The Gaming Philosopher

The primary aim of a review is to tell us whether a particular piece of fiction is worthy of our attention. The primary aim of criticism is to teach us to read. There is of course no sharp line between the two genres, and a single article can have both aims. But it is nonetheless a useful distinction to make. Good criticism teaches us to read. How? By showing us good reading in action. In the ideal case, we and the critic have both read the piece to be discussed; but the critic has seen things we have not seen, has thought about the piece in ways we have not thought, and has related the piece to contexts that may not even have crossed our minds. The point of this is not that the critic has arrived at the correct interpretation of the work and will explain it to us. If the work is rich in meaning, many interpretations are possible, making it senseless to seek the correct one. If it is not, then the question of interpretation does not carry much weight. The point is also...

Why are we interested in interactive fiction and roleplaying games as new forms of art? Presumably not simply because they are new and relatively unexplored, but because of the interactive aspect in its modes of creativity, complicity, judgement. (Thinking about the artistic modes of interactivity should be one of highest priorities.) Traditionally, a work of art is created by a writer, is the responsibility of the writer and expresses the judgements of the author.. Sessions of playing an RPG or reading a work of interactive fiction may transfer one or more of these wholly or partially to the players and/or readers. Why is this a good thing? What can a work of art that is interactive in this sense do that a non-interactive work can not? But perhaps this is already the wrong way of thinking, if we wish to arrive at a critique of IF and RPGs. First, there may not be a work of art. Is the program or the game book a work of art? It is certainly not the work of art we are looking for. Is t...

I have been planning to respond to John McLintock's Roleplaying as art? Not for me for a long time, and I'm finally getting round to it. McLintock's post infuriated me when I first read it - not because I get angry at people who think that roleplaying is not an art, but because of its rhetorical use of the word 'elitist', and its attempt to discredit art. Let me make an important point right here at the start: the question whether RPGs are art is meaningless, just as meaningless as the question whether painting is art. Is there a hidden essence of RPGs or of painting, that may turn out to be 'art' or to be something else? Of course not. Rather, we can paint with many different goals; and we can look at paintings with many different 'eyes'. We can paint for fun, and judge the painting by how much fun we had making it. We can paint to express our hidden trauma's, and have our psycho-analyst look at the painting as a symptom the meaning of which h...

In the comments to my last post, Ian mentioned an essay by Walter Benjamin , Der Erzähler ( The Storyteller ). Benjamin was an important German philosopher of the first half of the twentieth century; he wrote on a wide range of topics, but his best-known work is probably his essay Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (it is widely cited as The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction , but The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility would have been a better translation). Der Erzähler is a very rich and complex essay. It claims to be a reflection on the work of Nikolai Lesskow (in English known as Leskov, I believe); but it also touches on the difference beween a story (in the sense that a storyteller tells stories; Erzählung , not Geschichte ) and a novel, on the communicability of experience, on the role of death in modern life, on the nature of wisdom, on the relation between man and nature, and on several other topics. All...