The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach (New Directions in Aesthetics)

The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach

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Between Film, Video, and the Digital. Memory and Imagination in Film. The Event of Literature. The Couch and the Silver Screen. American Film Satire in the s. The Philosophy of Poetry. The Cinema of Christopher Nolan. The Moving Pictures Generation. The Hatred of Music. Levinas and the Cinema of Redemption. Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction. The Routledge Companion to Adaptation. Film And Television In Education. Adventures with the Theory of the Baroque and French Philosophy.

On Comics and Legal Aesthetics. The Aesthetics of Enchantment in the Fine Arts. Hollywood Remakes, Deleuze and the Grandfather Paradox. Class, Please Open Your Comics. Affect and Authenticity in Popular Cinema. Steven Spielberg's Style by Stealth. Aesthetics and the Sciences of Mind. Hilary Putnam on Logic and Mathematics. The Routledge Companion to Comics. New Directions in Aesthetics Book How to write a great review. The review must be at least 50 characters long. The title should be at least 4 characters long. Your display name should be at least 2 characters long.

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Continue shopping Checkout Continue shopping. Hence, I see this book not as one situated within games studies, but as a philosophical and humanistic work on the topic of videogames. This makes a practical difference in that the gaming examples I focus on, and the issues that I explore through them, will often not be orientated around the issues prominent in current games studies, but instead those to be found within the philosophy of the arts. Gaming replicates many of the issues that have been the traditional focus of philosophical aesthetics.

Theories that exist within the philosophy of the arts, designed to explain things beside videogames, often find a natural application in the case of videogames. Among the topics dealt with in the recent philosophy of the arts are the definition of art, the ontology of artworks, the expressive nature of artworks and our experience of their expressive qualities, the nature of narrative and interpretation, and recently, issues in cognitive science particular to the perceptual, cognitive, and emotional processes involved in the appreciation of art. A number of these concerns have their corollaries in videogaming.

Among the questions that will interest philosophers when they come to look at videogames are the following: This book, split into nine chapters, is an attempt to address these and other questions concerning videogames and their relationship to art. In the next chapter I address the first issue on the list, arguing that we must turn our attention to the formal features of definition if we are to construct a definition responsive to the varied nature of videogaming.

Chapter 3 discusses the fictional nature of videogames, drawing on the philosophical theory of fiction to establish that videogames are indeed interactive fictions. Along the way the concepts of virtuality and immersion are considered and explained in the context of the theory of fiction: Chapter 5 looks at how these virtual fictions are ideal for situating games. Games, I will argue, are best seen as formal systems set in a framework of behavioral norms, and on both of these issues the theory of interactive fiction has something to contribute to the understanding of gaming. Chapter 6 discusses the nature of narrative in gaming, again arguing that the nature of videogames as virtual or interactive fictions has a significant impact on this issue.

Chapter 7 presents a theory of how the emotions are involved in gaming, explaining what it is we become emotional about, and the role that emotions play in connecting us with game worlds. Chapter 8 looks into the obvious moral significance of videogaming. Many people are of the opinion that the violent content in videogames is genuinely worrying from a moral point of view; I assess whether these basic intuitions really are warranted, offering a partial defense of the disturbing content found in games.

Chapter 9 turns its attention to whether videogames really are a form of art.

Drawing on the discussion of the previous chapters, and philosophical theory about the nature of art, I hope the reader will come to agree with me that videogames are not only properly regarded as art, but as an art form filled with a potential for creativity, richness, and subtlety. I suspect, for a number of reasons, that there might be some resistance to this last claim about the potential of videogames as art. Though the ultimate justification of my application of philosophical aesthetics to videogames will be what success I have in my aims in this book, I will say a couple of things here.

First, videogames are in their infancy, and have developed to their current level of sophistication in a very short time. The last fifteen years in particular have seen rapid maturation of the form, and I see signs in that growth that games are beginning to broach the concerns usually associated with serious art. Second, looking on games with a sympathetic eye already turns up impressive riches. In many respects videogames are a hard sell to culturally literate people: But pushing beyond this often unfair image, videogames do have much to offer in the way of aesthetic pleasures, and as such they are of intrinsic interest to philosophical aesthetics.

But besides allowing us to understand videogames themselves, a philosophical study of gaming also has the potential to shed new light on a number of the traditional issues within the philosophy of the arts. As a new form of art, a careful study of videogaming can allow us knowledge not only of videogames, but of the larger classes — popular art, fiction, visual art, narrative — of which modern gaming is an instance. Permit me to extend an analogy. For biologists, the discovery of a new species is exciting not only in the interest of the new species itself, but of the potential the discovery has to tell them about the rest of the biological world.

The discovery of the platypus, for example, made a great many surprising facts known to eighteenthcentury scientists, forcing them to revise many of the ideas they accepted about the world Eco, Some mammals, it turned out, not only lacked nipples, but also laid eggs, and so nipple-bearing and egglaying could no longer be thought to be features that distinguished between reptiles and birds sauropsids and mammals.

More significantly, the platypus served to make clear the aetiological links between mammals and the egg-laying creatures from which they were ultimately derived: Through the discovery and explanation of the platypus we learn something about the more familiar classes of which it is a member, and also of the basic nature of the biological world. Videogames have the potential to be a cultural platypus. The general theme of this book is that videogames are a new form of representational art that employ the technology of the computer for the purposes of entertainment.

They involve their audiences through structural forms — including visual representations, games, interactive fictions, and narratives — that have cultural precedents in other artworks and non-artworks. Equally, videogames also engage us in ways that are precedented in previous forms of culture and art: But they also modify this participation by representing the player and their agency within a fictional world. It may turn out that what we thought we knew about art, fiction, narrative, games, and the psychology of the arts, was really an artifact of what was already known to exist in those classes of things.

I am a gamer as well as a philosopher, and a lot of my discussion here will be informed and propelled by my own gaming experiences. This book is filled with anecdotes of my many adventures in game worlds. A number of the academic works about videogames give the unmistakable impression of really being about something else: When I began this work, I wanted to write a book squarely about videogames, because I think they are of intrinsic and not merely instrumental interest.

I have sympathy for videogames, and if I achieve anything here, I hope it is to show how a sensitive look into gaming can uncover the genuine artistic richness of the new cultural form, perhaps even tempting some of the nongamers who read this book to pick up a controller and play. As such they seem to engage many of the same issues as do the traditional arts, raising questions about aesthetics, representation, narrative, emotional engagement, and morality, that have been the focus of the philosophy of the arts.

Philosophical aesthetics promises to provide a unique window of understanding into videogames. Exactly how do they relate to previous forms of art and entertainment? Videogames, I argue, are not characterized by any single distinctive trait, but instead are made up of a variable set of such conditions. Videogames differ to previous forms of art, mostly in their technologically dependent digital media, but also share profound continuities with earlier forms of art and entertainment in how they engage their audiences.

One concern that has interested a number of game theorists is the question of exactly what games are. Indeed, this seems an obvious and foundational issue for games studies to tackle. Often the question of the nature of gaming is taken to ask which of the previous non-videogaming forms of culture videogaming most resembles. Three such approaches are salient in the literature: The debate between narratology and ludology has taken a particular prominence in the literature and at recent games studies conferences Frasca, ; Aarseth, Though each of these approaches does see games and gaming as involving typical features, the theories do not come in the form of definitions.

This seems to be partly explained by the disciplinary location of some of these ideas: James Newman is one of the few researchers to confront the definitional issue head on, though even he does not seem to hold much hope for the prospect of defining videogames. Interestingly, both Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman and Jesper Juul discuss a number of previous definitions of gaming in general, testing the applicability of the definitions to videogames. This lack of concern with definitions is unfortunate because dealing with the definitional issue in a forthright and clear manner at the outset has the potential to add significant clarity to what can at times be a very murky debate.

It is often just not clear what it is that theorists are arguing games to be, and hence it is sometimes very hard to know what would support or falsify their theories. A successful definition of videogames would provide games studies with a target of explanation. But even if gaming proves to be beyond the scope of definition, the process of offering and criticizing definitions would nevertheless have practical and heuristic value in that we might learn a great deal about the category, including, perhaps, the reasons for its definitional recalcitrance.

Reward Yourself

The very difficulty in defining gaming may account for the lack of enthusiasm for definitions, of course. It is useful to compare the situation with videogames to that with the definition of art. Philosophers have struggled for a long time with the task of defining art, providing many definitions which have all in their turn seemed subject to serious doubts.

A representational theory of art might define art as involving representation or mimesis, seeing art as a mirror on reality. Such a definition is easily falsified. Though a large proportion of artworks do involve representation, it quickly becomes clear that this definition is prone to examples of artworks that do not — pure orchestral music and some abstract art, for example — and objects such as billboard advertisements that do involve representation but which are nevertheless not artworks.

For some, the history of the definition of art seems comprised of a succession of such definitions and their prompt refutations Gaut, Though a number of thinkers have over the years disputed whether art can be defined at all Weitz, , the interest in the definition of art shows no sign of waning. Furthermore, the debate has been worthwhile despite the clear lack of agreement: A great deal has also been learned about the formal, artifactual, social, and institutional natures of art, a fact easily proved by dipping into the rich definitional literature Davies, ; Carroll, What precisely is a definition, and what is it meant to achieve?

It is clear that definitions can serve a number of different purposes and take different forms. One of these — and it is the version of definition that many of my first year students seem most drawn to when they begin their essays by citing a dictionary — is what we might call nominal definition. Such nominal considerations are relevant here in that there clearly are variations in how videogames are referred to. Computer game, electronic game, console game, PC game, and handheld game have all been used to refer to videogames, or some class of them, and they are not strict synonyms.

Indeed, the usage of these terms is far from univocal: I have settled on videogame as the generic term in this book partly because it dominates current usage, partly because it does have a generic sense that cuts across the nominal variants just noted, and partly because it has the virtue of referring to the visual aspect of games, a fact which will assume importance later in this book.

Setting out the nominal bounds of a concept is not always sufficient for providing a real understanding of the term, however. Some everyday concepts, though proving perfectly suitable for the use to which people put them, fail to capture the real nature of the world. Consider as just one example the pre-scientific use of the concept water: As such, water could be defined nominally despite the lack of a real understanding of water, in that lexicographers could specify the way in which the concept was used.

More worryingly, sometimes everyday concepts just get the nature of the world wrong, and so nominal definitions, though capturing the way the concept works, can incorrectly describe reality. One such example is the vernacular term lily which groups together biologically disparate groups because of the superficial resemblance of their flowers Griffiths, It is for reasons such as this that a more substantive sense of definition than nominal definition is often desired. We can call this substantive sense of definition a real or empirical definition.

Scientists take a principal interest in empirical definitions because of their concern with discovering the real nature of the world, which may depart from how our nominally specified concepts tell us it is. The formulation of successful empirical definitions can also have a correcting effect on nominal terms. In philosophy, such empirical definitions usually come in the form of definition by necessary and sufficient conditions. Such definitions attempt to explain, clarify, or even revise the conceptual status of a term in common usage and come in the form of a condition or set of conditions that are necessary and sufficient for x to be y.

Water can be defined as H2O, because water must have this makeup, and if a substance has this makeup, then that guarantees that it is water. In philosophical parlance, a substance is water if and only if it has the microstructural composition of H2O molecules. Such essentialist definition is a substantive conception of definition in that it is an explanation of what it is if anything that makes all members of a given class — be it water, art, lilies, videogames — members of that class.

The definition proffered here is an attempt to capture the material nature of videogames: But this ambition for realism needs to be tempered by the likelihood that games lack a substantive essence and that a nominal aspect to this definition is unavoidable: A great many of our concepts are resistant to empirical definition, because they are merely nominal, being coined to reflect our needs or perceptual dispositions, rather than any natural categories that exist in the world.

The vernacular term lily is like this, in that it uses something that is particularly salient to us — a resemblance in the shape of flowers — to group together what are actually quite different things. And of course, there is nothing stopping someone arbitrarily collecting a group of things together under a concept: I might collect all of the things currently sitting on my coffee table into a nominal category, but it would be absurd to think that there is any real nature to that category other than the stipulated classificatory principle I originally used to group the items that they all currently sit on my coffee table.

Videogames, of course, are quite unlike water in being a cultural invention. With cultural artifacts, such categorial nominalism can be even more striking, because the coining of a term to describe an invention can lead to the production of new instances of the kind. In popular music, the rise of the album surely had an effect on the types of music released, so that even today when the technological means that originally gave rise to the form — the long-player record — has largely disappeared and artists can freely produce music in vastly different forms, the album is still a concept through which musicians organize their musical activities.

What this shows — and it is a point that will have consequences for videogaming — is that just which categories are coined to group cultural items together can have a significant impact on the kinds of things that subsequently get produced within those categories. It can even occur that artifacts are intentionally produced to expand or stress a category, or even merge categories, and as a result, our interests in defining cultural categories can become very complicated indeed, as the definition of art literature makes abundantly clear.

This means that even a successful definition of videogames may arrive not at some fact about what videogames really are in the sort of robust sense in which water really is H2O, but a specification that the term videogame, which is a fairly nominally contingent way of grouping a set of objects — but nevertheless a subsequently influential one on the development of the class — can be given a conceptual foundation in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions.

This nominalism does not mean the definition of videogames is unmotivated or lacks utility. The worth of such a definition will be adjudged not by how closely it corresponds to an underlying fact of nature as in the case of water , but how useful it is in allowing us to explain where videogames came from, their similarities to other cultural forms, and how they function. The very nominal nature of the definition itself allows us to understand something very important about games; that is, their continuity with other cultural forms.

Admittedly, this is a very pragmatic conception of definition that may not please everyone, but I think it will prove up to the task of providing a focal point for this study. Inevitably, because of the failure of games studies to squarely approach the definitional issue, this section is something of a reconstruction of the literature.

In their native forms, the theories discussed here are not formulated as necessary and sufficient conditions, but to see what can be made of them as definitions, I will treat them as such. It may be unfair to the authors discussed here to treat them as stand-in philosophers, but lacking a significant philosophical literature on these issues, I think this is the best way to make use of the genuinely important theoretical contributions these writers make to the debate. My argument is that when treated as proper definitions, narratology, ludology, and interactive fiction theories are all prone to examples of videogames that lack the purported characteristic feature, or of items that have it but are not videogames.

Narratologists argue that games are a new kind of the narrative structure seen in older cultural artifacts such as films and novels. Because of this, the theories that are used to explain those traditional forms of narrative can be adapted to explain videogames. Janet Murray discusses how games can be used to express narratives and stories even though their representational means differ to previous ways of depicting these things.

It is here that I must write the first of the promissory notes needed in this chapter so that I can suspend the real discussion of narrative in gaming until chapter 6. But even a cursory observation shows that many videogames do involve narratives.

Description

Narrative might be roughly defined as a representation of sets of events chosen for their contribution to an unfolding plot with a beginning, middle, and an end, and it is clear that many videogames involve such things. Narratives are more prevalent in some gaming forms than others: But as shown with the case of Portal, even what is essentially a puzzle game might present a narrative. But if we are to settle the question of the nature of gaming — the task I have set myself here — something stronger than the presence of narratives in some games needs to be shown: Problematically, narrative does not seem to be a sufficient or even necessary condition of videogames.

The presence of narrative is not sufficient to make an artifact a videogame because of the very obvious fact that non-videogames also involve narratives. Narrative constitutes the primary interpretive interest in television and film drama, and in a number of literary forms. In fact, videogaming often seems to be a combination of these media forms with a gaming element.

As we will find, the narrative in many games is represented by pre-rendered videos that interrupt the gameplay proper, often effectively suspending it, and the narrative in a great number of games might actually be removed without detriment to the gameplay: Narrative is not even a necessary feature of videogames because many videogames lack it entirely. Though Tetris involves a represented sequence of events — namely, differently shaped blocks falling at regular intervals from the top of the screen — the events are not chosen for their contribution to an overall plot or story.

Rather, the events occur simply to test the skills of the player. Dance and music games also tend to lack narrative structures, at least in their gameplay. Some theorists seem to be tempted to include such games as having narratives by broadening the meaning of narrative away from that supplied above. What about CCTV footage of someone parking their car?

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If we include these as narratives, the concept threatens to become uninteresting through its sheer ubiquity of application. The same arguably goes for the extension of the term text to apply to videogames and other items very unlike traditional texts. For all of these reasons it seems doubtful that narrative is by itself a constitutive feature of videogaming, but is instead a contingent aspect of some games. Still, the nature of narrative in videogames where it does exist remains an interesting issue, and I will have a great deal more to say on the topic in this book.

Ludology emphasizes the obvious gaming nature of videogames, and is sometimes seen in opposition to narratological approaches. The claim that videogames are principally games might seem self-evident because of the similarities videogames bear to non-digital games, a similarity which no doubt led to the coining of the term videogame.

Exactly what this similarity amounts to — what makes a game a game — is an issue that will also be deferred chapter 5 , but some videogames are very obviously games, having only migrated into the digital setting after being invented in another medium: Sports videogames such as Madden NFL are digital forms of physical sports games, and in most cases stick close to the actual rules and objectives of their real counterparts, in this case American football, though in a simulated setting.

Other videogames do not seem possible except in the digital medium. Tetris is one such videogame that seems perfectly suited to this ludological theory in that it involves a set of rules albeit programmed into a computer and an objective that must be achieved through those rules to fit the colored pieces together so as to avoid them reaching the top of the box into which they fall.

Real-time and turn-based strategy games like Age of Empires, Civilization, and Rise of Nations also seem entirely appropriately characterized as digital games. While not strictly being transmedial games, these strategy games seem to have non-videogame relatives in strategy board games such as Risk, and the strategy war games that use small figurines to represent the positions of armies. Espen Aarseth is perhaps the writer most commonly associated with ludology, though whether this is because of his opposition to narratology, or any substantive ludological theory of gaming that he has, is unclear.

Ergodic texts allow the possibility of multiple readings, allow the reader to instill in a text novel meaning, or place the onus on the reader to choose in which narrative direction a text goes. I am not convinced that a new concept is useful or even needed for my analytic purposes here. But more important than the criticism of the very notion of a distinctive class of ergodic media are worries about its potential to be developed into a definition of videogames.

Even if Aarseth has identified something that is distinctive of a range of textual artifacts, it is clear that this range is not coextensive with videogames, and Aarseth, in setting out the explanatory range of his theory, admits as much: In many ways, Jesper Juul is a better choice of a theorist who attempts to explain how videogames instantiate traditional gaming forms, though his theory is complicated in that he holds that at least some videogames are not games, but rather fictions Juul links videogames to earlier forms of gaming, hoping to show that they replicate many of the properties of traditional gaming in a new digital medium.

Without going into the details at this stage, this model defines traditional games as involving rules, variable and quantifiable outcomes, player effort and attachment to the outcome, and negotiable consequences. Videogames replicate these properties, and hence count as games. As with the concept of ergodic media, it is not clear that a simple use of the classic game model will allow us to develop a definition of gaming. To his credit, Juul accepts as much. The classic game model is clearly not a sufficient property, given that it was initially developed to define and explain non-videogames: Microsoft Flight Simulator is a similar case, in that the idea of winning such a game makes little if any sense.

Juul has shown that some videogames share a set of formal properties with earlier games, but he perhaps does not attach enough significance to the differences in the media instantiation of videogames to their earlier and non-videogame counterparts, giving us a hint that one of the needed conditions of a successful definition of videogames will refer to their typical media. Thus a third theoretical approach is to characterize games as interactive fictions. Two immediate confusions need to be avoided here. First, there are at least two senses of the term interactive fiction. The term can be used in a narrow way to refer to the genre of interactive fiction, a type of interactive literature in both electronic and non-electronic media that reached its height of popularity in the early s in videogames like Zork and in the various Choose Your Own Adventure style game-books, and which is still evident on the Internet today.

Typically, such interactive literature sets out a story during which the reader has choices to make that determine the outcome of the fictive narrative: This genre of interactive fiction in fact seems more appropriately described as interactive narrative. The use I intend to make of the term interactive fiction is wider and more encompassing than this genre sense, including interactive narrative, but also other kinds of interactive fictions. Some of the things I will refer to as interactive fictions, such as flight simulators, do not involve narratives of any kind, but nevertheless allow the player to interact with a fictive scenario.

Not all fictions are narrative in form, and equally, not all narratives are fictional. I have argued elsewhere that if one is careful in specifying exactly what it is that is interactive about interactive fictions, then videogames can often be counted as such things Tavinor, a.

Though again we will have to wait for another chapter 3 for the real justification and explanation of this claim, here we can pause briefly to consider the interactive fictive elements of videogames. Oblivion represents a fictional world filled with ogres and goblins, and it is fictional of the game that you interact with these things. Some fictional worlds are more similar to our own world than Cyrodiil is, and even reproduce parts of the real world: Even though the fictional setting has a real-world counterpart, the activities that the player is represented doing in the world are fictional: Unfortunately, videogames cannot be defined as interactive fictions.

Being an interactive fiction cannot be a necessary condition of videogaming as it is not clear that all games really are interactive fictions, or involve fiction at all. This seems to be the case with some transmedial games. The primordial videogame OXO, videogame chess, Sudoku, and solitaire do not seem to present a fiction that one is playing these games in the sense that Oblivion presents a fiction that one is fighting a goblin.

Rather, they merely allow one to play a digital version of tic-tac-toe, chess, Sudoku, or solitaire. Admittedly, many chess and card videogames do seem to represent chess boards and pieces and playing cards in a visual way. But these representations owe to the virtual representational configuration of modern computers see chapter 3.

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It is not clear to me that moving a symbol from a material to a virtual medium is sufficient to make it a fiction. Similarly, Tetris does not seem to be a fiction, because it is no part of that game that we imagine a corresponding fictional world; arguably, the game is just comprised of the real manipulation of virtual representations or symbols on a screen. Later, when I turn my attention to the theory of fiction chapter 3 , I settle on a robust meaning for the term, where fiction is something more than this symbolic activity: James Newman makes a different objection to the idea that videogames are necessarily interactive fictions by noting that much of the fictive activity involved in gaming is distinctly non-interactive For large stretches of many games one is merely viewing pre-rendered videos in which the player has no ability to act.

It is probably not fair to attribute this failure squarely to these theories given that they usually have no such intention to be so treated. But these failures do clear the way for me to offer my own definition of videogames. It is clear that games are not simply narratives, games, or fictions. What, then, are they? The definition I propose here involves a slight emendation to what I said earlier about the nature of definition. There I assumed that a definition is made up of a set of conditions that are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for x to be y.

When formalizing narratology, ludology, and interactive fiction theory in this way, it became clear that none really worked out as a real definition because there were obvious counter-examples of videogames without the specified feature, or items with the specified feature which were nevertheless not videogames.

See a Problem?

Perhaps, though, the fault lies not with the theories themselves, but with the way in which I formalized their content into a definition. In the definition of art debate, a number of recent philosophers of the arts have argued that an essentialist mode of definition is not the only definitional game in town: To drastically simplify matters, it may be that X is art if and only if it has property A or property B.

In this case a set of properties may be individually or jointly sufficient for x to be a videogame, but it is not specified that they are individually necessary for x to be so.

In the case of theories of the arts, such definitions are often meant to capture the intuition that there may be more than one way to be art Dutton, To revisit the earlier toy definition of art, we might define art as involving representation or expression of the emotions: Perhaps there is more than one characteristic manner of being a videogame.

I have already noted that Juul has this intuition about the hybrid or disjunctive nature of videogames. A disjunctive definition might be used to explain how, even though they fail to have a single set of necessary and sufficient properties, videogames can nevertheless be defined. Indeed, this would be a way to reconcile the theoretical divergence of ludologists, narratologists, and interactive fiction games theorists, while retaining the valuable contribution these theorists do make to the understanding of videogames.

The Art of Videogames (New Directions in Aesthetics)

Though not describing some aspects of games that can be developed into a successful definition, each theoretical vantage point isolates a characteristic that genuinely exists in videogames. In my view, videogames can best be defined by providing a set of conditions, not all of which are individually necessary, but when combined in an appropriate way are sufficient for an artifact to be a videogame Tavinor, X is a videogame if it is an artifact in a visual digital medium, is intended as an object of entertainment, and is intended to provide such entertainment through the employment of one or both of the following modes of engagement: This definition differs from a purely disjunctive definition in that there are at least two necessary conditions needed to distinguish videogames from their conceptual precedents and relatives: The invention of the computer, including its crucial visual display elements, stands as a historical prerequisite for videogaming, and gaming exists as an employment of that technology for the purposes of entertainment.

It is obvious that videogames also employ non-visual representational means, but the visual display has always seemed prominent or central to the form. Modern games have thankfully moved on from the oscilloscope: I currently do most of my gaming on a Playstation 3 running through a inch high definition LCD television. But the basic prototype — entertainments in a visual digital setting — can already be seen in Tennis for Two.

Despite their almost self-evidence, the media-based conditions need to be included in the definition because a number of videogames are structurally very similar to non-videogames, differing only in their representational medium. These games can become videogames in virtue of their transfer into a digital setting. Without the necessary condition specifying the computational and visual medium of videogames, the above definition would also apply to these games in their non-digital form.

The reference to visual representation in particular is needed because there are a range of toys and electronic games that would otherwise be included under this definition. Computer Battleship — the s Milton Bradley version of the pen and paper game — is an example of an electronic game that does not count as a videogame because it does not have a computer visual display; rather, the players themselves display the state of the game with small ship models and pegs on a plastic grid.

Videogames exist as a species within the wider class of electronic games, allowing us to understand the connection between the clearly related kinds, however. Videogame versions of Computer Battleship have been produced, adding to the electronic games a visual depiction of the game state, including animations of the battle. They also add the possibility of playing against a computer opponent. One point of clarification is needed: Though almost all recent videogames are pictorial — indeed, 3D representation is now the norm — this has not always been the case.

In these games, the visual screen is used to represent text, and the interaction that the player has with the game typically utilizes text as the player types their move as a command using a keyboard. Some might think that these text-based games, because they could be played in non-computer settings, are not really videogames at all, and that genuine videogames involve the manipulation of pictorial representations. But to make this conclusion would unsatisfactorily exclude from gaming an important kind of early videogame that has had a persisting influence in the form of the textual aspects still evident in games see chapter 4.

What we should say, I think, is that these text-based videogames have potential transmedial forms in non-digital media. It is with this visual media condition that the nominal aspect of this definition is most evident. One potential counter to my definition is that it counts out games without visual display elements. Metris is a computer game that is structurally similar to Tetris, but which uses musical tones and phrases where Tetris employs geometrical shapes.

The obvious counter to this is to deny that Metris is a videogame, instead being some other clearly related kind: I could have orientated this book around computer games, and so included Metris. This would not evade the definitional problems being encountered here of course; in fact they would probably be worse given that the category of computer games seems even harder to pin down than videogames. All that can be said here, I think, is that videogame just is in this respect a nominal category, and that the suspicion that Metris might act as a counter-example to the present definition makes the mistake of crediting such cultural categories with a real existence they just do not have.

The entertainment condition of the proposed definition is needed to distinguish games from similar artifacts that have purposes besides entertainment, and so do not sit comfortably under the classification of videogame. Examples of artifacts that have similar digital and visual media to videogames are military and commercial flight simulators, virtual museums, and computer desktop applications that involve fictive aspects such as the aforementioned paperclip character who offers advice — moreover proves to be an annoyance — in some versions of Microsoft Word.

The representational abilities of the computer that give videogames their potential to entertain also have a host of more utilitarian functions. Simulations in particular, because they are able to present in a virtual manner an activity that would be either dangerous or costly in reality, are valuable tools in learning and training.

Where I differ to Juul is in formalizing these conditions as part of a disjunctive definition. The gameplay and interactive fiction conditions of the definition are needed to distinguish ways in which digital visual media have been employed for entertainment purposes that do not constitute videogames, examples being Internet sites and videos, and digital television. While these artifacts do entertain and do share the media of videogames — and so meet the necessary conditions of the definition — they differ in how they engage their audiences.

Digital films may involve fictions, but not the interactive ones characteristic of videogames. It seems a matter of historical contingency that videogames have employed one or both of these modes of engagement. That an artifact involves rule and objective gameplay is a condition that is sufficient, given the presence of the two necessary conditions of this disjunctive definition, for an artifact to be a videogame.

Tetris, Pong, Pac-Man, and transmedial games such as chess and card games count as videogames in virtue of this condition. In a later chapter I will develop this condition into a fully-fledged theory, providing the real justification for seeing videogames as being games.

It already seems clear, however, that there are some crucial differences between games in the setting of videogames and non-videogames. In particular, the nature of the rules in videogames seems quite unlike that in traditional games, existing not as explicit linguistic formulations about legal moves and objectives, but as possibilities for interaction and goals to be achieved. In fact, many videogames do not even inform you of the rules and objectives of the game prior to play, these only being discovered as one plays.

Not all videogames involve rule and objective gameplay, and so the second characteristic way in which an interactive entertainment can be a videogame is its employment of interactive fiction. Fiction by itself is not sufficient, because as noted, this would include within the class of videogames many fictional Internet videos and films in a digital medium. The idea of interactivity must hence play a crucial role, and this explanation is to be taken up in a later chapter.

Interactive fiction comes in a number of forms — including simulations, world-exploring or world-building fictions, and interactive narratives. These fictions are surely one of the principal interests to be had in videogames, both in their playing and their study. An important motivation for the disjunctive aspect of this definition of videogames is that it explains some of the links that videogames have to earlier forms of culture, in particular, games and fiction.

These features are clearly seen in other media, and it is these similarities that have tempted games theorists to characterize games in terms of those previous forms. Videogaming is essentially a manner in which these traditional forms of entertainment have been implemented in a new technologically derived medium.

The examples with which I introduced this book — The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, Grand Theft Auto, and Portal — certainly contain interactive fictions and games. Though it would not be suitable as a definition, I do not think it is too far from the truth to say that typically, videogames are digital visual entertainments that employ games in a fictive setting.

Thus the disjunctive aspect of this definition, though important from a definitional point of view in allowing the definition to capture a category that does not seem monolithic, may not amount to all that much when it comes to the explanation of games. In the following chapters, as I relax my analytic tendencies, this rough categorization of videogames as being games through fiction will bear the main weight of the theory offered here.

At the same time, the definition offered here should serve to remind us of the difficult and atypical cases that do exist. It is worthwhile covering some potential objections to this definition. It might be argued that the definition offered here is too inclusive. Are transmedial videogames like chess and Sudoku really videogames, or normal games in a video setting?

Chess can be played on a board using pieces, by correspondence, and on a computer. It might be argued that the latter media change is not sufficient to make chess a videogame. Genuine videogames such as Tetris, it might be claimed, cannot be played except in their digital medium. If the intuition is correct that medium transposition is not sufficient to make non-videogames such as chess or Sudoku videogames, the proposed definition includes artifacts that are not genuinely videogames.

There are some obvious responses to make to this argument. First, there are unequivocal cases where non-videogames are adapted into videogames, such as videogame football or cricket. Playing videogame football is not merely playing football in a video setting. We are already familiar with transmedial forms of chess, and so our initial temptation is to see videogame chess as just chess in another medium. Given their unfamiliarity, transmedial sports games make the categorial effects of media transposition more obvious.

Modern videogame football, on the other hand, needed the technology to support 3D graphics before it could be created, and even now the form we have is only a rough approximation of the game. Second, I think that if chess had originally developed as a computer game and had subsequently been shifted to a board game setting, our intuitions would tell us that a videogame had become a board game. Indeed, there are cases where videogames have moved to a board game setting that have had this categorial effect: These examples show that media transposition can change whether or not something is a videogame or a board game.

Movement from a board game to a videogame is dependant on a change in representational media and so explaining the necessity of the media condition of the definition being offered here. There is a real sense of game identity at the genus level, however, so that videogame and board game chess or Frogger can still count as the same game in different media. It could also be claimed that my definition is too narrow in excluding those games that have intended uses besides entertainment.

Surely the proposed definition would not allow either kind of case to be counted as a videogame given their intended respective educational and public relations functions? My response is that these are clearly videogames with extended functions. Artifacts can have a host of functions and their categorial identity can change depending on which function we pick out for attention: Another example that shows the need for the entertainment criterion are artifacts in a digital medium that have as their extended aim learning or education, but which are not videogames because they do not use the local function of entertainment in achieving this aim.

A medical simulation aimed at training laparoscopic techniques would be an example if the simulation did not intentionally engage and motivate its users by means of entertainment. It is sometimes argued that Second Life — a virtual world in which participants can engage in activities besides those of entertainment — is not a videogame in virtue of lacking this condition. The entertainment condition of the disjunctive definition — framed in reference to the local function of an artifact — is needed to distinguish such cases. Videogames could be defined as interactive visual digital entertainments, with interactive seen as a term that captures the nature of both interactive fiction and gameplay modes of engagement.

Unfortunately, interactive is unsuited to the task of defining videogames because a sense of interaction wide enough to capture both interactive fiction and gameplay would include other things besides. If interactive is taken to refer to audience participation, the definition would probably stretch to include interactive DVDs, television on demand systems, various non-game Internet activities, and toys with digital and visual display elements.

If the sense of interactive was specified more restrictively, so as to capture the ways in which videogames are interactive, but to exclude other interactive artifacts, it is not clear that the term could stretch to cover all and only videogames because the interaction involved in the various kinds of videogames seems quite diverse. Tetris is interactive in virtue of being a challenge to sensory-motor abilities set within a goal-directed framework. Microsoft Flight Simulator is interactive in the sense of allowing the player to explore and interact with a fictional world through simulated flight.

It is not clear that these two games share a sense of interaction that is not also shared by non-gaming Internet activities or other interactive digital media.

The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach by Aaron Meskin

I have claimed that a potential benefit of defining games is the instrumental effect this would have on the theory of videogaming in clarifying the topic and setting out new avenues of study. Here then is the payoff for this rather technical and dry chapter: In the coming chapters I will explore the conditions specified in the above definition, showing how each condition exists in a distinctive manner when employed in a videogame setting. Much of the philosophical interest in videogaming will derive from how these conditions interact to produce new possibilities of artistic creation, and also new tensions, given that the definitional characteristics do not always sit comfortably together in their new setting in videogames.

Enough of definition; it is now time to move on to the explanation of videogames. Rather, to define videogames, we need to look into the formal possibilities of definition itself, and construct a definition that offers the possibility that there may be more than one way to be a videogame. This definition promises to provide a focal point in this study. Also, it allows us to reflect on the continuities between videogames and previous forms of culture, connections that will be explored in the coming chapters.

The many goblins that I have fought while playing Oblivion, for example, have an imagined existence only. Still, videogame fictions seem different to other kinds of fiction in allowing the player to adopt a fictional role and so to interact with a fictional world. I draw on the philosophical literature on fiction to explain the nature of game fictions, and also to explore the notions of virtuality and immersion, and how these relate to fiction. Videogames, because of their robust and contingent digital media, are interactive fictions in two senses: The origins of the videogame are complicated, with gaming arguably being invented independently a number of times; Steven Kent is one of few writers to explore the history of gaming.

Several very early games seem particularly significant in terms of setting a precedent for games as fictions. In the late s and early s, researchers at MIT working on Project Whirlwind — originally an attempt to create a functional flight simulator but later to lead to the first real-time digital computer — made a rudimentary videogame employing an oscilloscope as a display unit, which involved bouncing a crudely rendered ball into a hole Woolley, In Willy Higinbotham created the oscilloscope tennis game already mentioned.

In the mids Ralph Baer, an engineer with the military electronics company Sanders Associates, conceived of a range of television games, including handball, car racing games, and ping pong, eventually being marketed as the Magnavox Odyssey, the original home games console.

The games are fictional in that the oscilloscope patterns and pixel displays are meant to represent states of affairs having no real existence: These fictive scenarios are subsequently used to represent games with possible moves, and objectives to achieve given those moves. In Tennis for Two, the idea is to return the ball across the net so that the other player cannot also return it. The fiction of Tennis for Two — like the later Pong — is extraordinarily rudimentary: Spacewar is a little more determinate in terms of exactly what kind of fiction it represents in that the spaceships look somewhat like spaceships.

In the center of the screen is a star that exerts a gravitational force on the two spaceships — one controlled by each player — so that they respond to the gravity of the central star. The spaceships are armed with torpedoes, represented as tiny pixilated blips that shoot out from the front of the craft. If a torpedo hits the other ship it is destroyed; if the two ships collide they are both destroyed. The object of the game is to avoid the other ship and the central star, while attempting to get close enough to the opponent to destroy it with the torpedoes.

Though both games represent a fictional world, Spacewar has the more sophisticated world both because of the detail of its two-dimensional representations and the fact that the spaceships are subject to rudimentary laws of physics in the form of a fictional inverse r squared force — Spacewar has a Newtonian universe. Other early games utilized different means to represent their fictional worlds. Another text-based game, Hunt the Wumpus, involves navigating an environment and attempting to shoot an arrow into the deadly wumpus, whatever that is.

Again, the player performs actions by typing in commands, and is warned by the computer of the dangers of the fictional world of the game: Recent times have seen an incredible growth in the sophistication of the fictional qualities of videogames. Just one example should bear this out. World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game that depicts a large fictional world, in this case called Azeroth, much like that of Oblivion in having various fantasy elements, but involving multiple players. Players pay for subscriptions to the game and enter its fictional world through the guise of a player-character.

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