Ludic Unreliability and Deceptive Game Design

Drawing from narratology and design studies, this article makes use of the notions of the ‘implied designer’ and ‘ludic unreliability’ to understand deceptive game design as a specific subset of transgressive game design. More specifically, in this text we present deceptive game design as the deliberate attempt to misguide players’ inferences about the designers’ intentions. Furthermore, we argue that deceptive design should not merely be taken as a set of design choices aimed at misleading players in their efforts to understand the game, but also as decisions devised to give rise to experiential and emotional effects that are in the interest of players. Finally, we propose to introduce a distinction between two varieties of deceptive design approaches based on whether they operate in an overt or a covert fashion in relation to player experience. Our analysis casts light on expressive possibilities that are not customarily part of the dominant paradigm of user-centered design, and can inform game designers in their pursuit of wider and more nuanced creative aspirations.

The Value of Value Capture

Gamification, roughly the use of game-like elements to motivate us to achieve practical ends “in the real world,” makes large promises. According to Jane McGonigal, gamification can save the world by channelling the amazing motivational power of gaming into pro-social causes ranging from alienation from our work to global resource scarcity and feeding the hungry (McGonigal 2011). Even much more modest aims like improving personal fitness or promoting a more equitable division of household labour provide some license for optimism about the ability of gamification to improve our lives in more humble but still worthwhile ways. On the other hand, Thi Nguyen has argued that there is a dark side to gamification: what he calls “value capture.” Roughly, gamification works in large part because it offers a simplified value structure – this is an essential part of its appeal and motivational power. However, especially in the context of gamification which exports these value schemes into our real-world lives, there is a risk that these overly simplistic models will displace our more rich, subtle values and that this will make our lives worse: this is value capture. The point is well-taken. The way in which number of steps taken per day can, for an avid user of “FitBit,” displace more accurate measurements of how one’s activities contribute to one’s fitness is a compelling example. If I become so obsessed with “getting my 10,000 steps” that I stop making time to go to the gym, jog or do my yoga/pilates then that is not a net gain. However, there is an important range of cases that Nguyen’s discussion ignores but which provide an important exception to his critique: value capture relative to behaviours that are addictive and destructive. Here I have in mind things like alcoholism, drug addiction, and gambling addiction. With these kinds of activities, value capture can not only be good but essential to a person’s well-being because (and not in spite of) of its displacement of the person’s more rich, subtle values. Interestingly, the point is not limited to cases of addictive behaviour, though they put the point in its most sharp relief. Any situation in which making rational decisions one by one can leave one worse off than “blindly” following a policy which is itself rational to adopt also turns out to illustrate the point, thus further expanding the role for value capture as itself a force for good. The more general point is that certain kinds of sequential choice problems carve out an important and theoretically interesting exception to Nguyen’s worries about value capture. In these kinds of choice contexts, value capture not only does not make our lives go worse, it may be essential to making our lives go better.

Videogame Cognitivism

The aim of this article is to examine and defend videogame cognitivism (VC). According to VC, videogames can be a source of cognitive successes (such as true beliefs, knowledge or understanding) for their players. While the possibility of videogame-based learning has been an extensive topic of discussion in the last decades, the epistemological underpinnings of these debates often remain unclear. I propose that VC is a domain-specific brand of aesthetic cognitivism, which should be carefully distinguished from other views that also insist on the cognitive or educational potential of videogames. After these clarifications, I discuss and assess different broad strategies to motivate VC: propositionalism, experientialism, and neocognitivism. These map the different ways in which videogames can prove epistemically valuable, showing them to be, respectively, sources of propositional knowledge, experiential knowledge, and understanding. I eventually argue that neocognitivism is a particularly promising and yet underexplored way to defend VC.

Ghosts of the Present Past: Spectrality in the Video Game Object

The aim of the article is to analyse the phenomenon of ghost characters in video games from the perspective of Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology, and to use this as the starting point for a hauntological engagement with the video game object’srelationship with its own past. The paper will investigateghostly figuresand their spectral status inside the video game environment, as well as their uncertain hauntological status as both fictional bygone souls and digital in-game objects.On the basis of this analysis of ghostly figures in video game environments, I draw a line between the past of the fictional world and the past of the game world, and examine what happens when they overlap.The dual status of the in-game ghost will thereby serve to metonymically anchor an investi-gation into the duality of the game as a whole, as both fiction and digital materiality, and of the dif-ferent dimensions of the past that exist in between these two levels of the game object.

Old Lies, New Media

Book review of A Defense of Simulated Experience: New Noble Lies by Mark Silcox.

Me and My Avatar: Player-Character as Fictional Proxy

Players of videogames describe their gameplay in the first person, e.g. “I took cover behind a barricade.” Such descriptions of gameplay experiences are commonplace, but also puzzling because players are actually just pushing buttons, not engaging in the activities described by their first-person reports. According to a view defended by Robson and Meskin (2016), which we call the fictional identity view, this puzzle is solved by claiming that the player is fictionally identical with the player character. Hence, on this view, if the player-character fictionally performs an action then, fictionally, the player performs that action. However, we argue that the fictional identity view does not make sense of players' gameplay experiences and their descriptions of them. We develop an alternative account of the relationship between the player and player-character on which the player-character serves as the player's fictional proxy, and argue that this account makes better sense of the nature of videogames as interactive fictions.

The Compatibility of Games and Artworks

This discussion note is a response to Brock Rough’s “The Incompatibility of Games and Artworks”. (Rough, 2017) http://dx.doi.org/10.5617/jpg.2736

Introduction to the First Issue

Editorial introduction to the first issue.

The Role of the Player in Video-Game Fictions

What is the relationship between the player and the avatar of a video game? In this article, I aim to show that Jon Robson and Aaron Meskin’s apparently promising, Waltonian analysis of that relationship—namely, that it consists in the player imagining herself as the avatar—fails to accommodate and explain four central data about video-game storytelling that any such analysis ought to accommodate and explain. These data are, briefly: (1) Many of an avatar’s actions are inexplicable if we appeal only to the avatar’s beliefs, desires, and knowledge. (2) Video games may have many different kinds and numbers of avatars. (3) Video-game narratives often proceed by the player exploring multiple disjunctive, mutually exclusive possibilities. (4) Video-game narratives sometimes centrally depend on epistemic differences between the player and avatar.After evaluating Robson and Meskin’s view, I offer my own positive analysis of player interactivity that provides a motivated and unified explanation of these four data: the player of a video game plays the role of a metaphysically foundational fictional entity that actualizes possible fictional events. I call this entity ‘the fictional player’.Keywords: avatars, narrative, video games, storytelling, fiction, narrative explanation, ontology, fictional grounding, art, aesthetics, possible worlds, Walton.

Fictionally Flipping Tetrominoes? Defining the Fictionality of a Videogame Player’s Actions

In this paper, I use the case of player actions in Tetris to explore possible problems in existing descriptions of videogame actions as fictional actions. Both in the philosophy of computer games and videogame studies, authors often make use of Kendall Walton’s make-believe theory to describe videogame actions as fictional. According to the Waltonian description of fictional actions, however, the actions players perform when playing Tetris, such as flipping tetrominoes, would also be fictional. This is a counterintuitive idea, as players of Tetris seem to be really manipulating the graphical shapes in this game. I will thus discuss two other possible descriptions of fictional actions hinted at by Grant Tavinor (2009). Firstly, the (non-)fictional status of videogame actions might depend on the nature of the affordances to which they are reactions. Secondly, it might be the case that the player must take on a role in the fictional world for her action to be fictional. In the end, I will combine this second idea with a Waltonian description of fictional actions to form a new description of fictional actions that corresponds to and explains videogame players’ experiences.