The aim of this workshop to discuss the various forms of representation that take place in gaming settings or gaming systems. Games seem seem to rely on a variety of representational roles for their gameplay in variety of ways. Examples of games include digital action games like “Call of Duty”, board games like chess or Monopoly, role playing games like Nordic Live Action Role Playing Games (Larps), guessing games, knowledge game like Trivial Pursuit, or gambling games, to mention just a few types.
This text briefly indicates some of the themes that can be raised and where they have been discussed in the literature so far. It draws mainly on chapters for an upcoming handbook on the philosophy of games written by the game scholars Ida Jørgensen, Pawel Grabarczyk and Andreas Gregersen. The full texts for these chapters will be available when the handbook is published and may be made available to the participants in the workshop.
The Gaming System
As a preliminary, it might be useful to characterize the functional element of the gaming system. Espen Aarseth (2009) proposes that a game consist of a mechanical system, such as the computer game system, or a board and pieces, along with a representational surface layer, which has various representational roles. The mechanical system contains certain rules and instructions for how to play the game, which in a computer game is encoded using algorithms and storage files for use during gameplay. In addition, Aarseth holds that the gaming system is involved in a process which consist of the actions performed by the player in the course of game using the physical game system.
Is Representation Intrinsic to Games?
Is the gaming system essentially representational? It is natural to assume that when playing an abstract game like checkers or when participating in free-form play, you are essentially involved in some sort of representational practice.
One such notion is to understand games as forms of storytelling, or more specifically as systems that provide multiform stories which aim to represent events which include characters, settings and plotlines. Janet Murray (2016) regard computer games as multiform stories that “presents a single situation or plotline in multiple versions” (p. 30), and similar views could be applied to non-digital games.
A variant option is to regard games as practices that involve the theatrical phenomenon of enactment. (Fernández-Vara 2009; Laurel 2013; Løvlie 2005; Murray 2016; Dubbelman 2011) According to this understanding, some (or all) games can be regarded as systems that provide certain general forms of scripts which facilitate that the player is enacting certain roles for the purpose of play.
According to some scholars, however, it is metaphysically misguided to regard games as systems that essentially consist in systems of representations, and that we should rather talk understand games as systems that create opportunities for self-standing action rather than communicational settings. As such, the game works by mechanisms that impose agential properties to be analyzed by notions of challenges, goal-attainment and the like, and that they should be regarded as that create agential rather than representational forms (Eskelinen 2001; Sageng 2015, 2017). According to these views, we must look outside notions of communication to understand what is peculiar to gaming.
Simulation and Virtuality
One popular approach to games is to regard them as a form of simulations. In the context of digital games this also raises the issue of whether they are to be regarded as virtual environments, each of which introduce a number of philosophical issues.
In a view made popular by Frasca (2003), most computer games rely on a form of simulation. The relationship between gaming and simulation has furthermore been explored in a range of settings, both in science and as a means for play. (Frigg and Hartmann (2020); R. Giere (2004, 2010); Winsberg (2015)). According R. Giere, the relevant desidrata of simulation is that “Agents (1) intend; (2) to use model, M; (3) to represent a part of the world, W; (4) for some purpose, P” (R. Giere, 2010, p. 274). This analysis is also applicable to games in so far as they are seen as simulations, but in this we can ask questions about what it means for the agent to be a player, to what extent the game attempts to represent a part of the world.
It is common to hold that computer games rely on virtual environments. The ontological and semantic character of virtuality in games has been given a lot of weight, since the reality status of the gaming environment has far-ranging consequences for understanding the outcomes and norms that apply to the gaming acts, to the extent that they can be said to constitute unique kind of games on their own. It has common to regard virtual reality as having a form second-rate or illusory nature, epitomized by William Gibson description of cyberspace as a “consensual hallucination … A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system.” (Gibson 1984). However, recently David Chalmers has popularized the idea that virtual reality is real, relying on real computational functions to produce sensory impressions for their users (2021), something that offers different ways to regard the semantic implications of game environments.
Forms of Reference in Games
The model mentioned in the beginning that posits that games consist of a mechanical system and a surface layer can be adapted to many of the representational roles that have been mentioned so far. A more fundamental issue is the matter of the kind of referential mechanisms that the surface layer in games provide. Following a popular distinction from Charles Sander Peirce, William Huber and Pawel Grabarczyk have proposed that his distinction between conventional, iconographic and indexical can fruitfully be applied to games. According to these distinctions, there are those representations that gain their representational power from linguistic conventions, like the nouns, predicates and proper names of everyday language, there are those representations that represent objects and states of affairs because or their depictive or structural similarity to them, and there are those representations that work in virtue of a causal relationship between the representation and what is being represented, such as the use of tracks or bullet marks in games. Because games constitute worlds of their own, there is also a distinction between internal and external representations that are achieved with representational mechanisms like these.
Gaming and its Psychological States
When talking about representation in games, it might be useful to distinguish between original and derived forms of representation. The varieties of representational roles mentions so far belong to communication, which are forms of representation that depends on various forms of psychological intentional states that belong to the individual. There are several such intentional states of particular importance to the process of gaming. One attitude is what Bernard Suits calls the “lusory attitude”, which is the attitude that a gamer adopts when she attempts to achieve a goal in a game just because it is made possible by the game rules. (Suits, 1978). Another central attitude stems from the fact the surface layer in the gaming system is centrally concerned with creating interactive fictions. As the games scholar Jesper Juul puts it, to play a video game is to play in accordance with real rules while imagining a fictional world. (cf.Juul 2005, Tavinor 2009), which in turn can be analyzed in terms of the prescriptions they provide for pretense and make-believe (Walton 1991). This raises issues such as whether interaction involve a form of self-imagination with regard to the player character or whether there are specific forms of imagination that comes with interaction with the fictional world of the game. A final issue for original representation that can be mentioned is the issue of perceptual states that the player has of games. Issues that can be raised here is whether we perceive affordances and gaming properties, whether perception in these cases are veridical, and whether we ought to regard perception of objects and events in the gaming environment as “seeing-as”, “seeing-in” or “seeing-with” (cf. Walton 1991; Wollheim 1980).
Communication in Play
Another issue of importance to the theme of representation in games is the kind of signalling that is done in the course of play-activities. A classic approach to this issue is found in Gregory Bateson (2000) who holds that play is a central example of what he calls meta-communicative frame. Thus, when animals or people are playing, it seems that signal that their behavior is merely play, as opposed to serious behavior. Thus a dog may wag its tail while making an aggressive stance, to signal that the aggressive stance is not to be taken seriously. This issue raises a number of interesting question that can be pursued, such as whether play and games in some sense is essentially self-referential and perhaps even inherently paradoxical. If there are play-signals, what kind of types exist, and what roles do they serve in play and gaming? (cf Myers 2003) There is also the matter of whether meta-communication is a necessary condition for all play, or whether it is possible for game and play to make do without such signals.
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