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This paper focuses on the way computer games refer to the context of their formation and ask how they might stimulate the user’s understanding of the world around him. The central question is: Do computer games have the potential to inspire our reflection about moral and ethical issues? And if so, by which means do they achieve this? Drawing on concepts of the ethical criticism in literary studies as proposed by Wayne C. Booth and Martha Nussbaum, I will argue in favor of an ethical criticism for computer games. Two aspects will be brought into focus: the ethical reflection in the artifact as a whole, and the recipient’s emotional involvement. The paper aims at evaluating the interaction of game content and game structure in order to give an adequate insight into the way computer games function and affect us.
This first volume of the DIGAREC Series holds the proceedings of the conference “The Philosophy of Computer Games”, held at the University of Potsdam from May 8-10, 2008. The contributions of the conference address three fields of computer game research that are philosophically relevant and, likewise, to which philosophical reflection is crucial. These are: ethics and politics, the action-space of games, and the magic circle. All three topics are interlinked and constitute the paradigmatic object of computer games: Whereas the first describes computer games on the outside, looking at the cultural effects of games as well as on moral practices acted out with them, the second describes computer games on the inside, i.e. how they are constituted as a medium. The latter finally discusses the way in which a border between these two realms, games and non-games, persists or is already transgressed in respect to a general performativity.
