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Video Games: Art, Theory, Design, Philosophy
Can video games be art? What can we learn from them? Why are they so perfectly suited to tackling big questions about morality, humanity, and the nature of reality?
This accessible collection of articles tackles big questions about the medium of gaming, informed by philosophy, literary theory, cultural criticism, and an earnest interest in what makes humans tick. Informative yet entertaining, it provides the perfect introduction to a range of subjects for anyone interested in thinking about games more deeply.
This accessible collection of articles tackles big questions about the medium of gaming, informed by philosophy, literary theory, cultural criticism, and an earnest interest in what makes humans tick. Informative yet entertaining, it provides the perfect introduction to a range of subjects for anyone interested in thinking about games more deeply.
422 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 19, 2021
About the author
Chris Durston
21 books38 followers'Chris Durston refuses to be dull ... He doesn't see the point of writing a story if he can't take full advantage of the medium and do things within that medium that can't be done in any other.'
From Devon, in the South West of England, Chris Durston has always wanted to be a writer and only just got around to doing anything about it. Each Little Universe is his debut novel, initially conceived while studying English literature and philosophy at Cardiff University and finally published five years later.
In addition to being a new author, he is the host of Philosophiraga, a podcast about video games and philosophy.
From Devon, in the South West of England, Chris Durston has always wanted to be a writer and only just got around to doing anything about it. Each Little Universe is his debut novel, initially conceived while studying English literature and philosophy at Cardiff University and finally published five years later.
In addition to being a new author, he is the host of Philosophiraga, a podcast about video games and philosophy.
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July 19, 2024
This is a strange review for me to write because, not only am I friends with the author, but this book is a published edition of the blog that led me to getting to know him in the first place.
From 2017 - 2020, Chris Durston regularly posted on his Wordpress site Overthinker Y about video games. This was the same period of time that I was also blogging about video games on Wordpress. It was inevitable that one of us would encounter the other sooner or later and a big reason for that is that Overthinker Y was the first time I’d met someone who engaged with video games in the same way as me and asked the same oddly-specific questions about them. He was good at explaining, going in-depth but keeping it simple - and that made his complex, analytical mind all the more interesting to me.
In the years since, Durston retired from blogging about video games as he transitioned to writing published fiction. This is something that led to our friendship developing yet further because his enthusiasm for literature inspired me to take myself seriously as a writer. It’s the reason I decided the novel I’m writing isn’t just a hobby but a legitimate pursuit. There have been plenty of times when I’ve considered giving up and accepting that it isn’t meant to be. But then, I think of everything he’s accomplished and imagine myself accomplishing those same things and, of course, I realise I should press ahead, no matter how difficult it seems.
I explain all this because I need to make it clear that Overthinker Y is how I was introduced to someone who means a lot to me personally. We’ve never actually met in real life, yet he’s become the most influential person in my life outside my family (and I can say this because, of all those people, he also has the smallest ego). Without him writing the blog, my life would have taken a completely different course. Would I have learned to take my passion for writing seriously? Maybe, but it would have been less likely. Would I have realised that I’ve spent my life with un-diagnosed Autism? It’s possible... but I can’t think of anything else in my life that would have led to that.
What I’m saying is that Overthinker Y even being written at all is what has led to my life being so enhanced. Other people are what make our lives worth living. I met Chris Durston because he wrote a video game blog at the same time as me. It’s the ripple effect; how one, seemingly small thing can have life-changing effects.
So the published edition of it - Video Games: Art, Theory, Design, Philosophy - is a special book to me. It may not be one of my favourites, nor one of the most valuable (you can read the whole thing online) but it’s the physical manifestation of the thing that ultimately led to a friendship between me and its author that has come to define me as a human being.
But I think I should actually review the book now.
The book’s articles are divided into the sections in the title - art, theory, design and philosophy.
Art is the final section, though it’s the one I’ll begin with because it’s first in the title.
Unlike the other sections, Art is one chapter and is actually not from Overthinker Y. Instead, it's a revised edition of Durston’s essay Are Video Games Art?, which was originally posted on Academia and is also listed in his Goodreads bibliography (though I can’t claim to be aware of it having been published on its own). But, in publishing his collected works on video games, it made sense to throw this in there at the end because it is a fairly long essay that’s probably of academic merit and also discusses a contentious question amongst video game players and artists; that of whether video games count as an art form - which they obviously don’t.
I say “obviously” because it is obvious. Video games are not art. I won’t write a full-length rebuttal to his essay (because I can’t be bothered and also I don’t really care) but the process of creating a video game is through software development, which is a science. Student developers study towards a science degree (a BSc or MSc), not an arts degree (a BA or MA). If video games were an art form, the academic institutions that teach video game development would classify it as one. But they don’t. Because it isn’t - and the idea that scientists can call themselves artists, despite holding a science degree and not an arts degree - is an insult to people who actually are artists. I can use a word processor but that doesn’t make me a programmer. Video games aren’t an art form and this is a hill I’ll die on. Frankly, I don’t even understand why this is such a popular question. Even if video games were unanimously considered an art form, it wouldn’t change anything about them, nor would it change the way the players feel about them. If you like video games so much, you wouldn’t need that arbitrary validation. I think that if you’re so obsessed about this, you need to get over it and move on.
The theory and design sections I’ll pair together because... well, you can’t really separate them, can you? Theory is applied in design. If you’re studying theory, you’re studying it through the design. What else are you working from? Similarly, if you’re studying design, what are you learning from it, if not the theory that informed it?
For a book about video games, theory and design are the same thing. Yes, design is the application of theory but if you’re just reading about a subject, there’s no difference. Design can be studied separately but it’s something you have to “do”. The subjects of theory and design are so closely connected that I don’t understand why they have their own sections in the book. Surely, it would have been better to group each section’s articles together under Theory and Design? That way, you could still have “Theory, Design” in the title of the book. For what it’s worth, I can’t actually recall the differences between those two sections in terms of content or subject matter.
Finally, Philosophy.
This section is... interesting, to say the least. The articles here weren’t published on Overthinker Y but are instead transcribed from Durston’s video games and philosophy podcast Philosophiraga. Honestly, I’m not sure this section should even have been included at all. I can understand the inclusion of Are Video Games Art?, as that was also a written work on video games, so the book was a good place for it to finally be published, but those podcast episodes didn’t originally exist in written form. Instead, they’ve been transcribed into prose in order to be included in the book. But if they weren’t written works originally, why include them at all?
The idea behind the book seems to be that Durston realised he’d written so many articles on one subject that there was an entire book there already and that all he had to do was collect them together. That’s why I’m so confused by his decision to include transcriptions of podcast episodes. They weren’t part of those written works he already had lying around. It’s like he threw them in there for... what, exactly? To be a record of those episodes, should they ever no longer be hosted? As an easy way of giving the book more volume? Just because he really wanted to include a philosophy section?
I think the problem is that, as transcripts of a podcast, those chapters read like transcriptions; they read like someone riffing and improvising without a script. The book’s biggest strength is in its structure; in how well Durston breaks down his analytical thoughts and how simply he presents complex ideas. He writes non-fiction well. That’s what made Overthinker Y so appealing in the first place. I often used to think, after reading his latest article, that he ought to write a non-fiction book about video games because of how effectively he can communicate his thoughts.
The Philosophy section, however, does not demonstrate this. Philosophiraga was entertaining enough to listen to but, written down, it just isn’t the same. When you read it on the page, the way you process it is different. Listening to someone talking off the top of their head is completely different from reading someone writing off the top of their head (which is not how he actually wrote the Philosophy articles but you know what I mean). Taking something that was intended to be listened-to and then presenting it in a way that is read doesn’t work. I would have cut this entire section.
So let’s talk about the book as a published edition of a blog.
Since the publication of the original articles, Durston has had more to say about them and, as such, has inserted addenda as footnotes, which are used throughout the book to provide his retrospective thoughts. These range from additional points he’d like to make, disagreements with statements he made at the time, or even notes on the way something has been edited to work better on the printed page.
It’s a fun addition and provides new material, so not all of the book is recycled content. If I were to publish a collection of my old blog posts, I can’t imagine that I wouldn’t feel the need to do this myself.
However, sometimes the footnotes can be so long, or add something so substantial to the original article, that they may as well have just been added to the body of text. I understand that Durston wanted to preserve the articles in their original form while still giving his contemporary opinions on what he wrote at the time but when a footnote is a whole paragraph, at that point, it could simply be inserted into the article. It would have been fairly easy to do that while still making it clear that it’s an addition for the book. I think that would have made the experience flow better for the reader, instead of having lots of footnotes providing lots of new information and making the page layout sometimes look a bit too busy.
Another part of the adaptation process I’d like to talk about is the article titles. One of the things the footnotes will state is not only the article’s initial publication date and where it was published (since there are some which were published somewhere other than Overthinker Y) but also the original title, which has been changed for the book. Why this is I don’t know. Yes, the new titles sound more academic and do a better job of summarising the premises of the articles in question but the original titles are so much more idiosyncratic and representative of Durston’s unique voice as a writer. One such article was originally published with a title proposing that, from a video game character’s point-of-view, the player is some sort of ability-enhancing god-like being; yet, its title in the book is far less dramatic. The original title is an example of what first drew me to Overthinker Y in the first place; but the new title wouldn’t and I feel like this is a mistake. The original titles were far more consistent with the tone of the blog, whereas these new, more formal-sounding titles prepare the reader for something less fun and casual. They were the “face” of the blog and, for me, were the initial appeal before I’d even read the article or - to begin with - any of the site at all.
I understand that Durston wanted the topics of the articles to be more obvious just from the titles (which they wouldn’t have been without them being changed) but a way around this could have been by including an index, which I notice there isn’t. The book could have considerably benefited from having one, given the wide range of subjects it covers. Durston classifies the content into those four categories (art, theory, design, philosophy) but then stops there. In footnotes, he’ll mention how a subject mentioned in one article is explored in more detail in another. Listing these subjects in a simple index would make things easier for the reader rather than relying on a footnote somewhere else in the book. This wouldn’t just help the reader find every page or article mentioning, for example, Undertale (Durston even acknowledges in one such footnote just how often he talks about that game throughout the book) but also those that explain a certain topic, like morality or free will. For a non-fiction book, an index is essential. For a book like this - a compilation of preexisting blog posts - an index would have helped make it seem more legitimate.
However, there are some things excised from the book that it wouldn’t have made sense to include. Overthinker Y both hosted and participated in various community collaboration events over the years (our respective entries for Blogger Blitz will always hold a special place in my heart) but I can’t imagine a way of including them in the book without it just being weird, especially sans the context of the other participants’ posts. Also not included are blogging challenges, such as blogmas, which are arguably just web filler anyway. Those parts of the blog lean more towards the social media aspect of blogging, which just wouldn’t work in a book.
Despite my criticisms, though, this is a book I will cherish, if only because it represents something important in my life. I’ve already explained how the original blog the book reprints led to me befriending the author and how much of an impact he’s made on me personally, though he isn’t the only friend I made through video game blogging and there’s a section at the end spotlighting some of those other people I met through him.
His community collaboration events led me to meeting my friend known as Pix1001 from Shoot the Rookie; she, in turn, introduced me to the Scotland Loves Anime festival where we now meet up with each other ever year, as well as getting me into various anime and video games that have filled a hole I didn’t even know I had. Then there’s Ian Shepherd from Adventure Rules; he isn’t quite as active anymore but he streams on Twitch from time-to-time and it’s always a pleasure to chat with him on those occasions.
I myself am not actually mentioned in this section because he only wanted to put the spotlight on people who are still actively posting and I, like him, am now retired from blogging about video games (although I’ve received a personal “thank you” in all his novels, so I could hardly complain anyway). He’s closed the book on that chapter of his life and so have I, physically as well as metaphorically.
This probably doesn’t count as a book in its own right but Chris Durston wouldn’t pretend it’s legitimate either. He’s a writer who loves video games and realised that his old blog had a book’s worth of material in it, were it all to be collected together. He wanted to be able to say that he’d written a book about video games and, given how long these articles clearly took to write, it’s not like he didn’t put the equivalent effort into it anyway.
But you know what?
I don’t think the story’s over.
I think he still has more to say. I think he can still go deeper. It’s obvious from this book that he’s only just scratched the surface. The concept of a video game is too complex; it fascinates him too much. One of these days, he won’t be able to resist. One of these days, he’ll get too curious, too bored of not knowing what he could write about them. And then, he’ll finally let himself off the leash and write one of the greatest books about video games ever written.
Chris Durston may have already published a book about video games. But this is surely just a placeholder. His definitive work on the subject is yet to come... and I can’t wait for the day it does.
From 2017 - 2020, Chris Durston regularly posted on his Wordpress site Overthinker Y about video games. This was the same period of time that I was also blogging about video games on Wordpress. It was inevitable that one of us would encounter the other sooner or later and a big reason for that is that Overthinker Y was the first time I’d met someone who engaged with video games in the same way as me and asked the same oddly-specific questions about them. He was good at explaining, going in-depth but keeping it simple - and that made his complex, analytical mind all the more interesting to me.
In the years since, Durston retired from blogging about video games as he transitioned to writing published fiction. This is something that led to our friendship developing yet further because his enthusiasm for literature inspired me to take myself seriously as a writer. It’s the reason I decided the novel I’m writing isn’t just a hobby but a legitimate pursuit. There have been plenty of times when I’ve considered giving up and accepting that it isn’t meant to be. But then, I think of everything he’s accomplished and imagine myself accomplishing those same things and, of course, I realise I should press ahead, no matter how difficult it seems.
I explain all this because I need to make it clear that Overthinker Y is how I was introduced to someone who means a lot to me personally. We’ve never actually met in real life, yet he’s become the most influential person in my life outside my family (and I can say this because, of all those people, he also has the smallest ego). Without him writing the blog, my life would have taken a completely different course. Would I have learned to take my passion for writing seriously? Maybe, but it would have been less likely. Would I have realised that I’ve spent my life with un-diagnosed Autism? It’s possible... but I can’t think of anything else in my life that would have led to that.
What I’m saying is that Overthinker Y even being written at all is what has led to my life being so enhanced. Other people are what make our lives worth living. I met Chris Durston because he wrote a video game blog at the same time as me. It’s the ripple effect; how one, seemingly small thing can have life-changing effects.
So the published edition of it - Video Games: Art, Theory, Design, Philosophy - is a special book to me. It may not be one of my favourites, nor one of the most valuable (you can read the whole thing online) but it’s the physical manifestation of the thing that ultimately led to a friendship between me and its author that has come to define me as a human being.
But I think I should actually review the book now.
The book’s articles are divided into the sections in the title - art, theory, design and philosophy.
Art is the final section, though it’s the one I’ll begin with because it’s first in the title.
Unlike the other sections, Art is one chapter and is actually not from Overthinker Y. Instead, it's a revised edition of Durston’s essay Are Video Games Art?, which was originally posted on Academia and is also listed in his Goodreads bibliography (though I can’t claim to be aware of it having been published on its own). But, in publishing his collected works on video games, it made sense to throw this in there at the end because it is a fairly long essay that’s probably of academic merit and also discusses a contentious question amongst video game players and artists; that of whether video games count as an art form - which they obviously don’t.
I say “obviously” because it is obvious. Video games are not art. I won’t write a full-length rebuttal to his essay (because I can’t be bothered and also I don’t really care) but the process of creating a video game is through software development, which is a science. Student developers study towards a science degree (a BSc or MSc), not an arts degree (a BA or MA). If video games were an art form, the academic institutions that teach video game development would classify it as one. But they don’t. Because it isn’t - and the idea that scientists can call themselves artists, despite holding a science degree and not an arts degree - is an insult to people who actually are artists. I can use a word processor but that doesn’t make me a programmer. Video games aren’t an art form and this is a hill I’ll die on. Frankly, I don’t even understand why this is such a popular question. Even if video games were unanimously considered an art form, it wouldn’t change anything about them, nor would it change the way the players feel about them. If you like video games so much, you wouldn’t need that arbitrary validation. I think that if you’re so obsessed about this, you need to get over it and move on.
The theory and design sections I’ll pair together because... well, you can’t really separate them, can you? Theory is applied in design. If you’re studying theory, you’re studying it through the design. What else are you working from? Similarly, if you’re studying design, what are you learning from it, if not the theory that informed it?
For a book about video games, theory and design are the same thing. Yes, design is the application of theory but if you’re just reading about a subject, there’s no difference. Design can be studied separately but it’s something you have to “do”. The subjects of theory and design are so closely connected that I don’t understand why they have their own sections in the book. Surely, it would have been better to group each section’s articles together under Theory and Design? That way, you could still have “Theory, Design” in the title of the book. For what it’s worth, I can’t actually recall the differences between those two sections in terms of content or subject matter.
Finally, Philosophy.
This section is... interesting, to say the least. The articles here weren’t published on Overthinker Y but are instead transcribed from Durston’s video games and philosophy podcast Philosophiraga. Honestly, I’m not sure this section should even have been included at all. I can understand the inclusion of Are Video Games Art?, as that was also a written work on video games, so the book was a good place for it to finally be published, but those podcast episodes didn’t originally exist in written form. Instead, they’ve been transcribed into prose in order to be included in the book. But if they weren’t written works originally, why include them at all?
The idea behind the book seems to be that Durston realised he’d written so many articles on one subject that there was an entire book there already and that all he had to do was collect them together. That’s why I’m so confused by his decision to include transcriptions of podcast episodes. They weren’t part of those written works he already had lying around. It’s like he threw them in there for... what, exactly? To be a record of those episodes, should they ever no longer be hosted? As an easy way of giving the book more volume? Just because he really wanted to include a philosophy section?
I think the problem is that, as transcripts of a podcast, those chapters read like transcriptions; they read like someone riffing and improvising without a script. The book’s biggest strength is in its structure; in how well Durston breaks down his analytical thoughts and how simply he presents complex ideas. He writes non-fiction well. That’s what made Overthinker Y so appealing in the first place. I often used to think, after reading his latest article, that he ought to write a non-fiction book about video games because of how effectively he can communicate his thoughts.
The Philosophy section, however, does not demonstrate this. Philosophiraga was entertaining enough to listen to but, written down, it just isn’t the same. When you read it on the page, the way you process it is different. Listening to someone talking off the top of their head is completely different from reading someone writing off the top of their head (which is not how he actually wrote the Philosophy articles but you know what I mean). Taking something that was intended to be listened-to and then presenting it in a way that is read doesn’t work. I would have cut this entire section.
So let’s talk about the book as a published edition of a blog.
Since the publication of the original articles, Durston has had more to say about them and, as such, has inserted addenda as footnotes, which are used throughout the book to provide his retrospective thoughts. These range from additional points he’d like to make, disagreements with statements he made at the time, or even notes on the way something has been edited to work better on the printed page.
It’s a fun addition and provides new material, so not all of the book is recycled content. If I were to publish a collection of my old blog posts, I can’t imagine that I wouldn’t feel the need to do this myself.
However, sometimes the footnotes can be so long, or add something so substantial to the original article, that they may as well have just been added to the body of text. I understand that Durston wanted to preserve the articles in their original form while still giving his contemporary opinions on what he wrote at the time but when a footnote is a whole paragraph, at that point, it could simply be inserted into the article. It would have been fairly easy to do that while still making it clear that it’s an addition for the book. I think that would have made the experience flow better for the reader, instead of having lots of footnotes providing lots of new information and making the page layout sometimes look a bit too busy.
Another part of the adaptation process I’d like to talk about is the article titles. One of the things the footnotes will state is not only the article’s initial publication date and where it was published (since there are some which were published somewhere other than Overthinker Y) but also the original title, which has been changed for the book. Why this is I don’t know. Yes, the new titles sound more academic and do a better job of summarising the premises of the articles in question but the original titles are so much more idiosyncratic and representative of Durston’s unique voice as a writer. One such article was originally published with a title proposing that, from a video game character’s point-of-view, the player is some sort of ability-enhancing god-like being; yet, its title in the book is far less dramatic. The original title is an example of what first drew me to Overthinker Y in the first place; but the new title wouldn’t and I feel like this is a mistake. The original titles were far more consistent with the tone of the blog, whereas these new, more formal-sounding titles prepare the reader for something less fun and casual. They were the “face” of the blog and, for me, were the initial appeal before I’d even read the article or - to begin with - any of the site at all.
I understand that Durston wanted the topics of the articles to be more obvious just from the titles (which they wouldn’t have been without them being changed) but a way around this could have been by including an index, which I notice there isn’t. The book could have considerably benefited from having one, given the wide range of subjects it covers. Durston classifies the content into those four categories (art, theory, design, philosophy) but then stops there. In footnotes, he’ll mention how a subject mentioned in one article is explored in more detail in another. Listing these subjects in a simple index would make things easier for the reader rather than relying on a footnote somewhere else in the book. This wouldn’t just help the reader find every page or article mentioning, for example, Undertale (Durston even acknowledges in one such footnote just how often he talks about that game throughout the book) but also those that explain a certain topic, like morality or free will. For a non-fiction book, an index is essential. For a book like this - a compilation of preexisting blog posts - an index would have helped make it seem more legitimate.
However, there are some things excised from the book that it wouldn’t have made sense to include. Overthinker Y both hosted and participated in various community collaboration events over the years (our respective entries for Blogger Blitz will always hold a special place in my heart) but I can’t imagine a way of including them in the book without it just being weird, especially sans the context of the other participants’ posts. Also not included are blogging challenges, such as blogmas, which are arguably just web filler anyway. Those parts of the blog lean more towards the social media aspect of blogging, which just wouldn’t work in a book.
Despite my criticisms, though, this is a book I will cherish, if only because it represents something important in my life. I’ve already explained how the original blog the book reprints led to me befriending the author and how much of an impact he’s made on me personally, though he isn’t the only friend I made through video game blogging and there’s a section at the end spotlighting some of those other people I met through him.
His community collaboration events led me to meeting my friend known as Pix1001 from Shoot the Rookie; she, in turn, introduced me to the Scotland Loves Anime festival where we now meet up with each other ever year, as well as getting me into various anime and video games that have filled a hole I didn’t even know I had. Then there’s Ian Shepherd from Adventure Rules; he isn’t quite as active anymore but he streams on Twitch from time-to-time and it’s always a pleasure to chat with him on those occasions.
I myself am not actually mentioned in this section because he only wanted to put the spotlight on people who are still actively posting and I, like him, am now retired from blogging about video games (although I’ve received a personal “thank you” in all his novels, so I could hardly complain anyway). He’s closed the book on that chapter of his life and so have I, physically as well as metaphorically.
This probably doesn’t count as a book in its own right but Chris Durston wouldn’t pretend it’s legitimate either. He’s a writer who loves video games and realised that his old blog had a book’s worth of material in it, were it all to be collected together. He wanted to be able to say that he’d written a book about video games and, given how long these articles clearly took to write, it’s not like he didn’t put the equivalent effort into it anyway.
But you know what?
I don’t think the story’s over.
I think he still has more to say. I think he can still go deeper. It’s obvious from this book that he’s only just scratched the surface. The concept of a video game is too complex; it fascinates him too much. One of these days, he won’t be able to resist. One of these days, he’ll get too curious, too bored of not knowing what he could write about them. And then, he’ll finally let himself off the leash and write one of the greatest books about video games ever written.
Chris Durston may have already published a book about video games. But this is surely just a placeholder. His definitive work on the subject is yet to come... and I can’t wait for the day it does.
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