Abstract
In this chapter I discuss the notion of gameplay in the context of computer games. While the concept widely used within the discourses of game studies and game design, its definitions are less than satisfactory, often reducing the phenomenon to consequences of rules or interactivity. Assuming a premise from the colloquial use of the term as referring simultaneously to qualities of the player, the game artefact and the activity of play, I seek to establish a footing for the concept beyond its colloquial use. After inspecting the notion as a composite of the established terms game and play, I suggest that the description needs to be complemented with attention to the ways in which the both the activity and experience of gameplay are shaped by materiality. Trough an analysis informed by post-phenomenological philosophy of technology I establish the involved materiality as a game artefact. I describe how it is intertwined with the processual and subjective constituents of the phenomenon of gameplay, confirming the assumption that gameplay can be descibed as an ontological hybrid.
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Notes
- 1.
The argument can be extended to address any predictions on how a game will play out made based on the properties of the game’s structure.
- 2.
Calling this kind of attitude “pragmatic” seems fair given the “usual question” for pragmatism, outlined by James (1943, 133) as follows: “Grant an idea or belief to be true, […] what concrete difference will its being true make in any one’s actual life? […] What, in short, is the truth’s cash-value in experiential terms?” Regarding more specifically epistemology, Heylighen (1993), who sees pragmatism as a stage in the development of epistemology over the course of history, suggests that “according to pragmatic epistemology, knowledge consists of models that attempt to represent the environment in such a way as to maximally simplify problem-solving.” A linkage between James (1943) and Heylighen (1993) can be drawn, so that James’ ‘cash-value’ is the maximal simplification of problem-solving to which Heylighen (1993) refers.
- 3.
Certain ambiguity is added by the fact that the German notion of Spiel used by Gadamer can be translated into English as both play and game.
- 4.
Even though play escapes definition, it is possible to describe its intricacies. Elsewhere (Leino 2009) I have suggested that a non-approximative description of the intricacies of play is possible from a first-person perspective, in other words, the player’s perspective.
- 5.
I intend the notion of “resistance” as used by Sartre (2003, 505) as signifying the quality of a world which makes an individual’s freedom meaningful. In other words, “resistance” refers to that without which there would be no difference between ‘wishing to’ and ‘choosing to’ do something.
- 6.
Without further explication I intend the notion as referring to whole packages of technology in which structures of games are manifested. Such reference may initially seem reductive. For example, the “game artefact” involved in gameplay of the original instalment of the Tetris franchise is admittedly different from the game artefact involved in the gameplay of Far Cry. Acknowledging that technological artefacts are created in their contexts of use, we cannot ignore the competencies of individual users and the psycho-social contexts around the use of game artefacts. Using one single concept in reference to all this may seem to reduce the diversity of vastly different configurations, or “assemblages” (cf. Taylor 2009), of materialities and practices into one. However, it is important to remark that the notion is not an exhaustive description of any single empirical artefact or a constellation of artefacts and practices. I make no reference to a ‘prototypical game artefact’, for example. All ‘game artefacts’ are, assumedly, ‘more than’ game artefacts.
- 7.
Ihde (2003) describes also a fourth kind of human-technology relations: “background relations”, referring to the ways in which technologies with which we are not explicitly in relations shape our experience of the world.
- 8.
For a discussion on this topic see e.g. Nielsen (2010).
- 9.
If we want to consider enhanced ways of seeing into Far Cry in relation to the phenomenology of technics, we could perhaps take what is often referred to as ‘user interface’ elements as “embodied technics” (Ihde 1990, 72–80). These features can often be turned on and off at will, or, are turned on and off as a consequence of turns of events, thus resembling more the paradigmatic cases of embodied technics such as eyeglasses. However, this would require a degree of benevolence since the notion of “interface” is contested: it would be hard to pinpoint where the “interface” would stop and Far Cry begin.
- 10.
This claim applies only as long as we are considering the game from the player’s perspective. From a non-player’s perspective there is no ambiguity in the ontological status of the “bare Far Cry ” as a constellation of computer code. As such it can be observed independent from its symbiotic relation with the player by for example using debugging tools, network traffic analysers, and the like.
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Leino, O.T. (2012). Untangling Gameplay: An Account of Experience, Activity and Materiality Within Computer Game Play. In: Sageng, J., Fossheim, H., Mandt Larsen, T. (eds) The Philosophy of Computer Games. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 7. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4249-9_5
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