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Imaginary Games
Can games be art? When film critic Roger Ebert claimed in 2010 that videogames could never be art it was seen as a snub by many gamers. But from the perspective of philosophy of art this question was topsy turvey, since according to one of the most influential theories of representation all art is a game. Kendall Walton's prop theory explains how we interact with paintings, novels, movies and other artworks in terms of imaginary games, like a child's game of make-believe, wherein the artwork acts as a prop prescribing specific imaginings, and in this view there can be no question that games are indeed a strange and wonderful form of art. In Imaginary Games, game designer and philosopher Chris Bateman expands Walton's prop theory to videogames, board games, collectible card games like Pokémon and the Gathering, and tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. The book explores the many different fictional worlds that influence the modern world, the ethics of games, and the curious role the imagination plays in everything from religion to science and mathematics.
334 pages, Paperback
First published November 16, 2011
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July 21, 2017
I’ll confess that I am old enough to have shared houses with avid players of table top, verbal role playing games – Dungeons & Dragons and the like – when they were by far the most sophisticated thing going in gaming, and while I was never into them I did have a real passion of word play games: as the years went by I drifted away to the torpid years of middle age. As never a player but as one interested in the moral panics about gaming, in looking at the criticisms of gaming as time wasting and as puzzled by the (not-very) closet orientalist critique and obsession with gaming cultures among young East Asian men, I have usually found the whole thing about gaming cultures intellectually interesting in an observer rather than participant sense.
Things changed a bit in the last few years; a good friend/kinswoman of many years went in and out of business as a games entrepreneur (for want of a better term), I began teaching in a play programme and thinking more and more about play and games as both metaphor and practice for many of the ways we stay alive in an otherwise terribly serious world, with some others in my working life began to consider games and play as more appealing and socially desirable practices than the sporting worlds in which we made our professional lives (and earned our income). Elsewhere in my working life I’d begun to think of games as systems of world-making, and practicing at building the utopias we love to live in even if they remain dreams that inspire us to act rather than anything much achievable. Through all of this ran a comment an old friend from a lefty activist past made about having played a politics, not in a disparaging manner but as a celebration of our passion and immersion as younger men and women, and of our attempts and successes at world-making (on a small scale).
Then, at a conference I had a hand in organising (not a big hand, mind you, but still a hand) Chris Bateman delivered a blinder of a paper about fiction, game playing and make-believe theory, drawing on work by Kendall Walton, a philosopher/theorist of art and literature who I’d also never heard of, but who has done a whole bunch of work on ideas of mimesis, a place I do play: I figured I just had to look at his stuff – so here, 35 years after I last recall a discussion about D&D with a serious player and three years my game-world entrepreneur kin-friend had to leave that patch I find myself in midst of a serious philosophical discussion that starts with a measured rebuttal of Roger Ebert’s (foolish) public comment that (digital) games are not art.
Bateman, then, has set out to explore and apply to games Walton’s notion of make-believe theory, which he describes as a “philosophical theory that representational art can be understood as props which prescribe particular imaginings to participants who enter into a game of make-believe using that prop”. Now, a prop can be pretty much anything – a broom-handle that becomes a horse, a top hat that becomes a person, a painting of a Night Watch, an actor impersonating a fictional king lamenting his daughter’s death, an agreed set of rules prescribing a certain discussion (for BBC Radio 4 listeners, think Mornington Crescent ), a rugby ball….. the list goes on. Crucially, however, the prop’s imaginings are prescribed as a result of a series of principles of fiction, but it is the prop rather than the pretence that grants access to the fictional worlds being imagined.
The core of the book turns around four key themes and issues – 1) the role of imagination in play, including types of imagination and thought, belief, suspension of belief, empathy, sympathy and abilities to act; 2) the notion and enactment of the prop, and given as much of the book deals with gaming there are all sorts of complexities here about avatars, dolls, words and material and immaterial artefacts; 3) fictional world-making including rules and principles of fiction, the presence of authorised and unofficial games in and with fictional worlds, and the tensions between personal and collective fictional world-making; and 4) the emotions and practices of participation in the make-believe.
One of the real strengths (and therefore one of the problematic limitations) of this approach is the difficulty of drawing the limits of fiction and fictional world-making. Bateman frames the book with chapters exploring questions of definition and reality; one of the powerful elements of the final chapter exploring virtual realities (that is, fictional worlds and our places in them) is the argument that mathematics is a form of game (this is not new in Bateman’s work but he applies this case effectively here) where it works because we agree a series of rules – there is no inherent 19-ness in the number 19; it works because we all agree it works – and these rules are bundled up in other forms of factual authority that give mathematics its power. There is always a danger in an argument everything fits into the category we’re exploring (here, a risk that everything becomes a game or gameified), a trap Bateman avoids through an implicit but clear sense of the politics of power.
The one section that sits a little uncomfortably in the overall argument, but that is essential to the discussion, is the exploration of ethics which, in its discussion of digital gaming at least, makes the powerful point that it is not games that require ethical decisions to be taken in the design or in entry to their world, but those that might bring about unexpected and challenging ethical decisions to continue to function and exist in that world that are the most ethically interesting. He also argues, convincingly, that the ethics of virtual and fictional worlds cannot be separated from ethics outside those worlds if we are to function in them and recognise/treat them with a sense of verisimilitude (my word, not Bateman’s); this is not to argue that fictional world ethical decisions transfer back into our more mundane worlds or that we are corrupted by them, it is an argument about the phenomenology of fictional worlds as experienced. The moral panic of gaming is never far away.
The irony of the moral panic, though, is that prop/make-believe theory means that the digital games that this panic focusses on is but one of a huge number of other fictional worlds, and for many of us one over which we have less power in making rather than entering than many other fictional worlds we make every time we watch a film or TV show, read a novel, join in verbal play with a circle of friends, immerse ourselves in a painting or wander into a sports environment. The strength of this book is that Bateman challenges us to think of all these kinds of activities as imaginary games, and in doing so disrupts many of the precious hierarchies attached to these activities. More to the point, he also takes some demanding and complex ideas and presents them in engaging and accessible ways – perhaps partly because as well as being a philosopher, he is a gamer and game designer making him an insider in many of the fields he writes about, but there are many insiders who are rubbish at translating their worlds into forms of language the rest of us can understand: his is a rare talent. It is a talent that means I am very happy that he agreed to contribute a piece to a book I’m editing with two friends at the moment, but more importantly it is a talent that makes this the fabulous book it is.
Things changed a bit in the last few years; a good friend/kinswoman of many years went in and out of business as a games entrepreneur (for want of a better term), I began teaching in a play programme and thinking more and more about play and games as both metaphor and practice for many of the ways we stay alive in an otherwise terribly serious world, with some others in my working life began to consider games and play as more appealing and socially desirable practices than the sporting worlds in which we made our professional lives (and earned our income). Elsewhere in my working life I’d begun to think of games as systems of world-making, and practicing at building the utopias we love to live in even if they remain dreams that inspire us to act rather than anything much achievable. Through all of this ran a comment an old friend from a lefty activist past made about having played a politics, not in a disparaging manner but as a celebration of our passion and immersion as younger men and women, and of our attempts and successes at world-making (on a small scale).
Then, at a conference I had a hand in organising (not a big hand, mind you, but still a hand) Chris Bateman delivered a blinder of a paper about fiction, game playing and make-believe theory, drawing on work by Kendall Walton, a philosopher/theorist of art and literature who I’d also never heard of, but who has done a whole bunch of work on ideas of mimesis, a place I do play: I figured I just had to look at his stuff – so here, 35 years after I last recall a discussion about D&D with a serious player and three years my game-world entrepreneur kin-friend had to leave that patch I find myself in midst of a serious philosophical discussion that starts with a measured rebuttal of Roger Ebert’s (foolish) public comment that (digital) games are not art.
Bateman, then, has set out to explore and apply to games Walton’s notion of make-believe theory, which he describes as a “philosophical theory that representational art can be understood as props which prescribe particular imaginings to participants who enter into a game of make-believe using that prop”. Now, a prop can be pretty much anything – a broom-handle that becomes a horse, a top hat that becomes a person, a painting of a Night Watch, an actor impersonating a fictional king lamenting his daughter’s death, an agreed set of rules prescribing a certain discussion (for BBC Radio 4 listeners, think Mornington Crescent ), a rugby ball….. the list goes on. Crucially, however, the prop’s imaginings are prescribed as a result of a series of principles of fiction, but it is the prop rather than the pretence that grants access to the fictional worlds being imagined.
The core of the book turns around four key themes and issues – 1) the role of imagination in play, including types of imagination and thought, belief, suspension of belief, empathy, sympathy and abilities to act; 2) the notion and enactment of the prop, and given as much of the book deals with gaming there are all sorts of complexities here about avatars, dolls, words and material and immaterial artefacts; 3) fictional world-making including rules and principles of fiction, the presence of authorised and unofficial games in and with fictional worlds, and the tensions between personal and collective fictional world-making; and 4) the emotions and practices of participation in the make-believe.
One of the real strengths (and therefore one of the problematic limitations) of this approach is the difficulty of drawing the limits of fiction and fictional world-making. Bateman frames the book with chapters exploring questions of definition and reality; one of the powerful elements of the final chapter exploring virtual realities (that is, fictional worlds and our places in them) is the argument that mathematics is a form of game (this is not new in Bateman’s work but he applies this case effectively here) where it works because we agree a series of rules – there is no inherent 19-ness in the number 19; it works because we all agree it works – and these rules are bundled up in other forms of factual authority that give mathematics its power. There is always a danger in an argument everything fits into the category we’re exploring (here, a risk that everything becomes a game or gameified), a trap Bateman avoids through an implicit but clear sense of the politics of power.
The one section that sits a little uncomfortably in the overall argument, but that is essential to the discussion, is the exploration of ethics which, in its discussion of digital gaming at least, makes the powerful point that it is not games that require ethical decisions to be taken in the design or in entry to their world, but those that might bring about unexpected and challenging ethical decisions to continue to function and exist in that world that are the most ethically interesting. He also argues, convincingly, that the ethics of virtual and fictional worlds cannot be separated from ethics outside those worlds if we are to function in them and recognise/treat them with a sense of verisimilitude (my word, not Bateman’s); this is not to argue that fictional world ethical decisions transfer back into our more mundane worlds or that we are corrupted by them, it is an argument about the phenomenology of fictional worlds as experienced. The moral panic of gaming is never far away.
The irony of the moral panic, though, is that prop/make-believe theory means that the digital games that this panic focusses on is but one of a huge number of other fictional worlds, and for many of us one over which we have less power in making rather than entering than many other fictional worlds we make every time we watch a film or TV show, read a novel, join in verbal play with a circle of friends, immerse ourselves in a painting or wander into a sports environment. The strength of this book is that Bateman challenges us to think of all these kinds of activities as imaginary games, and in doing so disrupts many of the precious hierarchies attached to these activities. More to the point, he also takes some demanding and complex ideas and presents them in engaging and accessible ways – perhaps partly because as well as being a philosopher, he is a gamer and game designer making him an insider in many of the fields he writes about, but there are many insiders who are rubbish at translating their worlds into forms of language the rest of us can understand: his is a rare talent. It is a talent that means I am very happy that he agreed to contribute a piece to a book I’m editing with two friends at the moment, but more importantly it is a talent that makes this the fabulous book it is.
December 28, 2022
Pim pam, boníssim. Marc teòric per al TFG toma yaaaaa.
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