This is the first article of an extended series that considers the relationships of philosophy to the practice of gaming. I have long felt that gamers and even game designers are remarkably ignorant of the philosophical assumptions the rules they use or create. Since "Assumptions make an Ass out of You and Me" (to quote Walter Mathau) it would seem useful to explore the intersection of academic thought and gamer practice.
DEFINITION OF TERMS
It's always a good idea to get one's terms nailed down at the start. Games and philosophy would seem to require, game, simulation, and philosophy defined.
GAME: For my purposes a game is a set of mechanical steps that move objects about and which change certain key information about those object by acting on them. The game is the mechanics. And the mechanics of a game define, before play even begins, the full range of actions that can happen in the game. So games have built in assumptions about what should happen and how it should happen. At this time the adventure game hobby uses XXX basic games: Miniatures (little men representing actual men), Board games (rigid rules tell procedures for resolving conflicts), Role Play games (players say what they do and a referee tells them what results from it), Computer games (which tend to be either move and shot picture games a.k.a. miniatures, or strategy games a.k.a. board games, or dialogue games a.k.a. role playing), Card games (which use cards to allow the rules to change as the game goes on) and Matrix Games (which use arguments to allow players to change the world as they go along).
Games do not have to have anything to do with human life. Abstract games like checkers, backgammon or poker have nothing to do with life. They are exciting but they do not simulate. Chess on the other hand (while not a good simulation) does attempt to simulate warfare on some level. Adventure games in general all try to simulate human experience. They may not do a very good job of it, they may even say they are not doing that, but by definition, they are.
SIMULATION: A simulation is an attempt to model human experience. The model is a simple set of rules that channel behavior so that the player's actions "imitate" processes that happen in the wider world. Rules designers impose their assumptions about the world in the key processes their rules channel players to imitate. So if a game has players roll dice to resolve gun fire, the rules writer is saying that weapons fire is an important process.
The adventure game hobby has been plagued by an argument between "realism" and "playability". Both sides saying that the other side is different from them and thus wrong. Realism strives for perfect simulation (a totally real copy of life– like a realistic painting), beer and pretzel games are "not realistic" (ie not agreeing with my assumptions about what the vital processes of the event are). Playability strives for a fun game. Simulation and realism are not very important. It is okay if a game is not perfect as long as it captures the essence of the event being represented. Too much "realism" (ie detailed complicated rules) is bad because it makes games unplayable. Both positions are incorrect and this debate a waste of time.
The only "perfect" simulation of reality is reality itself. All models of reality are by their nature simplified and incomplete. And a good thing to! The last thing I want is to be shot and killed while playing a wargame! Or to go insane from casting too large a spell in a role play game. Both simulators and beer and pretzel gamers are doing the same thing. They both make assumptions about what the essential processes of events are and make rules that in a much simpler way mimic those processes. If one person likes more salt in his potatoes than the next, it does not change the fact that it is potato soup! Academic gaming realized and acknowledged this thirty years ago when it included hobby games as a valid approach.
PHILOSOPHY: The dictionary says a philosophy can be a statement about a person's values. This is what most discussions about game philosophy have been over the last thirty years. That is not what this series is about. For our purposes, philosophy refers to systems of thinking about the way the world works. Over the last three thousand years many different systems of thought have been put forward. This series will look at school of thought after school of thought and see how it's system gets incorporated into modern games.
The following philosophies will be covered in this series.
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Theism
Thales and Pythagoras
Plato
Aristotle
The Epycurians
The Stoics
The Arab philosophers
The Humanists
Descartes and the Rationalists
Locke and Hume and the Empirists (Positivists, Logical Positivists)
Immanuel Kant – god of philosophy
Hegel and Marx and Idealistic Dialectic
Phenomenology
Pragmatism William James
Psychology Freud and Skinner
Existentialism and
Chaos and uncertainty
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© Copyright 1999 by Chris Engle.
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