Katia is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Chico, where she teaches a course about philosophy and video games.
A post by Katia Samoilova Franco
As Nguyen puts it, games provide us with an “existential balm” (2020, 21) – a balm against a variety of human ailments, such as the lack of moral clarity, boredom, or the fleeting nature of our existence. There are other balms available for these ailments besides games, but for those of us who turn to games over other balms, the peculiarity of games makes them a particularly effective balm. That peculiarity of games and their effectiveness as an existential balm is what I’d like to explore here.
Nguyen’s own diagnosis of games’ peculiarity has to do with an unusual deployment of our agency during game play. In certain games, “we take up a goal for the sake of the activity of struggling for it” (2020, 9). On his account, this is made possible by us taking up disposable ends: “I must be able to bring myself to temporarily care about an end, and for that end to appear to me as final. But I also must be able to dispose of that end afterwards” (2020, 10-11, italics in original). This is the crucial component which allows us to immerse (or submerge, or be absorbed) in temporary or alternate agency, on his account.
I find inspiration in Nguyen’s account and it does seem to capture something important about games – their involvement of our agency to create an immersive experience. But it doesn’t quite capture the peculiarity of my own experience with games. Much of modern society hinges on activities that involve bringing ourselves to temporarily care about an end and have it appear as final, only to be disposed of afterwards, such as applying for jobs, attending committee meetings, or filing tax returns.
Thinking about how to draw the line between those mundane activities and games has been very helpful in diagnosing what makes my own experience with games peculiar. To me, the magic element of games is imagination. Games rely on and unleash our imagination in a wide variety of ways – and different games do so differently – but the particular use of our imagination that allows games to tap into our agency in a peculiar way is pretense.
The way different games invite pretense is vastly different. Not all games are games of pretense, in the sense that it is the intended purpose of every game. Some games are indeed mainly and openly games of pretense, like lightsaber fights, tea parties without any tea, or LARPing sessions. But on the other extreme of the continuum, we need a metaphorical magnifying glass to spot the role of pretense in a game, such as pretending that the various chess pieces can only be moved in their prescribed way on the board. On this end of the continuum, other ways of using one’s imagination (other than for pretense) are more prevalent, such as imagining the available chess moves and how the opponent might respond to them.
Most games are somewhere in between. They invite pretense in some easily detectable way – like pretending that, as the player, we are a different person (in games like Clue or The Witcher), or in a different time or a different world (in games like Settlers of Catan or Skyrim), or that there are different rules of physics (in games like Borderlands or Goat Simulator) – but not in a way that makes pretense the stated purpose of the game. Most games invite pretense in a variety of ways, none of which must be taken up in order to enjoy the game. For instance, when playing Clue, one can pretend to be Colonel Mustard, who lives in a different time or even a different world, but all of this is optional. There are different ways to play most games, and the extent to which we engage in pretense is part of what is up to us as players.
Notably, games do not involve pretending that we care about them or achieving some game-prescribed end. Perhaps we do that in some mundane activities, like when we are trapped in a boring conversation, which allows us to perform them though perhaps poorly, but that is not what games require or offer us. This brings us closer to the core of the peculiarity of games: they do not require us to pretend, but rather invite us to do so, offering us the rare opportunity to depart from reality in a very specific way.
What is pretense? At root, pretense is the exploration of possible worlds. Moreover, it is the sort of exploration that we begin to engage in as children, as part of our normal cognitive development. Here is how Harris puts it:
“Children’s pretend play is not an early distortion of the real world but an initial exploration of possible worlds. Moreover, as they think about those alternatives, children consider them in a coherent and consequential fashion. In that sense, pretend play is not an activity that is doomed to suppression but the first indication of a lifelong mental capacity to consider alternatives to reality.” (2000, 27-28)
As we explore possible worlds, we depart from reality in a sense, and in that sense it is worth contrasting pretense with deception to highlight something important about games. We can think of deception as a departure from reality as well – an intentional manipulation of the facts so that reality appears differently to someone. But the purpose of deception is firmly rooted in reality, and it is pursued in an attempt to gain an advantage at the expense of someone else going astray in their goals. In contrast, pretense does not involve a trade-off among the goals of different people. Rather, pretense involves a departure from reality for the sake of the experience that departure creates.
Putting it all together, we are now in a position to explain what it is about games that is so peculiar and why they can serve as an effective existential balm. Games offer us the rare opportunity to escape the burdens of reality by inviting us to exercise our capacity for imagination, and to engage in pretense in particular. In pretense, we explore possible worlds, where we can be free from whichever burdens weigh on us most. This is a temporary freedom, and to experience it, it helps to be immersed – or submerged, absorbed, be present, whichever term one prefers – in the world alternate to our own. Pretense is a very effective vehicle for achieving that immersion. Whether or not we choose to rely on it, and the extent to which we do so in games, is up to us.
It is no accident that in describing how the capacity for pretense evolves from childhood into adulthood, Harris speaks of “displacement” into the fictional world and that this is “not just a loose metaphor” (2000, 49; something similar is also discussed here and here). Likewise, it is no accident that researchers debate the appropriate terminology for what happens to those engaged with a fictional or virtual environment, e.g. whether to call it “immersion” or “presence” (Slater 1999). It appears there are measurable markers that the fictional world or environment is well suited for our travel there, making some possible worlds easier and others harder to explore. This is also evident in the fact that describing a game as immersive is often considered to be one of the highest compliments.
What this suggests is that exploration of possible worlds and departure from the burdens of reality is actually quite difficult to achieve for us as adults, as we accumulate those burdens like barnacles. This is in part why pretense is such an effective vehicle of immersion – because of its connection with our childhood, when pretense came naturally to us and no one around us thought it was odd to engage in it. This connection with our childhood is crucial for games serving as an existential balm, allowing us to tap into our memory of a time when we were free of the human ailments that plague us as adults.
References
Harris, P.L. 2000. The work of the imagination. Blackwell Publishing.
Nguyen, C.T. 2020. Games: Agency as art. Oxford University Press.
Slater, M. 1999. Measuring presence: A response to the Witmer and Singer presence questionnaire. Presence: teleoperators and virtual environments, 8(5), 560-565.