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Jesper Juul has convincingly argued that the conflict over the proper object of study has shifted from “rules or story” to “player or game.” But a key component of digital games is still missing from either of these oppositions: that of the computer itself. This paper offers a way of thinking about the phenomenology of the videogame from the perspective of the computer rather than the game or the player.
This paper suggests an approach to studying the rhetoric of persuasive computer games through comparative analysis. A comparison of the military propaganda game AMERICA’S ARMY to similar shooter games reveals an emphasis on discipline and constraints in all main aspects of the games, demonstrating a preoccupation with ethos more than pathos. Generalizing from this, a model for understanding game rhetoric through balances of freedom and constraints is proposed.
The space-image
(2008)
In recent computer game research a paradigmatic shift is observable: Games today are first and foremost conceived as a new medium characterized by their status as an interactive image. The shift in attention towards this aspect becomes apparent in a new approach that is, first and foremost, aware of the spatiality of games or their spatial structures. This rejects traditional approaches on the basis that the medial specificity of games can no longer be reduced to textual or ludic properties, but has to be seen in medial constituted spatiality. For this purpose, seminal studies on the spatiality of computer games are resumed and their advantages and disadvantages are discussed. In connection with this, and against the background of the philosophical method of phenomenology, we propose three steps in describing computer games as space images: With this method it is possible to describe games with respect to the possible appearance of spatiality in a pictorial medium.
One of the informal properties often used to describe a new virtual world is its degree of openness. Yet what is an “open” virtual world? Does the phrase mean generally the same thing to different people? What distinguishes an open world from a less open world? Why does openness matter anyway? The answers to these questions cast light on an important, but shadowy, and uneasy, topic for virtual worlds: the relationship between those who construct the virtual, and those who use these constructions.
Playing with information : how political games encourage the player to cross the magic circle
(2008)
The concept of the magic circle suggests that the experience of play is separated from reality. However, in order to interact with a game’s rule system, the player has to make meaningful interpretations of its representations – and representations are never neutral. Games with political content refer in their representations explicitly to social discourses. Cues within their representational layers provoke the player to link the experience of play to mental concepts of reality.
MMORPGs such as WORLD OF WARCRAFT can be understood as interactive representations of war. Within the frame provided by the program the players experience martial conflicts and thus a “virtual war.” The game world however requires a technical and as far as possible invisible infrastructure which has to be protected against attacks: Infrastructure means e.g. the servers on which the data of the player characters and the game’s world are saved, as well as the user accounts, which have to be protected, among other things, from “identity theft.” Besides the war on the virtual surface of the program we will therefore describe the invisible war concerning the infrastructure, the outbreak of which is always feared by the developers and operators of online-worlds, requiring them to take precautions. Furthermore we would like to focus on “virtual game worlds” as places of complete surveillance. Since action in these worlds is always associated with the production of data, total observation is theoretically possible and put into practice by the so-called “game master.” The observation of different communication channels (including user forums) serves to monitor and direct the actions on the virtual battlefield subtly, without the player feeling that his freedom is being limited. Finally, we will compare the fictional theater of war in WORLD OF WARCRAFT to the vision of “Network-Centric Warfare,” since it has often been observed that the analysis of MMORPGs is useful to the real trade of war. However, we point out what an unrealistic theater of war WORLD OF WARCRAFT really is.
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.
Extending Alexander Galloway’s analysis of the action-image in videogames, this essay explores the concept in relation to its source: the analysis of cinema by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. The applicability of the concept to videogames will, therefore, be considered through a comparison between the First Person Shooter S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Andrey Tarkovsky’s film Stalker. This analysis will compellingly explore the nature of videogame-action, its relation to player-perceptions and its location within the machinic and ludic schema.