Gil On the Reality of Games (original) (raw)
Related papers
Philosophy of Games (Philosophy Compass)
Philosophy Compass
What is a game? What are we doing when we play a game? What is the value of playing games? Several different philosophical sub disciplines 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 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.
What Philosophy Can Teach Us About Games
Games make their presence apparent in every place. People of any age play games, talk about games and accomplish learning objectives with the right use of games. However, the basic question of what games really mean to players remains inadequately answered and further examination of the whole subject is needed. Conceptualizing the meaning of games and understanding their role in everyday life is the basic research area that Game Theory examines. Specifically, a major focus is given on the interaction that takes place when the players make their own decisions when playing a game. This paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of games from a humanistic perspective, examining at the same time the role of games in peoples' everyday life and how they can be helpful for promoting meaning in life. The existence of a connection between a theoretical goal of human life and games is possible, and to find out, we have conducted a theoretical analysis in order to examine Aristotle's conception of happiness, and other philosophical theories in relation to games. Next, an experiment was conducted, where young players could explore in a matching game, Aristotle's teaching about virtue, and specifically, that all virtues are means between extremes.
I.Mosca (2014) What is it like to be a player (Critical Evaluation of Game Studies).pdf
A short survey on the main views about the relation between games and rules leads to understand that game studies need the help of social ontology. This recent philosophical discipline investigates the social facts, those that exist only inasmuch people believe in them. Similarly, games exist only inasmuch people play them. This means that games are constituted by player's intentionality: “games are such stuff as we are made on”.
Beyond Play: A New Approach to Games
Games have intruded into popular, academic, and policy-maker awareness to an unprecedented level, and this creates new opportunities for advancing our understanding of the relationship of games to society. The author offers a new approach to games that stresses them as characterized by process. Games, the author argues, are domains of contrived contingency,capable of generating emergent practices and interpretations, and are intimately connected with everyday life to a degree heretofore poorly understood. This approach is both consistent with a range of existing social theory and avoids many of the limitations that have characterized much games scholarship to date,in particular its tendency toward unsustainable formalism and exceptionalism. Rather than seeing gaming as a subset of play, and therefore as an activity that is inherently separable,safe,and pleasurable,the author offers a pragmatic rethinking of games as social artifacts in their own right that are always in the process of becoming. This view both better accords with the experience of games by participants cross-culturally and bears the weight of the new questions being asked about games and about society.
The category “Games” (Wittgenstein's Problem)
In the Aristotelian tradition, a category was defined as a class of objects in which each member had some objective characteristic feature that distinguished it from the members of other categories. More than fifty years ago, Ludwig Wittgenstein offered a critique of such an understanding of a category. He introduced the notion of “family resemblances” to define the category “Games” as he considered it to be non-classical, not having a unified description or clear boundaries. Analyzing the diversity of human games and their features, he wrote: “Don't say: "There must be something common, or they would not be called 'games' "—but look and see whether there is anything common to all” (Wittgenstein 1953, section 66). Furthermore, comparing different games, he demonstrated that they resemble one another in a variety of features like relatives do in a large family. In other words, he argued that games show “family resemblance” rather than possess a uniform characteristic feature. Wittgenstein’s approach has played a crucial role in working out an alternative definition of category as a loose class of objects that resemble some prototypical object from the class (see research conducted by E. Rosch, G. Lakoff, and others). I do not share this position of Wittgenstein, see Koshelev (2015; 2020), see also Wierzbicka (1990). I believe that the category “Games” does possess a uniform characteristic that distinguishes games from other activities. However, this is not an observable, or exogenous characteristic that Wittgenstein was looking for (there really isn’t such), but an endogenous, or functional characteristic that is not accessible to external perception. We identify the members of one family not by their appearance - “family resemblance” (not relatives can be more similar than relatives), but by endogenous (functional) characterization - the presence of kinship between them. As will be shown below, it is the endogenous (functional) characteristic that underlies the human category. It is also important that this endogenous characteristic belongs to the basic meaning of the word. Because of this, the word game may be used correctly to refer to any game while it cannot be used correctly to refer to a non-game activity. PROBLEM. Identify the characteristic feature of the category “Games” which strictly separates games from other, similar kinds of activity. DISCUSSION. Evidence for the existence of such a feature is provided by the examples of incorrect uses of the word game to refer to some combat sports that appear at first sight to be bona fide games. Indeed, it is correct for some reason to use the word game to refer to football, but not to boxing; cf. the correct sentences (both in Russian and English) Football is a game, Futbol – èto igra and the incorrect or odd sentences *Boxing is a game, *Boks – èto igra. Keywords: category “Games”, classical category, family resemblance category, Wittgenstein
I.Mosca (2015) Why society depends on games but is not a game (Mustekala Peli 315 60)
“What is time? If you don't ask me, I know - if you ask me, I don't know”. With this poetic expression, a thousand and some centuries ago, Saint Augustine [1] expressed a simple fact: there are some things that cannot be understood objectively because they are constituted by the subject itself. Augustine was talking about time, but other things can also be analysed using the same approach. Games are a good example: indeed, despite the fact we all play games, if someone asks “what are games?” or “what is play?”, each of us would probably have difficulties to answer. In this article we will see how games are established, and how what are the similarities and the differences from establishing social institutions such as money, marriage, laws, fashion, and governments. Some recent keywords in human sciences, such as “gamification” and “serious gaming”, can lead us to suppose that institutions are just big games. For example, stock markets might come very close to roulette or poker; the power hierarchies of corporations might be seen as roleplaying games; and bureaucratic activities could be represented via Tetris [2]. Despite this, stock markets are very different from dolls and ring-around-the-rosey games, corporations have nothing in common with football or crosswords, and bureaucracy is not related to Super Mario Bros [3].
George Herbert Mead in the Twenty First Century, ed. by T. Burke; K. Skwronski, Lexington Books, Lanham, 2013., 2013
This volume is composed of extended versions of selected papers presented at an international conference held in June 2011 at Opole University—the seventh in a series of annual American and European Values conferences organized by the Institute of Philosophy, Opole University, Poland. The papers were written independently with no prior guidelines other than the obvious need to address some aspect of George Herbert Mead’s work. While rooted in careful study of Mead’s original writings and transcribed lectures and the historical context in which that work was carried out, these papers have brought that work to bear on contemporary issues in metaphysics, epistemology, cognitive science, and social and political philosophy. There is good reason to classify Mead as one of the original classical American pragmatists (along with Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey) and consequently as a major figure in American philosophy. Nevertheless his thought has been marginalized for the most part, at least in academic philosophy. It is our intention to help recuperate Mead’s reputation among a broader audience by providing a small corpus of significant contemporary scholarship on some key aspects of his thought.
One way to deal with complex situations is the simulation approach: build a simplified model of this reality, learn from this simplified model, and, finally, translate the findings or knowledge back to the reality. Gaming is based on this idea, If we want to make inferences about reality based on experiences and knowledge acquired in a game, we have to be sure that the game model is a good, or valid, representation of the real situation. In this article, the concept of validity is explored in relation to games and simulations; four aspects of validity that apply to simulations and games are distinguished. These aspects are related to three applications of games. The article concludes with factors that may threaten validity during the process of the game design; a few suggestions are made to avert these threats.
The Grasshopper's Error: or, On How Life is a Game
2015
I aim to defend the thesis that the best life is the life that one plays as a game. Specifically, it is a “Suitsian” game, a game meeting the definition proposed in The Grasshopper by Bernard Suits. Even more specifically, it is a nested, open, role-playing game where the life’s quality as a game partly depends on there being no more people than players. To defend this thesis I refute two powerful challenges to it, one raised by Thomas Hurka (2006) and another which Suits himself raises at the conclusion of The Grasshopper. In the process I offer a new interpretation of that enigmatic and challenging book.