Game Design - Philosophy and Games (Introduction)

For all of its history, humanity has tried to understand its nature, and its place in the universe, and this has been the greatest preoccupation of our writings and drawings and other creations. More than that, ever since Plato and Aristotle taught their various lessons to the Hellenistic world, philosophy has been a point of interest in Western culture, and communicating it has been the work of countless stories throughout all media. However we get there, we must acknowledge that countless stories have devoted themselves to showing us new ideas about the world, or building on old ones. To name a few:

In literature, we have Steppenwolf, Infinite Jest, Notes From the Underground, Ulysses, Atlas Shrugged and Fight Club. In film, there’s Inception, 12 Angry Men, Forrest Gump, Cloud Atlas, Patch Adams, and The Matrix. Theatre provides us Rent, AIDA, Les Miserables, Assassins, & Rosencrantz and Guildenstein Are Dead. Surely comics would be the poorer without Watchmen, or television without Twin Peaks? All of these are just the tip of a very large iceberg, one that stretches back almost as far as storytelling itself. To communicate vastly different ideas, and even complex systems of them, is the province of fiction no matter the form it comes in.

Where, then, is the philosophy in Pong? What is communicated by Super Mario Bros. 2? What does Call of Duty teach us, beyond the virtues of aiming and not-being-aimed-at? Admittedly little, and to turn the messages they provide into philosophy would require mental contortions of the highest degree. However...

In film’s infancy, it was a vaudeville spectacle. In literature’s, it was campfire mythology and tales of trumped-up personal triumphs. In theatre, crude humor played for the lowest common denominator. Every medium, no matter how vast and intimidating, has its humble beginnings. Video games are mostly amusements today, but within a century of their creation we’re already growing out of that mode of thinking. Many games today, especially experimental ones like Dear Esther and Dinner Date, are trying at more complex themes and ideas, and it’s reasonable to assume that they’ll keep improving with time.

It’s important to remember that we now have the first truly interactive fictional medium, one where the audience does not simply serve as amanuensis to the author’s series of events, but plays an active role in them. This could be a golden opportunity to teach philosophical concepts, and wider systems of philosophical thought, through firsthand experience.

Games aren’t at any sort of renaissance on that front, at least for now, but they’re moving in the right direction. And so this series will cover how games represent different branches of philosophy, and how they could do more for them. To fill a 14-week schedule, there will be an introduction, 12 entries and a conclusion. 2 of those 12 entries will each be devoted to one of six branches of philosophy: Metaphysics, Politics, Aesthetics, Ethics, Logic, and Epistemology.

Each branch will have, by the end, an “Introduction to…” post outlining the nature of the branch and one or more surface-level aspects of it, how games represent those aspects (if they do), and how they could do so better. This will be followed by a “…Continued” post, which will give a more complex, in-depth topic from that branch the same treatment. For instance, “Introduction to Ethics” will involve ethical dilemmas in games, how systems of morality are represented in games, and how to gamify the Trolley Problem, while “Ethics Continued” will deal with a stranger beast like meta-ethics, virtue ethics, Epicurean hedonism, antinatalism, or the philosophies of Kant or de Sade.

Games have the power to teach us much more than simple patterns of behavior, or minor cognitive skills. They can teach us how to see the world through the eyes of others, and give the thinkers of the past new voices for the generations of today and tomorrow.