C. Thi Nguyen’s book Games: The Art of Agency is an interesting book on game philosophy. It makes an argument that seems to me genuinely new and insightful: that games can be used to capture and design forms of agency, allowing designers to express specific types of agencies. This makes them the art of agency, a form of art where the experience of action and agency are where the aesthetic qualities lie.1 ...
I’m writing this review in my blog and not publishing it in some more reputable place because I’m so obviously biased: Markus and Jaakko are my brilliant colleagues, so you should probably take my opinion with a grain of salt. I think in this case I’m more critical than I would be if someone else had written the same book – because I have such high expectations for these brilliant people. ...
In 2018 I wrote an extended abstract where I tried to define what I called “interpretive challenges”. I started thinking about this topic after playing Her Story, which is about looking at videos and parsing together a timeline of what happens in the videos. The challenge in that game comes from understanding what is said on the videos and finding new videos by noticing topics and themes that might be meaningful based on what is said. ...
One of my pet peeves in game studies is the claim – repeated in published articles again and again – that Wittgenstein thought you can’t define games, games are impossible to define or some other variant of this idea. I’m not sure why the idea is so persistent. Perhaps game scholars have a hard time coming up with definitions and feel better when they think that an esteemed dead philosopher let them off the hook: “I’m failing to define games because Wittgenstein told me it’s impossible, not because I’m not very good at this kind of theorising.” ...
I recently ran into a blog post discussing role-playing games using the play modes from various typologies since the 70s, including for example the Threefold Model, GNS and how the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons frames player preferences. The problem with these typologies is that they are typically based on people’s personal experiences at the gaming table (a valuable source of information!), but lack a systematic way of collecting and validating that information. ...
GamerGate was mostly active in 2014–2016, but you can still see the hashtag being used on Twitter. What was it about? GamerGate was a decentralised group of activists, with no central leadership and only partially shared goals, so saying what they were “really” interested in is difficult. Some would probably point to the wide-spread harassment as their main goal, but I’m more interested in what they themselves thought they were doing. There have been some questionnaires that have tried to map out GamerGate’s participants views, but it’s hard to say how representative they are. ...