Philosophical games

Philosophical games are games designed to invite players to think philosophically within (and about) their gameworlds. They are interactive fictions that allow players to engage with philosophical themes in ways that often set these (interactive and computer-supported) fictions apart from non-interactive kinds of philosophical fictions (such as philosophical novels or thought experiments).

Fictional content has historically been an important component of how philosophical knowledge has been developed and communicated. Its use is particularly noteworthy in thought experiments and fictional cases (i.e. verisimilar scenarios used to exemplify or to disprove a certain hypothesis; see Johan De Smedt & Helen De Cruz & Alex Fisher). Like non-interactive forms of speculative fiction, according to the philosopher and game scholar Stefano Gualeni, philosophical games present fictional contents and prescribe various acts of imagination. Three interrelated traits, however, are characteristic of interactive fiction in particular, and set the experiential worlds of games and digital games apart from other ways to access fictional contents.

According to Stefano Gualeni, these traits are:

1. Interactivity: a feeling of presence and belonging within the fictional world of the game is primarily upheld by the possibility for the player to persistently and intelligibly interact with in-game objects, characters and events. The manipulability and responsiveness of gameworlds afford players the possibility to take meaningful decisions and actions within those worlds. The fact that player decisions and actions can be recognized as having a philosophical relevance depends on the context in which they are taken, and on what kind of outcomes the designers of a game planned for them. The philosophical potential thus emerges from the interactivity of games and digital games relies on players taking responsibility for their actions and on accepting a game's invitation to critically reflect on those actions.
2. Replayability: in-game situations can be interactively approached in a variety of ways. In most games, players have the possibility to experiment with those situations over and over again until they are satisfied with the resulting state of affairs (or until all possible options have been explored). This can happen over multiple playthroughs or when the game is reverted to a previously saved state. When part of the experience of gameplay, the quality of replayability allows players to approach in-game scenarios and challenges in a non-committal manner than is not usually an option when those actions and decisions are taken in the actual world. Due to the replayability of games, a player is able to assess (and potentially revise) one's decisions and actions in light of having empirical knowledge of their outcomes.
3. A high degree of fictional completeness: Digital games typically offer a richer representation of fictional objects, characters, and events than non-interactive forms of fiction do. In films and novels, the incomplete description of fictional world can be embraced as an appeal to the appreciator's creativity and an opportunity for them to freely imagine what is not overtly represented in the work. In digital games, however, aesthetic incompleteness is often experienced as a deficiency and a limitation to players' freedom to explore and look at every nook and cranny of the gameworld. A detailed and more complete fictional representation arguably requires more work to be developed than a lesser defined one, but the extra effort also has its philosophical advantages: a higher degree of fictional completeness is considered to be a desirable trait in speculative scenarios that confront their audience with moral dilemmas or discuss human emotions and motivations in context.

Rhetorical games and dialectical games

Philosophical games grant interactive and experiential access to speculative scenarios that invite players to engage with philosophical questions and themes. In relation to those questions and themes, some playful philosophical scenarios are designed to convince players of the soundness of certain observations and courses of action. Other philosophical games are, instead, more ambiguous and exploratory, putting the onus of determining the best course of action and the meaning of in-game decisions (or lack thereof) onto players themselves. Stefano Gualeni labels this second kind of relationship between a philosophical game and its players as mainly "dialectical." Following Ian Bogost, instead, one might refer to the first approach as primarily "rhetorical".

In terms of the rhetorical use of games, one could – for instance – examine titles that emphasize the hopelessness and unfairness of certain sociopolitical arrangements. Players of these kinds of dystopian games are often not provided with sufficient resources or enough chances to bring about positive changes in the gameworld that they (fictionally) inhabit. There is an evident rhetorical goal in putting players in conditions where change is impossible and a tragic conclusion is inevitable. Examples of these playable, dystopian reflections on social oppression can be identified in Every Day the Same Dream (Molleindustria, 2009) or Cart Life (Hofmeier, 2010), in which players' interactions cannot prevent frustration and loss. In their arguing in favor of a certain point or perspective, rhetorical games tend to either converge towards a single conclusion, like in the cases that were just discussed, or various possible end-states. When multiple end-state are possible, games that take a rhetorical approach to philosophical themes present an obvious hierarchy with regard to their finales. What that means is that some of their game endings will be presented as more appropriate or valid answers to the games' philosophical questions than others.

Differently from rhetorical games, philosophical games of the dialectical kind allow players to experiment with a number of possible approaches and possibilities without necessarily presenting them hierarchically. An example of this dialectical use of interactive fiction can be identified in Quantic Dream's 2018 action video game Detroit: Become Human or in the experimental digital game Something Something Soup Something (Gualeni, 2017). Both games appear to be designed to stimulate epistemological crises in the players. Whereas the first has over forty different endings and raises thorny interactive questions concerning personal identity, artificial consciousness and the moral (and legal) status of artificial beings, the second game shepherds the player to the unsettling conclusions that one cannot even conclusively define something as familiar as the notion of soup.

Another distinction that proves useful in understanding philosophical games concerns their focus. Some digital games, like the already mentioned Detroit: Become Human, are big productions: they are games that last for several hours and elaborate upon multiple themes and tropes from a variety of disciplines (philosophy, literature, law and so on). There are philosophical games that, instead, focus on one theme, or sometimes even on just a single question. When these smaller, usually experimental productions take a predominantly rhetorical approach to their theme (like Jesper Juul's 2021 The Game of Video Game Objects), they can be labelled "playable essays." When focused philosophical games take, instead, a primarily dialectical stance towards their theme, we might refer to them as "playable thought experiments," of which Something Something Soup Something can be considered to be a paradigmatic case.

Thematic taxonomy of philosophical games

Among the most common themes that can be recognized as the focus of contemporary philosophical games are:

• ethics and morality,
• political dissent and social criticism,
• alterity and estrangement, and
• our very understanding of games (i.e. meta-reflexivity)

Worthy of mention among the philosophical areas that are not yet included here are those regarding determinism and the philosophy of religion.

Ethics and morality

Philosophical games about ethics and morality typically confront the player with choices that are designed to be hard to take. What makes those situations problematic to act upon usually depends on their ambiguity and on the emotional investment of the players. Some of the ethical dilemmas presented in these games echo (or even directly reference) philosophical perspectives on matters such as moral responsibility. It might help, here, to think of thought experiments like the trolley problem and about how often interactive fictions disclose similar scenarios to their players. A player who is challenged to think through knotty ethical situations and is asked to act upon them, and is finally faced with their consequences in a fictional context, undergoes experiences that have the potential to be educational and even transformative. Similar to non-interactive fictions, it can be argued that sufficiently engaging and verisimilar philosophical games can help us cultivate and obtain a firmer grasp of theories in moral philosophy, refine our sensitivity and help us better orient our moral compass.

Video game franchises such as BioWare's Mass Effect (2007-present), Telltale Games' The Walking Dead (2012), or the war survival vide ogame This War of Mine (11 bit studios, 2014) can be considered exemplary in this regard, as they famously feature a variety of morally ambiguous scenarios to act upon, and often irrevocable decisions that can lead to the death of some of the protagonists. In Mass Effect, for instance, the Krogans are presented as a resilient and aggressively expansionist alien species known for decimating planets and reproducing at a very fast rate. As a consequence, the fictional galaxy where the game takes place is in danger of being taken over by them. In response to the Krogan spreading, another species – the Salarians – developed the Genophage, a biological device that drastically reduces the rate of birth survival in the Krogans. At a certain point, in Mass Effect 3 (BioWare, 2012), the player character (the commander of the spaceship Normandy SR-1) is given the possibility to cure the Genophage and stop what is effectively an ongoing Krogan genocide. The player can, instead, decide to be complicit in sabotaging the cure. Sabotaging the cure that might save millions of Krogans requires, however, the murder in cold blood of the Salarian crew member of the Normandy, the scientist Mordin Solus.

Political dissent and social criticism

Philosophical games about political dissent and social criticism are often of the rhetorical kind, as they tend to be designed to unambiguously communicate the unfairness and/or the unsustainability of a certain political arrangement. Some of these games have, instead, a more utopian approach and reveal, through their gameplay, that the socio-economic systems we know and live in are contingent and subject to change, and that fairer and less oppressive alternatives are always possible. Like other philosophical fictions with similar goals (think of dystopian and utopian works of science fiction), philosophical games of this kind can help the players perfect their grasp of certain social and economic dynamics, and can supplement their political imagination. Games like Brenda Romero's 2009 Holocaust-inspired board game Train, Lucas Pope's 2013 bureaucratic dystopian video game Papers, Please or Molleindustria's 2016 gentrification simulation Nova Alea are widely considered to be successful examples of this use of games.

The political issues addressed by philosophical games are, however, not limited to interactively identifying the inadequacies or the utopian possibilities of society-wide systems. Some games with critical intents directed toward society and politics concentrate their attention on the oppressing effects those customs and institutions have at the scale of the individual human being. This kind of philosophical games focuses on the personal and often mundane cases of economic marginalization, racial discrimination and gender identity.

Alterity and estrangement

Digital games can also have philosophical uses that emerge from their ability to disclose extraordinary experiences for their players. Miegakure, for example, is a forthcoming, experimental puzzle-platformer video game designed to challenge players to actively solve puzzles in four spatial dimensions. Its gameplay is similar to that of a regular three-dimensional platformer game.

Miegakure invites the players to take a philosophical perspective on gameworlds as new experiential and epistemic domains. Similar aspirations can be recognized in titles such as Valve Corporation's 2007 puzzle-platformer video game Portal or the experimental first-person game prototype A Slower Speed of Light (MIT Lab, 2012). Where Portal challenges players to experiment with the idea that space can be interactively made discontinuous (i.e. tunneled through while preserving inertia of motion), A Slower Speed of Light allows them to playfully familiarize with the experience of being affected by special relativity (i.e. what it is like to perceive and interact the gameworld when moving at a speed that approaches that of light).

Our understanding of games

Philosophical games often take games themselves as their object of interest. In other words, there are games that invite what is technically called a meta-reflexive (or self-reflexive) perspective. Those games are deliberately designed to materialize, through their gameplay and their aesthetic qualities, critical and/or satirical perspectives on the ways in which games themselves are designed, played, sold, manipulated, experienced and understood as social objects. The subversion of representational and/or interactive canons are common design strategies through which those kinds of philosophical games encourage players to critically question their relationship with games from a variety of perspectives. In their subversive pursuit, the gameplay of meta-reflexive games often features the overt exhibition of their own constructedness as technical artifacts. In digital games in particular, this often happens by showing players debug information dialogues and broken geometry, or by purposely triggering aesthetic glitches.

Meta-reflexive games often disclose experiences that are not inherently enjoyable or rewarding: many philosophical games of this kind are short-lived, unwinnable and purposefully annoying. Another characteristic that frequently characterizes this group of philosophical games is the metafictionality of their narrative. What this means is that characters, narrators and indications that the player receives from interfaces are designed in ways that keep reminding players that they are playing within an artificial fictional world (e.g. the characters' awareness of their own status as fictional beings, or of a narrating voice explicitly addressing the player as a player). Examples of those design strategies are encountered in video game titles such as Doors (the game), Necessary Evil, the already mentioned The Stanley Parable, or The Beginner's Guide (Everything Unlimited Ltd., 2015).

It is important to insist on the fact that these games are not whimsically taking a metafictional stance, and do not embrace weirdness and unconventionality as ends in themselves – on the contrary, those games do so with an evident critical intent (or an obviously satirical perspective) on how games are currently made, marketed, played and culturally valued. In the cases of the games mentioned above, Necessary Evil playfully reveals the idealistic player-centrism that underpins the creation of every gameworld, The Stanley Parable is a video game that constantly breaks the 'fourth wall' to engage players in reflecting on the significance (if any) of in-game agency, and The Beginner's Guide is a playable essay on the very practice of game development and on players' practices of meaning-making.