality of play, especially in digital
spaces, reveals problems with the magic circle conception. T. L. Taylor focuses on massively
multiplayer online games (MMOs), such as World of Warcraft, and points to how game-play
boards (Taylor 2009, 2007). Similarly, Mia Consalvo argues that the MMO practice of gold
farming — selling laboriously generated in-game products for real-world cash — breaches
Many of these criticisms of the magic circle are taken to be criticisms of a general
underlying intellectual approach to games, called formalism. Formalism is the view that the
essential nature of a game is its rule-set, and that proper play involves obeying the rules.
This view has been attributed to Suits, Salen, Zimmerman, Juul and many of the ludologists.
Malaby argues that games are not formally fixed structures, but ongoing processes within
specific cultural contexts. Rules are often changed or ignored for reasons that are only
comprehensible in their cultural context. Games are “moving targets, capable of generating
new, emergent effects that then inform the following instances of the game” (Malaby 2007,
103). Consider the World of Warcraft glider, a cheat program designed to automate certain
simple character actions and save the player from having to go through the tedious grind of
leveling up. The magic circle view — and formalism in general — can’t cope with the WoW
glider, says Consalvo. The formalist’s only resources are to reject users of the glider as real
21
players, and reject that what they’re doing is really part of the game-world. But, says
Consalvo, the glider surely exists in the game-world of World of Warcraft. It has effects even
on those players who follow the rules by impacting various in-game markets; it even
motivates angry players to gang together and kill glided characters (Consalvo 2009).
These arguments clearly problematize the most radical version of the magic circle view
— that playing a game involves entering into theoretical space which is radically, perfectly
and unbreachably separated from normal life. Jaakko Stenros has tried to defend a more
reasonable version of the magic circle. All this talk of the magic circle has been clearly
gesturing at something important, says Stenros; the problem has been a blurring together
of what are really quite distinctive phenomena. Stenros unpacks what he takes to be three
different notions: the psychological bubble, the arena, and the magic circle proper. The
psychological bubble is the playful state of mind, a frame which guides the way a particular
player interprets the experiences of play. It requires no communication; a person can enter
this psychological bubble by themselves and play alone. Then there is the arena of play,
which is a culturally recognized structure for playful action. Such arenas do not guarantee
play, though they do encourage it, and stand as physical residues of play. Finally, the magic
communication for mutual play. Stenros’ version of a magic circle is not a guaranteed
are supposed to treat game events as disconnected from the external world, and supposed
to discard external motivations — though, as a matter of fact, they may fail to (Stenros
2012). These distinctions seem to dissolve many of the earlier criticisms. For example, says
Stenros, Taylor’s criticism of the magic circle depends on mapping the normal life/magic
22
circle distinction onto the offline/online distinction (3). But if we apply Stenros’
distinctions, we see that the online, multiplayer virtual environment is not the magic circle
proper, nor does it guarantee the mental attitude of play. It is, instead, merely an arena in
Similarly, Annika Waern suggests that that we can refine the magic circle concept in the
following way: games can be usefully thought of as systems of rules with two special
properties. First, we take them up for internal and experiential purposes. Second, they
involve agreed upon re-significations of player actions — that is, players agree ahead of
time to assign actions within the game new meanings (Waern 2012). As with Stenros,
Waern emphasizes the normative and contractual aspects involved in setting up the game-
space, but makes no claim of radical impermeability. What constitutes the magic circle is
the agreement to re-signify, and not some mysterious magical force which somehow
contractual aspects of games may, in part, arise from their interest in various sorts of social
games, including live-action role-playing games and pervasive games like Pokemon Go
An even more radical departure from the above approaches can be found in the
philosophy of sport. To paint with a broad brush, literary theorists and philosophers of art
typically focus on games as designed artifacts, while the philosophy of sport investigate
23
the artifact’s designer, its circumstances and purpose of design, and the player’s
relationship to that designer. What is the meaning? What was the designer’s intent? The
philosophy of sport, on the other hand, rarely treats games as representational artifacts or
as objects for interpretation. Rather, the typical framework is some variant of social
contract theory: games are sets of rules that people consent to follow. This leads to
questions about why and how players take up those rules, and what norms might structure
the ensuing activity. (As a sociological aside, many figures in game studies and aesthetics
come from backgrounds in art, literary criticism, and cultural studies. Many philosophers of
sport, on the other hand, come from backgrounds in ethics, political philosophy, and the
philosophy of law.)
The philosophy of sport is a rich and varied terrain, so I will only attempt to extract
some of the key ideas that might be relevant to the study of games in general. Here,
questions about the ontology of games, and about the norms and value of games, usually go
hand-in-hand. Where do the norms of game-play come from? One dominant view in the
early philosophy of sports was formalism: that the game consists simply of the explicit
rules, and that proper game behavior consisted solely in following those rules. Suits’
definition of games was often taken to be formalist. But formalism has come under
considerable fire. For example: under formalism, how does one conceptualize the cheater?
If playing the game consists of following the rules, then it follows that the cheater is not
playing the game. This result seems improbable. For example, it is commonly held that
Atlanta Braves pitcher Gaylord Perry threw spitballs in every game he played in. If
formalism were true, argues Craig Lehman, then, strictly speaking, no event in which Perry
pitched would count as a baseball game. This is surely absurd. Lehman suggests that we
24
need to look outside the rules themselves to particular communities’ customs of play to
individuate the game (Lehman 1981). (Arguments against formalism in the philosophy of
sport run in fascinating parallel to the arguments against formalism in the computer games
discussion, though the two literatures seem to show no awareness of one another.)
One very influential recent response is to locate the essence of a game in something
beyond the rules called the ethos of the game. The ethos might be thought of as, loosely, the
purpose of the activity, which can guide both the selection of rules and behavior outside the
rules.4 The ethos approach has several advantages. First, says William Morgan, formalists
have no ability to explain why a rule might be good, bad, or in need of replacement, where
the ethos approach can arbitrate such discussions be referring to the purpose of a game
(Morgan 2004). Second, there seem to be clear norms of good sportsmanship that guide
behavior in circumstances where the rules are ambiguous or silent. Formalism cannot
explain those norms, where the ethos approach can. Here is a standard example: suppose
one professional golf player has lost their golf clubs during their flight. Another competitor
happens to have a spare set of clubs; should she loan her spare clubs to her unlucky
opponent? There are no explicit rules about the matter. The purest sort of formalist should
say then that, since the explicit rules are silent on the matter, then the game is silent on the
matter. Such formalists will then usually attribute norms of good sportsmanship to extra-
game social or ethical considerations. But the ethos approach can offer an explanation of
4The phrase “ethos of the game” seemed to have been coined by Fred d’Agostino, but recent usage seems
to have drifted from his original presentation(d'Agostino 1981).
25
Robert Simon suggests that we can usefully borrow from Ronald Dworkin’s legal theory
here to think about the ethos of a sport, and explain its normative force. Dworkin was
concerned with what might guide our interpretations of the laws, as written. He suggests
that we can derive, from a particular set of explicit laws, a sense for the guiding values
behind those laws from inference to the best explanation. Those guiding values can help
inform how we interpret ambiguities in the laws. Simon suggests, accordingly, that we can
derive from the rules of golf that the guiding purpose of golf’s rules is to support
competitions against a worthy opponent. So in the club-loaning case, the competitor ought
to loan her unlucky opponent her spare golf clubs, in order to have a competition against a
More importantly, the ethos approach is usually taken to locate the value of sport in the
activity itself. Take, for instance, J.S. Russell’s view of the ethos of sport:
…Games create opportunities for developing certain human excellences by presenting obstacles that
must be mastered and overcome in order to achieve the goal set by the game. (Russell 2004, 146)
internalism” or “interpretivism” about the value of sport — namely, that the activity of
sport is valuable on its own, and that this value may even run counter to the values of the
prevailing culture (Dixon 2003). This is to contrast to “externalism” about sports — the
view that sports are valuable only instrumentally, and usually done for the sake of values
Various flavors of broad internalism and the ethos approach can be found throughout
constraints, mutually undertaken by the boxers, in order to encourage creativity and skill-
26
development — similarly to the way in which poets might take up, say, sonnet form, as a
Steven Weimer argues that striking a person in boxing is morally good, so long as it is
according to the rules, because the participants have not only consented to such strikes, but
have formed a social contract in which they have promised to strike each other. Therefore,
says Weimer, striking your opponent is good, since it fulfills your contractually obligated
duties. Furthermore, the reason for this social contract is that we wish to create a setting in
which we can realize human flourishing by realizing specific human excellences (Weimer
2014). Similar views have been used to ground specific arguments about establishing
norms concerning blood doping, strategic fouling in basketball, and retaliatory fouling in
These views have normative bite. Formalism only tells us that it is wrong to break the
rules; internalism can offer us grounds for criticizing a rule, and a basis for selecting a
better one. For example, R. Scott Kretchmer argues that time-delimited games are
inherently flawed because they encourage play that is against the ethos of the game. The
purpose of games, says Kretchmer, is to provide a fair test between competitors. Thus, the
game needs to provide as many tests of skill as possible. But in time-delimited games, often
the best strategy is to get slightly ahead and then stall in a low-risk manner and run out the
clock, which actually reduces the number of tests of skill. In these games, says Kretchmer,
the attempt to achieve the in-game goal actually frustrates the real purpose of games. Thus,
for instance, a game of “first team to a hundred points” is better than the game of “highest
score after an hour of play” because there is no conflict between the winning strategy and
the deeper purpose of playing games. And a timed game, when it must be played, will be
27
improved by rules that prevent stalling; the shot-clock was introduced into basketball for
When we probe these internalist pictures for specific accounts of value, the answers we
find are radically different from those that emerge from aesthetics and literary theory.
Rather than speaking of meaning or expressiveness, the philosophy of sports has cited such
goods as achievement, excellence, increased motivation, flow states, and even epistemic
benefits like the increased knowledge of one’s ability to move through space and time (,
2012, 102-3). If these arguments are successful, it seems they should also apply to
computer games, board games, and the like. It seems curious that the majority of
There are, however, a number of modern dissenters from the internalist tradition.
reject it (Morgan 2004). Ciomaga argues that the normativity of a game comes not from the
rules themselves, but from particular agreements made by particular communities about
how to play. The norms, for example, of a friendly game of basketball will be quite different
from the norms of a professional game, which will, in turn, be quite different from a game
of trash-talking street ball. Game rules are to be conceived of as instructions, not binding
norms. They are rather like recipes — instructions for cooking which, in and of themselves,
have no normativity, and which may be freely interpreted and modified depending on an
28
We can already see that the philosophy of sport adopts an entirely different approach to
the value of games. For the philosophers of sport, the value of games is usually hashed out
in terms of the desirability of the activity of playing the game, rather than in terms of the
value of the game itself and the value of appreciating its inherent aesthetic qualities. We
might say that, in the philosophy of sports, games are often treated as something like
governments: we all agree to the same rule-set because there’s something we want to get
done together. Interestingly, the paradigmatic cases for most work in computer game
aesthetics are single-player computer games, whereas the paradigmatic cases for
Philosophy of sports has, in fact, discussed the aesthetic experience of sports, but here,
again, the investigation has gone down a very different path. In work on the aesthetics of
computer games, the object of aesthetic attention is usually the game itself; we are
evaluating the game, as an object of appreciation, for its aesthetic properties. Sports
aesthetics has focused, instead, on the aesthetics of player actions — such as an athlete’s
graceful kick, the drama of a last-minute win (Hughson and Inglis 2002). When sports
aesthetics discusses the game directly, it often shows up only as a context for generating
aesthetically worthwhile play. Sports aesthetics has, instead, often focused on explaining
the unique relationship between aesthetic enjoyment and sporting success. David Best
examples of graceless efficiency — of ugly, but winning play — and argues instead that
29
Furthermore, computer game aesthetics usually treats the player’s experience as the
primary mode of aesthetic appreciation, where the sports aesthetics typically concentrates
concerns whether or not the victory-orientation of sporting events presents a problem for
aesthetic enjoyment — a.k.a., the “partisans and purists” debate. Stephen Mumford argues
that there is trade-off between being emotionally involved and having aesthetic
experiences. A partisan observer — the fan of a particular team — gains certain dramatic
and emotional experiences, but is too biased to have the kind of disinterestedness
characteristic of aesthetic experiences. Mumford argues that the superior sports observer
is the sports purist, who seeks to appreciate and understand the depth of strategy and
brilliance of play of the athletes, without preferring a particular side (Mumford 2012, 2013,
1-18).
Ethics of Games
We can now see why the discussion of the ethics of games has been so splintered. On
the one hand, those concerned with games as representative texts tend to worry about the
ethical implications of the represented content in games — about, say, graphic violence in
games. On the other hand, the philosophy of sport has been much more concerned with the
ethics of inter-player actions in games — cheating, fouling, fair play, and the spirit of
sportsmanship.
Here’s a typical question from videogame ethics: is something wrong with fictionally
killing an innocent person in Grand Theft Auto? Matt McCormick has argued that neither
the utilitarian nor Kantian model can provide an adequate basis for declaring fictional
30
game killings universally wrong. Since the killing is only fictional, the utilitarian can only
count the harms that accrue from a long-term change in behavior from the player of violent
video games. A utilitarian answer will, then, depend on a contingent cost-benefit analysis of
the bad psychological effects versus the positive pleasures of play, and not deliver a clear
verdict. A Kantian account might tell us that it’s wrong to be a bad sport towards your
competitor, but that’s a harm that is neither unique to, nor necessarily a result of, violent
video game — there are just as many opportunities to be a bad sport in chess as in an
online shooter. The only account that might show a direct wrong to violent video games,
says McCormick, is an Aristotelean virtue ethics, which could claim that in acting out
(McCormick 2001).
A related puzzle concerns the strange variability of our intuitions about what fictional
acts are acceptable in a video game. Morgan Luck poses a “gamer’s dilemma”: how could
one consistently hold both that virtual murder was acceptable, but that virtual pedophilia
was unacceptable? Shouldn’t any defenses of the former also work for the latter (Luck
2009)? Stephanie Patridge defends our asymmetrical intuitions by focusing, not at the
wrongness of the in-game act itself, but rather on the wrong of enjoying certain types of
fictional representation. Certain images, says Patridge, have an incorrigible social meaning
— a meaning which is fixed and unavoidable, given a particular social history. For example,
particular racist, anti-black images have an incorrigible social meaning in the United States.
Most video games representations — of killing enemy factions or spies — are insulated
from our moral reality, and do not have those incorrigible meanings. But certain types of
images, which target particular groups — racial minorities, women, children — do have, in
31
the right context, such an incorrigible social meaning, and so it is wrong to enjoy them,
even as fictions (Patridge 2011). Christopher Bartel offers a parallel response: virtual
murder is not murder of any sort, says Bartel, but virtual pedophilia is child pornography,
Even if one doesn’t think there is a problem with enacting fictive violence, there might
be higher-order moral problem for games. Miguel Sicart offers a subtle treatment of the
moral problems and opportunities of representational games. Sicart does not take
simulated moral wrongs to be actually wrong in any obvious way. Rather, he says,
simulated moral wrongs are actually an opportunity to stimulate moral reflection. The
crucial question is actually whether the game’s design encourages or squashes moral
reflection. The genuinely worrying cases, he says, are actually games like Knights of the Old
Republic, which output a quantitative ethical evaluation of a player’s actions based on pre-
determined moral parameters. You get “good points” for saving people, and “evil points” for
stealing from them. Many people have praised these sorts of games for rewarding morally
good behavior. Sicart argues the reverse: this quantitative scoring of morality, says Sicart,
achieves something like what Hannah Arendt described as the banality of evil. “By
alienating the player from reflecting about the ethics of their actions and outsourcing moral
evaluation to a closed, pre-designed system, the game effectively limits players’ ethical
agency” (Sicart 2009, 193,198). The problem is the same whether the game rewards the
player quantitatively for doing good or doing evil — in both cases, the player is merely
following the rules and divorcing themselves from substantive ethical reflection. Much
better, says Sicart, a game where the player is given morally charged choices, but where the
32
game provides no moral scoring or judgment of its own, leaving moral evaluation in the
The philosophy of sport, on the other hand, has largely focused on the ethics of what
players actually do to each other, including issues such as the justifiability of physical harm
in sport, and the nature of fair play. There are a great many individual topics, but a few
examples will serve to illustrate the sorts of issues under discussion. First, consider the
strike many as legitimate (taking vitamins, drinking coffee, working out), and some that do
not (steroids, blood doping). But how might we draw that line, exactly? The issue is
compounded when we consider prosthetics that might count as simple physical repair, but
might also improve performance past the human norm. Is there a principled way to draw a
line and distinguish between, say, legitimate nutritional supplementation and illegitimate
performance enhancement? The issue is quite thorny, says Brown. The standard of
enhancing skilled performance will not do, for steroid use surely enhances skilled
performance. Nor can we use considerations about avoiding risk and damage to the body,
since there are many sports in which all participants incur significant risks (Brown 1990).
Here we can see the consequences of one’s precise conception of the purpose of sport.
Loland distinguishes between two possible internalist theories of sport: one, that the core
value of sport is maximizing performance, and the other, that sport is for the development
of virtues and abilities in the performer. If the core value lies simply in the achievement of
maximal performance, then there is no principled reason, internal to the practice of sport,
to forbid performance enhancing drugs or cybernetic enhancements. But if the core value
of sport is to provide a sphere in which individuals have a fair opportunity for personal
33
development — perhaps one more fair than everyday life — then we have a reason to
enhancements externalize athlete development: they move the responsibility from the
Notice that these field-specific discussions actually have a very broad scope of
application. First, the majority of work in computer game ethics has focused on single-
player, story-driven games. But an increasingly vast chunk of actual computer game play is
spent in multiplayer competitive environments, to which much of the work from sports
ethics has significant relevance. Some philosophers of sport have already noted the
is far broader than simply e-Sports. A vast chunk of everyday computer gaming is now
multiplayer and competitive, from multiplayer shooters, to online battle arena games such
competitive massively multiplayer online games such as EVE Online. The same questions of
performance enhancement. The philosophy of sports has already laid much of the
groundwork to answers those questions. Some accounts of the social value of the sport can
also be applied broadly, across all forms of games. Simon argues that sports are a way of
cooperating to help each other achieve physical excellence (Simon 2014). C. Thi Nguyen
argues that such players are not straightforwardly cooperate with each other. Rather,
players try to win, and design features of the game transform that competition into
cooperation. This places a significant moral responsibility on the game design, rather than
simply player intent (Nguyen 2017). Nguyen and Jose Zagal have applied this view to
34
resolve ethical dilemmas in online gaming, such as trash-talk and online harassment
Similarly, much of the work the ethics of videogames can be applied to sports. For
example, if McCormick is right that the act of fictional violence in videogames creates a
moral habit, then it also may be true that watching or participating in non-fictive violence
in boxing might create a problematic moral habit. In fact, one might argue that participating
encouraging, for example, the voracious aggression found, say, on Wall Street. And perhaps
Sicart’s work can be adapted from story-driven games to cover all sorts of games, including
sports. For example: if Sicart is right, and simplified ‘moral’ scoring systems in games
in life, then perhaps aesthetic scoring systems in sports such as figure skating threaten to
Conclusions
The ludologists claim that games are a substantially novel artifact and demand new (or
straightforwardly annexed under traditional theories of, say, linear narrative. But there is
much reason to suspect that judicious adaptation from other frameworks will bear at least
some useful fruit. I’ve suggested that, in the philosophical analysis of games at least, there
are at least two ruling frameworks that have been applied to games with varying degrees of
success. First, from various schools of aesthetics, we have found tools to think about games
35
as objects of appreciation. In some cases, appreciation involves interrogating a game in
representational terms — looking for its story, its meaning, its social criticism. The
discussion of games as artworks has yielded other useful results concerning the exact
nature of the proper object of appreciation, and the relationship between artist and
Philosophers of sport, on the other hand, have approached games with an entirely
different framework. This has lead into investigations about the normative nature of games
— what guides the choice of rules, and how those rules might be applied, interpreted, or
practices and as forms of life. We might say that aestheticists have given valuational
accounts about the game itself, or about the experience of the game, while philosophers of
example, that the idea that it might be valuable to be skillful at a game arises very rarely in
the aesthetic discourse, but constantly in the philosophy of sport. Thomas Hurka’s reading
of Suits, for example, leads Hurka to conclude that game activities are more valuable when
they are more difficult, and that games are praiseworthy when they present genuinely
Subtler differences abound. For example, some work on games takes as its paradigm of
game-play something like children’s play. Play, in this conception, is the opposite of work.
Thus, being excessively competitive, being in it for the money, and caring too much about
winning, are all usually seen as failures of play. Sicart, for example, has argued that
excessively competitive, rule-bound game-play is, in fact, a failure of the essential spirit of
playfulness (Sicart 2014). The philosophy of sports, on the other hand, often treats
36
professional sports as the paradigmatic case for analysis, and focused competitiveness as
the paradigmatic form of play. Their focus on excellence, achievement, and fair competition
might provide a better justification for relatively rigid rule-adherence, contra Sicart.
Although there is still dissent within the philosophy of spot; Mike McNamee, for example, to
criticize the rank-obsession of professional sports and the consequent zero-sum nature of
We have restricted our conversation here to philosophical work on games and excluded
the discussion of play in general. But, of course, play provides another framework for
analysis. Tellingly, Stenros and Waern point out that earlier anthropological and
psychological approaches treated games as an activity of play and foregrounded the active
role of the players in creating play. On the other hand, computer game studies has tended
to treat games as structures or systems, and has been interested in how those systems give
rise to play (Stenros and Waern 2010) Waern suggests a hybrid path, and urges games
scholars to treat games both as systems of rules and as inherently playful activities (Waern
2012). Their work and other work in the very small and very new field on table-top role-
playing games and live action role-playing games is particularly fascinating, for such games
do not fit comfortably within many traditional models of games. They are not competitive,
nor do they offer anything that resembles traditional objects for aesthetic appreciation.
However, such game are often engaged in for very self-consciously aesthetic reasons. Take,
for instance, Nordic LARPs (live action role playing) — extended multi-day role-playing
events, which draw from both tabletop role-playing traditions and improvisational theater.
Stenros claims that Nordic LARPs are a particularly challenging case for game scholars.
First, they are explicitly co-creative — the primary work is not usually taken to be the game
37
rules, but rather the final, improvised performance. Second, they are aimed at a first-person
audience — that is, the primary audience for the improvised work is the players
It seems evident, to me at least, that games have the capacity to be many things: objects
of aesthetic appreciation; designed systems which structure play; venues for skilled
activities and competition; and goads to something like children’s play. Philosophers who
think about games have often stuck firmly one of those frameworks and de-emphasized or
actively excluded the others. The interdisciplinary field of game studies is starting to move
towards a synthesis of these frameworks, as exemplified in figures such as Juul, Waern, and
Stenros. It is also beginning to study the phenomena that arise at the interface between
these frameworks. Philosophers, on the other hand, have thought with enormous care
about these frameworks independently, but have rarely sought to connect them. There is
tremendously refined philosophical work on the nature of the ludic attitude, the nature of
digital interactivity, the nature of interactive fiction, and the value of competition. But the
most important work, in my mind, lies ahead, in synthesizing insights across these
disciplines.
Since the original publication of this Philosophy Compass article, I have developed my
own take on these issues, now published in “Games and the art of agency” (Philosophical
Review 128 (4), 2019) and Games: Agency as Art (Oxford University Press, 2020). Let me
summarize my views.
38
Games, I argue, are the art form that works in the medium of agency. This means that
the game designer doesn’t just make a story, character or environment. The game designer
designates who the player will be in the game by shaping their abilities and setting their
goals. In doing so, the designer creates the motivations for the in-game agent. And the
player, when they play a game, temporarily takes on those sculpted motivations. And we
often do so for the sake of aesthetic experiences of our own actions, decisions, and
movements. Games aren’t an art just because they have pretty graphics, or a present fiction
in a new way. Games are a unique artform, that sculpt agency for the sake of the player’s
We learn something crucial about the motivational structure of play from this analysis.
In many cases, our purposes for playing the game are different from the in-game goals we
pursue during the game. Often, we play for fun, but in order to have fun, we have to focus
all-out on winning. Games teach us, then, that we are capable of an enormous amount of
agential fluidity. We can take on temporary goals and submerge ourselves in them.
have many technologies for recording and transmitting parts of our experience. Novels lets
us record stories; paintings let us record sights. Games, I suggest, let us record and transmit
modes of agency. Thus, games form a library of agencies, and when we explore that library,
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