Imaginary Games

(2012/2013)

Preface

For as long as I can remember, games have been an important part of my life. In 1977, when I was five years old, the breakfast cereal Weetabix ran a promotion featuring Doctor Who board games on the back of the box, and collectible playing pieces inside; the games were (frankly) rather poor, but what struck my young mind was how simple it was to make a game. All you needed was some cardboard, a pen, and some ideas. Two years later, I encountered Tail Gunner (Vectorbeam, 1979) – a monochrome vector graphic space combat arcade cabinet – that in many ways was a forerunner to the vastly more popular Star Wars (Atari, 1983) cabinet. I began imagining my own arcade games, because at the time there was no way I could possibly make such a thing.

I had no idea then that I might be able to make a living as a game designer, believing rather that I was destined to become a research scientist, and indeed I followed this career path all the way to my first (unfinished) degree, in astrophysics, at which point I became somewhat disillusioned about the scientific establishment. I jumped ship to the computing department, and ended up with a Masters degree focusing on artificial intelligence and cognitive science. From there I eventually landed a job in digital entertainment software with Perfect Entertainment, where I was privileged to work with industry pioneers like Angela Sutherland, who had worked with adventure game company Magnetic Scrolls, Gregg Barnett, creator of The Way of the Exploding Fist (1985), and Sandy White, who created the first true isometric game – and the first game to support a gender choice – Ant Attack (1983).

But I never planned to be working in digital games. What had really fired my imagination were the boundless possibilities of tabletop role-playing games, epitomized by the first and most famous game of its kind, Dungeons & Dragons (Gygax and Arneson, 1974). By the time I graduated university I’d published three tabletop RPGs with my non-profit organization Discordia Incorporated, all low budget and small print run affairs. Needless to say, they didn’t make much money. In fact, what pushed me ultimately into digital games was precisely that: money. I needed to get paid, and there were jobs in entertainment software that I was more than qualified for.

Today, I still work in digital games – because it transpires that’s the easiest way for me to earn a living – but my interests have increasingly expanded into philosophy. As someone who has always explored the world in one way or another, what drew me into the work of philosophers were the infinite array of questions that could be explored, and the possible answers that could be uncovered. Here was a field less prone to premature certainty (for the most part, at least!), where anything and everything could be a subject for serious investigation – even games.

Well, perhaps I should not speak too soon on this front. For even in philosophy, the topic of games is somewhat looked down upon. Philosophers could investigate anything, but there seems to be a subtle bias by which certain things are not as important to investigate. Language? Certainly. Science? Definitely. Ethics? Absolutely. The nature of reality? Of course! But games? Surely that is more of a matter for psychologists or cultural theorists – anyone but philosophers. Levi Bryant (2010) sums up this kind of attitude rather neatly when he discusses his first response on encountering Ian Bogost’s work:

Video games? What could possibly be of interest in video games? Isn’t this a sort of scam that academics pull over on administrations so they can sit around and play? This, I suspect, is a response that those in digital humanities and cultural studies often receive when talking about their work to those outside of their discipline.

Fortunately, the blossoming popularity of digital entertainment has lead to a number of books in the space between games and philosophy, such as Jon Cogburn and Mark Silcox’s Philosophy Through Video Games, Miguel Sicart’s The Ethics of Computer Games, and Ian Bogost’s Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism, which adapts Alain Badiou’s work to digital games. These books paved the way for the one that you are reading, demonstrating that a robust and scholarly approach to philosophy of games was not only possible, it could even be enlightening.

This book began as something very different, although still a book of games philosophy. Seeking grounds for philosophical investigations in the space of games, I stumbled upon the Paradox of Fiction, as identified by Colin Radford, and in researching this further came across the papers of Professor Kendall Walton on his make-believe theory. Initially, his writings were just one of many things I was exploring in aesthetics, but when I eventually came to read his magnum opus Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (1990) I knew I’d found something quite special – something that was more than just a work on aesthetic theory, but a foundation for a whole new way of looking at art and play.

I wrote a summary of Mimesis as Make-Believe for my blog, Only a Game, between March and May 2010, in a seven part serial, and echoed each part in a second serial entitled Game Design as Make-Believe, which adapted Walton’s ideas to digital and other games. I was lucky enough to have aggregator site Kotaku pick up the latter serial and run it, bringing in a wider audience than I originally expected, but even then I felt that I had barely skimmed over the surface of what Walton’s book had to offer both game studies and philosophy. Those two serials were the genesis of the book you are now reading, and throughout this book any reference to Walton that is not otherwise attributed refers to Mimesis as Make-Believe.

In respect of Walton’s book, I must make certain disclaimers explicit. Throughout this book, I treat the make-believe theory of representation as if it were a theory of art – but Walton expressly denies this intention. The introduction to Mimesis as Make-Believe makes it explicit that his theory is concerned with representations, and this is a class that extends beyond what we could conventionally consider art, even though it also takes in a wide swath of things that are generally accepted as art, such as paintings, sculpture, theatre, movies and even most kinds of music. In ‘Aesthetics – What? Why? and Wherefore?’ (2007) he clarifies the relationship between art and his theory even more explicitly, stating: I do not claim that make-believe or fiction is involved in all the arts, and certainly not that it is always or ever what is most important. He also declares: "The theory I propose is not a grand theory of art, but a theory that straddles most any way of construing the art/nonart boundary."

Given this, how can I possibly get away with treating it as if it were a theory of art? I have two answers to this. Firstly, Walton’s reluctance to have his theory used this way stems partly from the very important fact that the make-believe theory has a great deal to say about the wider human experience (a topic I pursue in the final chapter of this book) and also from a wise resistance to being pulled into debating the boundary conditions of what he has termed folk theories of art. But my purposes here require something that answers the question what is art? in at least its broadest strokes, and I believe that the make-believe theory (in connection with some of Walton’s other writings on aesthetic values and artistic styles) sketches an answer to this question – albeit largely by setting aside the question of art’s boundaries. If nothing else, understanding Walton’s philosophy reframes this issue such that the question of drawing borders for ‘art’ becomes a rather provincial activity.

Secondly, I find it exceedingly difficult to find anything that might reasonably be construed as art that would not also qualify as a representation in Walton’s sense. He includes music within the make-believe theory by virtue of numerous representational aspects – including representing emotions, and both Walton and Richard Wollheim agree that the majority of non-figurative painting is still representational. There might be things that qualify as art that do not qualify as representations in Walton’s sense – but it’s not clear what they would be. Thus even though the make-believe theory is more than a theory of art, I am able to use it as if it were also a theory of art without any difficulty – albeit with a certain risk of misrepresenting Walton’s beliefs in this regard. In a recent email to me on this matter, he stated the following which makes the relevant point concisely:

The question of what art is, or how to define art, is a horrendously messy one, and one that I think is not as important as some think it is. So in Mimesis (and elsewhere) I wanted just to avoid it. Yes, if I am right that (most or all) pure music and non-figurative paintings involve make-believe, it might turn out that all art (in some intuitive sense) does. But then probably lots and lots of things most people would not count as art will involve make-believe as well. I and others have suggested that make-believe, in one form or another, arguably turns up all over the place (in metaphor, irony, quotation, scientific theories, religious belief, sports and games, etc.)

Since I cannot entirely avoid the boundary disputes concerning ‘art’ in this work, I instead proceed on the principle that the make-believe theory can function as a theory of art among other things, largely by accepting the assumption that there may be little or nothing that qualifies as art (in some sense) that does not also qualify as a representation (in Walton’s sense). Walton has suggested to me that this approach is close to arguing for the substantive claim that having a certain role in make-believe is a necessary condition for being art. I support this assertion – but I do not actively defend it in this book. It is my belief that after reading this book, no-one should have cause to ask me to mount a formal defense of this kind. But if I am wrong, I shall be glad to debate the matter further.

I must also apologize for a certain confusion I may have engendered in my earlier writings on Walton’s work whereby I treated his term Mutual Belief Principle (MBP) in a way that it was not supposed to be used. Walton intended this term to apply to circumstances in which the appreciator of a representation of some kind accepts the beliefs concerning reality that were held in the artist’s society when that representation was created, but which the appreciator does not believe are true (e.g. that the world is flat). But in Walton’s approach the creator of the fiction in question necessarily did hold the beliefs in question when MBP is in effect, because for Walton what is true is to be believed. I have a somewhat softer attitude towards belief and truth, and ended up using MBP as synonymous with what I have termed in this book (following discussions with Walton) the Shared Mythology Principle (SMP). Anyone coming to my work with Walton’s theory for the first time with this book can safely ignore this particular disclaimer, but I feel it is important to draw attention to my earlier misunderstanding lest anyone is misled by what I have written previously on the subject.

While we are on the topic of disclaimers, it is probably prudent to note that I have stopped short of providing any tangible aesthetic principles for games, which is to say, I have not attempted here to provide any detailed account of what aesthetic qualities games as art works should or could possess. This is not because Walton’s philosophy is incapable of providing the tools for identifying the aesthetic values of games, or of thus providing a basis for determining ‘great games’ in an aesthetic sense, but rather that this project would in itself be a gigantic undertaking. It is one that I hope to pursue in the future, but it is vastly beyond the scope of the already quite ambitious book, which must content itself with providing what Immanuel Kant might have called Grundlegung zur Spielästhetik – ‘groundwork of the aesthetics of games’. What I will say, however, is that I believe that Tōru Iwatani’s Pac-Man (1980) is as significant a work of art as Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962), and I say this out of sincere respect for both Warhol and Iwatani-san.

Although this is primarily a work of philosophy, I also hope that it has something significant to contribute to the domain of game design. By looking at the design of games from the perspective of the make-believe theory of representation, my objective is not to dictate how game design must be performed – there is no unified method for game design, and to seek one is a fool’s errand. Rather, my hope is to offer a different way of thinking about the play of games (one inspired by Professor Walton’s theory), and an approach to game design that recognizes the role of imagination and the limitations this implies. I certainly can’t expect to influence the commercial videogames industry with this book, but that doesn’t mean I don’t hope to influence game designers to consider their medium through fresh eyes.

Like any philosopher I have a great love of words, and as such I like to include a glossary in my books whenever my publishers are generous enough to allow the extra pages. I hope that readers will find it valuable to have a place to turn to where the various terms used – whether philosophical, game-related or otherwise – have a concise definition provided, all cross-referred with a near-impeccable attention to detail that borders on the obsessive. I have italicized the first appearance in the manuscript of many of the key words or terms that are listed in the glossary to help flag their presence, although of course sometimes an italicized phrase simply denotes emphasis.

I have tried to be equally fastidious in ascribing developer or game designer credits and years of first publication to both board games and digital games. Where a sole game designer can be credited, I have preferred this to a company accreditation, and similarly I have credited development companies over publishing companies according to a principle that creative contributions should trump financial contributions in academic citation, even if they do not in commercial practices. Because of the theme of this book, I have also extended these ascriptions to other artworks where possible, although for radio and TV shows this has proved too difficult and thus no-one is expressly credited for these in the references. In the case of movies I have flagged the director’s name (a slight deviation from the standard Harvard citation format used throughout) without wishing it to be implied that they were the sole creative contributor.

I apologize in advance for any confusion over the terms video game and videogame. Both terms are in common usage at the moment, and while my books all use videogame (as do those of Ian Bogost) other people use the older form video game. When quoting such people, I have retained their form, and similarly with book titles. If nothing else, this demonstrates an aspect of the rapid evolution of the cultural status of digital games – from a kind of game that happens to use video displays (video game) to a distinctive medium in its own right (videogame).

I am indebted to a great many people for their assistance, both in the construction of the blog serials and in the development of this book. First and foremost to Professor Kendall Walton himself for his support of my work, and guidance on philosophy papers and other materials which form the inescapable background to this investigation. To my wife, Adria Smiley, for her infinite patience with my philosophy ‘habit’ that has accrued considerable expense and is taking up ever-more space on our bookshelves, and to my Auntie Paula, the bibliophile in my family who has been a constant source of encouragement in my life, and who recently furnished me with the anecdote about my mother following me home from school that I have recounted in the second chapter.

I have an especial debt to the readers of the manuscript who provided invaluable feedback, especially Professor Walton himself, but also Jon Cogburn, Sarah Hoffman and Ian Bogost. Also, to a number of friends for their insight on various issues, particularly Brian Towlson on the question of the vices and virtues of gamer communities and the terms gamers use for them (also Darren Stinchcombe, whom he discussed this issue with). The thoughts of my colleague and friend Richard Boon undoubtedly creep into the corners of this manuscript in many places, and I have played so many games over the decades with my old friend Neil Bundy that he must be considered a ghostly conspirator to this work. I also must thank the impossibly prolific author Michael Moorcock for answering some questions concerning his stance on the role of ethics in fiction, which I have made use of here.

Furthermore I must extend my gratitude to a great many of my blog ‘players’, and in particular Mory Buckman for his invaluable assistance in untangling the issues in respect of applying Walton’s system to megatexts via a series of spirited arguments, Rik Newman for his insights into the culture of fighting games, and John M. Osborne for bringing my attention to the issue of ‘fair play’. Other ‘players’ deserving of mention include Peter Crowther, Ben Cowley, Patrick Dugan, Corvus Elrod, Brian Green, Theo Malekin, Jack Monahan, Matt Mower, Michael Pereira, translucy and so many more I can’t adequately list, not only for comments that were invaluable in developing the ideas in this book but also for the constant encouragement that has kept me writing all these years. Also, my thanks go to Lauren Orsini, the intern at Kotaku who was responsible for the Walton serial reaching out to a wider audience at that aggregator. I also want to mention Yehuda Berlinger, whose blog has oft provided ideas to push gainfully against, and whose influence thus lurks beneath the surface of this manuscript in several places.

Then there are the many academics I have bugged about various issues, including the aforementioned Ian Bogost, Jon Cogburn and Sarah Hoffman, but also Levi Bryant, Edward Castronova, Stefano Gualeni, Thomas Malaby, Miguel Sicart, and Stephen Yablo, as well as the inestimable Mary Midgley for granting me a brief interview which I have made use of here. I must also express thanks to those academics whose resources were so inestimably helpful in my research, particularly Steven Schneider’s excellent summary of the Paradox of Fiction (2009) on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy which kick-started my reading list and thus first put me into contact with Walton’s work. From Schneider’s citations I was led to Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen’s magnificent Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: The Analytic Tradition (2004) which not only contains a wealth of wonderful papers, but has arranged them in a manner both insightful and practical. I would also like to thank the staff of the library of my alma mater, the University of Manchester, who helped me secure almost all the other papers referenced in this book.

Additionally, I have made use of all my perennial games resources including Lawrence Schick’s Heroic Worlds (1991) for tabletop role-playing games, the Killer List of Videogames (arcade-museum.com) for arcade cabinets, Board Game Geek (boardgamegeek.com) for hobby games, and even the Wikipedia (wikipedia.org), the veritable ‘dial-a-geek’ of the internet, for release dates of digital games for home consoles..

Last, but by no means least, I must acknowledge the people at the beginning and end of the story of this book coming into being. The genesis of Imaginary Games occurred when Mark Vernon invited me to submit a philosophy of games manuscript to a publisher he works with in London; via a strange and winding trail, this led surely yet obliquely to this book finally making it into print, and for this I owe him my thanks. More than a year passed between this first submission and a publisher finally accepting the proposal, and in the end approval came in the most inconceivably short interval – submitting on Friday and getting acceptance on Monday. My final appreciation must thus be expressed to Tariq Goddard of Zero Books, without whom there would be no book in which to offer my thanks, and for this I extend my infinite gratitude.

1

Games

What is a Game?

In April 2010, esteemed film critic Roger Ebert walked unknowingly into the teeth of a rancorous beast when he posted on his blog that not only were videogames not art, they could never be art (2010a). Given that the internet is packed to its virtual rafters with belligerent gamers who will argue to the death over the insignificant minutiae of their preferred forms of play, this inevitably unleashed a storm of criticism. In many respects, it was a boon for the games industry that Ebert had chosen to wade in on this topic, since there were enumerable critics in various media who would simply have treated the entire subject with disdain. Whatever one makes of Ebert’s claims, he at least had the respect for the medium of digital games to consider this topic seriously.

But what is art, and what is a game? There is a temptation, as Ebert observed, to think that this is simply a matter of semantics and thus not a big deal – an attitude embodying a rather wide prejudice against philosophy which Ebert, thankfully, does not share. He quotes from the Greek philosophers in saying that art "improves or alters nature through a passage through what we might call the artist’s soul, or vision," and constructs an argument based on the premise that, as goal-oriented activities, games are precluded from being considered art or, to put it another way, the possibility of winning in a game is anathema to artistry.

Yet not all things we call a ‘game’ include the notion of winning. A child’s game of make-believe need not, and neither do most tabletop role-playing games, which are, at heart, a more sophisticated form of exactly the same thing as children’s make-believe. A rhyming game like ‘ring a ring a roses’ doesn’t involve winning either, and certain computer games are equally divorced from an overarching goal – Will Wright has called his game SimCity (Maxis, 1989) a software toy, and there are many other games with ambiguity in this regard, such as the classic 8-bit title Deus Ex Machina (Croucher, 1985).

Before we can do justice to Ebert’s argument, we must first establish with some confidence what we mean by the term ‘game’, and this is no easy matter. In fact, this has been recurring theme in the literature of game studies, which from the outset has involved nearly endless discussions concerning the boundary conditions of games. For the most part, we are no closer to an answer than we were when we began, but it is interesting to note that a great deal of the debate presumes that there is a definitive answer to be reached. The fact that people seem confident the term can be unraveled gestures at an underlying unity to the concept of a game, and thus suggests that the problem is not wholly insoluble.

In his 2009 keynote for the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA), Ian Bogost admits that so much of the discussion within game studies has been dominated by this very question, what is a game? In an insightful summary of the ‘moves’ offered thus far, Bogost covers the history of this crucial investigation. First, there was the ludology vs. narratology debate, which hinged upon whether games were best understood as a system of rules, or as fictions. But as Bogost notes, there is a false dichotomy in this approach. The question being asked is akin to is a game a system of rules, like a story is a system of narration? – and worded this way, the sense of disjunction is removed and the answer is simply returned in the affirmative.

Jesper Juul provided the next major move in this debate, by suggesting in his seminal book Half-Real (2005) that:

…video games are two rather different things at the same time: video games are real in that they are made of real rules that players actually interact with; that winning or losing a game is a real event. However, when winning a game by slaying a dragon, the dragon is not a real dragon, but a fictional one. To play a video game is therefore to interact with real rules while imagining a fictional world and a video game is a set of rules as well a fictional world.

Games are thus suggested to be both systems of rules and fictions. Bogost criticizes not this claim, but an underlying assumption that even if this is the case, the rules somehow have a kind of precedence – some part of a game is more real than the other part (usually the rules). It is here that we reach the philosophical domain of ontology, where questions of being and reality are discussed. If one is making a claim concerning what is real, one is asking an ontological question. This point will become important shortly.

Juul once again provides Bogost’s ‘third move’ – the question of what is the appropriate area of study in respect of games: is it the games in themselves, or the players? It leads to an idea that games ‘exist’ when players occupy them, which Bogost compares to Kant’s breakthrough realization that whatever things may exist, we as humans only have access to them via our thought and senses. Once again, seen in this way we are no longer addressing the question what is a game? so much as we are dealing with the ontological implications of games.

Bogost has his sights in this keynote on introducing his own ontological move, based on the platform studies he has conducted with Nick Montfort. Here, a number of different component levels of digital games are systematically uncovered – looking as games as just rules misses out on many key aspects. In the case of the Atari VCS that Montfort and Bogost study in Racing the Beam (2009), the hardware and software constraints had distinct effects on the games that were (or could be) made. There are hidden elements in the nature of digital games to be teased out.

Drawing on the work of Levi Bryant and Graham Harman in ontology, and in particular the notion of a ‘flat ontology’, Bogost boldly suggests that we entirely abandon attempts to claim a hierarchy of some kind in understanding games. A game, he offers, is better understood from the perspective of such a flat ontology, one in which no one kind of entity has precedence over another (as in the case of the rules taking precedence over the fiction in Juul’s half-real paradigm). Bogost goes further, suggesting we can look beyond the ontological elements that involve humans and throw the remit far wider such that:

…game studies means not just studies about games-for-players, or as rules-for-games, but also as computers-for-rules, or as operational logics-for computers, or as silicon wafer-for-cartridge casing, or as register-for-instruction, or as radio frequencies-for-electron gun. And game is game not just for humans but also for processor, for plastic cartridge casing, for cartridge bus, for consumer… and so on.

It’s a fascinating discussion that Bogost develops, one that takes a great deal of contemporary philosophy in its stride, and offers a refreshingly wide stance of its subject matter. But while his application of Harman and Bryant’s object oriented ontology reveals some interesting questions, it’s not clear that it answers the question we set out to explore in this chapter.

The matter at hand, you may recall, is what is a game? and it’s far from clear that this is best dealt with as an ontological question. Ontology is principally concerned with what exists, the nature of being, or, in its wider scope, the grouping and relationships between entities. There is an ontological aspect associated with games, as we’ve already seen with Juul’s concept of half-real, but to get to this kind of discussion requires a prior conception of what we mean by ‘game’. Bogost could not reach the conclusion that game studies should include such esoteric areas of exploration as the relationship between registers and instructions, or radio frequencies and electron guns, had he not already established that registers, instructions, radio frequencies and electron guns were all involved with games in some way. His conclusion presupposes a certain concept of a game. It is only by deploying this concept (whatever it is) that he is able to recognize the many things involved in digital games.

Treating what is a game? as an ontological question will not settle it once and for all, although that is not to say that ontology doesn’t have an important role in a philosophical investigation of games. I will return to these issues at the end of the book since there are in fact some rather crucial questions in the intersection between games and reality – and particular that nebulous concept ‘virtual reality’ – that warrant addressing. For the time being, though, we must set this domain of philosophy to one side in order to undertake a philosophical investigation as to what the unifying concept behind ‘game’ might be given that we can so easily and confidently act as if we know what a game is, despite not actually agreeing on any particular answer to the question what is a game?

Games and Play

The whole of philosophy can be understood as conceptual investigation – as attempts to explore how the concepts of language (and those behind language) are deployed, as enquiries as to the relationship between our concepts and what we term reality, and as rigorous examination of the consequences that concepts and systems of concepts produce. The British moral philosopher Mary Midgley has suggested that one can appreciate the purpose of philosophy by a comparison with plumbing (2005). Most of the time, we just accept that our conceptual plumbing is doing its job, but every now and then we detect weird smells from underneath the floor boards and must take them up and examine what’s going on behind the scenes. It is time to take a crowbar to the floor of game studies and find out what lies underneath.

In