Effortpost: videogames and the search for meaning

[Broco]

As I’ve mentioned a few times, I’m passionate about existentialist literature, especially Camus and Kafka. As a hobby project (to both practice translation and to perform a very close reading of early Camus), I’m currently retranslating Camus’s seminal essay The Myth of Sisyphus from French to English – I’ve finished the first half so far.

I’ve come to believe Camus’s works have a strange connection with videogames and that this is indeed part of why they’ve fascinated me all along. I sometimes wonder if the movement had started in the 21st century instead of the 20th, what the founding authors of existentialism would have had to say about them. As it was, Camus had a lot to say about A) works of art, B) seemingly meaningless distractions – indeed he was interested in collapsing the illusory boundary between those two things.

Although the connection is clear to me, it seems to be a newish idea – probably because it requires a deep interest in both the experience of playing videogames and in existentialist arguments. On this forum, people have the former, as well as the general knowledge and life experience to understand the latter, so I’d like to spell out my ideas, which – like Camus’s philosophy in general – are simple and evident in essence, but which I haven’t really been able to express yet because they require significant context-setting.

So, in this first post in a series, before I start to really discuss videogames, I’ll sketch out the beginnings of Camus’s absurdist philosophy in particular, taking him for the purpose of discussion as “the” representative of existentialism (even though he himself rejected the label), as well as the basics of Aquinas’s theology, taking him as “the” representative of pre-existentialist thinking. With this foundation laid, it will make more sense later when I call this or that characteristic of videogames “existential” – and as you read this intro with videogames in mind, some connections will likely start to spark in your own minds without my needing to point them out.

–

The Myth of Sisyphus famously begins with this pointed challenge (all English translations my own):

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem: suicide. To judge whether life is or is not worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy. The rest – whether the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories – follows later. Those are games: one must first answer.

In his very first paragraph, Camus has already mentioned my theme, “games”… to dismiss them as unimportant and irrelevant. Did I instantly prove my thesis wrong?

This legendary passage is a masterful, many-edged troll: we sense that Camus intends to shock us into honest thinking by the means of hyperbole and dissimulation of his conclusions. Likewise, his dismissal of the foundations of physics and theory-of-mind as mere “games” cannot be a true dismissal – indeed, later in the same essay he demonstrates an intense interest in such questions. What is going on here? Can it be that by saying physics is as important as a mere game… he is also implying that a mere game is as important as physics?

The question of why keep on living is too weighty for me to fully answer it here – Camus’s essay spells out his answer over a hundred pages. Instead, in these posts I want to connect Camus’s question to a different, lighter question – why do we keep playing a videogame, instead of dropping the controller the first time we die and never coming back? And what does one refusal to die tell us about the other?

–

To understand Camus it helps to first understand some key cultural points of reference that were still universal for his generation – Greek philosophy and myth, as filtered through Christian thinkers, especially Aquinas. At some level we are all still familiar with this stuff but the ideas are now free-floating common sense, so let me briefly reattach them to a name.

Thomas Aquinas (13th century) was the second most important theologian after Augustine. (I have not yet read him so apologies if I caricature his ideas.) His greatest contribution was to enrich Christianity with the rediscovered and reinterpreted ideas of Aristotle.

In the realm of morality and meaning, Aquinas reframed the ideas of sin and holiness in the syllogistic logic of the Greeks. What is holy is what serves the purposes of God either directly or via a chain of reason, and what is sinful is what serves purposes opposed or neutral to God’s. Thus Aquinas would say that a dice game is sinful, as it causes febrile emotions that distance us from God, and its purpose is to gain money which is not a holy purpose.

Aquinas went on to spell out the nature of the holy purposes. One of particular interest to me is that he believed exploring and understanding God’s creation brings us closer to Him. Aquinas enthusiastically spread Aristotle’s natural philosophy not for the purpose of mastery over nature, but for appreciation of the natural order (I wanted to say “for its own sake” but the point with Aquinas is precisely that there is no such thing, it is always “for God”).

Aquinas’s framework remained dominant in Catholic countries as long as the Church did, but by the time Camus wrote in 1942, science, revolution and the proto-existentialist philosophers had utterly demolished the foundations of his theology.

–

The Myth of Sisyphus is thus not a direct reaction to Aquinas, but rather a reaction to the reactions to Aquinas. Camus sees no need to kill God yet again, and does not even bother to mention theology until later in the essay. Instead he spends the first pages of Myth summarizing what “everyone knows” about the psychological angst of the modern individual in a profane world. He coins “the absurd” to refer to the clash between the wrenching aspiration for ultimate meaning and the cosmos that coldly denies it at every turn. The following passage practically merits Camus’s Nobel prize for literature on its own:

All great acts and all great thoughts have a derisory beginning. Great works are born in the turn of a street or in the clamor of a restaurant. So it is with the absurd. The world of the absurd, moreso than others, gains a nobility from this humble birth. In certain situations, to answer “nothing” when queried as to the nature of one’s thoughts can be a man’s way of feinting. His loved ones know it well. But if the answer is sincere, if it illustrates that singular state of the soul where the void becomes eloquent, where the chain of everyday motions is broken, where the heart searches in vain for the link that binds it, then it’s the first sign of the absurd.

Sometimes, the scenery collapses. Alarm, tramway, four hours of office or factory, lunch, tramway, four hours of work, dinner, sleep and monday tuesday wednesday thursday friday saturday on the same rhythm: this path is easy to follow most of the time. Yet one day, “why” raises its head, and everything begins in that weariness tinted by astonishment. […]

For all the days of a humdrum life, time carries us. But the moment always comes where we must carry it. We live on the future: “tomorrow”, “later”, “when you have a moment”, “you’ll understand when you’re older”. These platitudes are admirable, because finally we die. The day comes where man observes or states that he is thirty years old. He thus affirms his youth. At the same stroke, he situates himself in time. He takes his place. He recognizes he is at a particular moment in a course he confesses he must travel. He belongs to time and, as horror seizes him, he recognizes his worst enemy. Tomorrow, he had wished for tomorrow, when every atom of him ought to have refused it. This revolt of the flesh is the absurd.

One level lower, we find strangeness: to realize that the world is “thick”, to glimpse the extent to which a rock is alien, irreducible; the intensity with which nature, a landscape, can deny us. At the root of all beauty lies something inhuman — these hills, this gentle sky, these watercolor trees, all of a sudden shed their blanket of illusory meaning, and are henceforth further than a lost paradise. The primal hostility of the world, through the millenia, rises towards us. For a moment, we don’t understand, because for centuries we only understood the symbols and the drawings that we placed on the world in advance – but we no longer have the strength to make use of this artifice. The world escapes us because it becomes itself. The scenery, masked by habit, returns to what it is. It recedes from us. Just as there are days when, under the familiar features of a woman, we rediscover, like a stranger, the person we had loved months or years ago – perhaps we even desire that which makes us suddenly feel so alone. But the time has not yet come. This thickness, this strangeness of the world, is the absurd.

[…] I finally arrive at death and the feelings we have towards it. On this point everything has been said, and as a matter of decency, let us avoid pathos. But I never cease to be astonished at how everyone lives as if “no one knows”. It’s that in reality, there is no experience of death. Strictly speaking, what is lived and rendered conscious forms the totality of experience. It’s barely even possible to speak of experiencing the death of others. It’s a surrogate, an artificial construction, and we are never terribly convinced. A melancholic convention cannot persuade. Horror comes, in reality, from the mathematical side of the thing. If time scares us, it’s that it demonstrates the logic – the solution comes after. All the pretty words about the soul receive here, at least for a time, a fresh proof of their opposite. In the inert body where a slap makes no mark, the soul has vanished. This basic and definitive side of the adventure constitutes the substance of the sentiment of the absurd. Under the mortal light of this destiny, futility appears. No morality, no effort is a priori justifiable before the bloody equation that orders our condition.

A few pages later, Camus explains how futile and frustrating it feels to try to use modern science to understand the Universe (contra Aquinas who believed he could understand God by studying natural philosophy):

Here again are trees, and I know the roughness of their bark; water, and I know its taste. The scent of grass and stars, those special evenings where the heart relaxes, how can I deny this world whose potent forces I feel so? Yet all the science of this earth will give me nothing to reassure me that the world is mine. You describe it to me and teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws, and in my thirst for knowledge I consent that they are true. You demonstrate its mechanism and my hope grows. Finally, you teach me that this prestigious and colorful universe is reducible to the atom, and that the atom itself is reducible to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But then you speak of an invisible planetary system where electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain the world with an image. I recognize then that you have arrived at poetry: I shall never know it. Do I have time to be indignant? You have already changed theories. Thus the science which was to teach me everything ends in hypothesis, its somber lucidity in metaphor, its uncertainty resolved into a work of art. What use was all my effort? The gentle lines of the hills and the hand of the evening on my agitated heart teach me much more. I have returned to my beginnings. I understand that if I can by science seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot as a result apprehend the world. When I have traced my finger over its entire relief, I will not know it any more. And you make me choose between a description that is certain, yet teaches me nothing, and hypotheses that pretend to teach me, but are not certain. A stranger from myself and from the world, armed only with thought which denies itself the moment it affirms, what is this condition where I can only find peace by refusing to know or to live, where the hunger for conquest hurls itself against walls that defy its assaults? To want is to suscitate paradoxes. Everything is ordered so as to give birth to the poisoned peace which arises from indifference, resignation or slumber of the heart.

–

I’ll end this post for now as I’ll never post anything if I wait to write something “complete”. In my next post(s) I’ll start to explain Camus’s positive ideas for living with the absurd and start to get into the ambiguous place of videogames, which perhaps can help us live up to Camus’s ideal of the “absurd life” in some ways, or perhaps leave us trapped in the “poisoned peace” instead.

For now, just one teaser:

The anguish of the absurd arises because humans are faced with a cosmos profoundly alien to their aspirations, and attempts to anthropomorphize the world by covering it with reason, purposes and symbols prove irredeemably hollow. It was only possible for us to be comfortable in the world when we believed God created both the world and humanity in His image. But what if the reverse happens – what if humans attempt to create a world in their image?

[BustedAstromech]

Thank you for writing this; I always learn from watching you think through these things in public.

A related concept. Hunicke, LeBlanc, and Zubeck’s Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics game whitepaper proposes a set of aesthetics to cover player experiences. The final aesthetic they identify as:

Submission: Game as pastime

I learned it as ‘self-abnegation’.

It exists to explain the player-reported experience of ‘killing time’; the grinding and repetition that idealistic designers always seek to erase when the first see the world with clarity.

[Broco]

Yes! Of course, the essay is named after Sisyphus for a reason :). I have a lot of thoughts about grinding

To perhaps spoil Camus’s surprise ending 80 years later, he puts a positive spin on Sisyphus – one might think Sisyphus represents the poisoned peace of resignation and routine, but Camus says no, Sisyphus too could find satisfaction in the fractal details of the rock and in the effort of an absurd job well done. Likewise, I am not so sure grinding is as negative an activity as it is commonly imagined. It seems necessary to have a lived-in world that accumulates meaning for the player.

In general early Camus draws rather clean lines between the blithely-unaware, the sickened-by-absurdity and the energized-by-absurdity and it is one place I think he could stand to be even more deliberately paradoxical than he already is. Whenever I try to categorize life experiences into one of them, I find that any given experience seems to involve a chaotic cauldron of all three. I suspect he did get even more nuanced in his later work, but I haven’t explored it as deeply.

[shelter]

my understanding of the existentialism i’ve encountered (i’m not an expert by any means) is that the subject encounters the void (or the absurd), the external indifferent inhumanity of the non-experience of death, which undoes her and causes her to lose faith in meaning. rationality and science begin grandly and dissolve gradually into absurd poetics in the face of the void, and eventually she finds freedom in this, the energizing absence of meaning.

i find lacan useful in response, particularly in his mid-late period of the early 70s. for lacan, we can’t “know” the Real, which is roughly analogous to the void of meaning camus is talking about; it’s external to the antimonies of knowing and not knowing (this is lacan’s critique of philosophy). the Real is something like a mathematical limit, which is defined as an impasse in formalizing the contradictions of the subject (that would be a function of psychoanalysis for lacan). at the same time, though, the psychoanalytic lesson that lacan derives from freud is that the inhuman Real (trauma, for freud) isn’t just the thing that comes from outside to destroy meaning and subjectivity; it’s what actually constitutes and jumpstarts them in the first place. it’s the gap or hiccup or lack that sets off the signifying chain of language, the pulsion of reason, and so the production of meaning and subjectivity. the Real, what is most foreign to us, is at the center of our most intimate sense of self. the subject is the figure that forms in response to the Real of trauma/the void, through which we access it. paradoxically, what makes us human is a “constitutive absence” or kernel of inhumanity or radical otherness. we are less than human, and that’s what makes us human.

the problem then is that if the subject is the form by which we come into contact with the Real, and the form which comes to be as a result of or in response to the alien trauma of the Real which determines the center of our being, then it isn’t possible to simply shed that form and its production of (non-)sense and embrace the void as freedom. we don’t even get the satisfaction of living absurdly on our own terms, because our terms are fundamentally not ours.

so! videogames

[Broco]

OK, it’s not quite bedtime yet and I feel like starting to get into the meat of it.

Sin without God

I really should get to videogames and not just do a sophomoric philosophy seminar but one more thing about Christianity first. Camus uses a vivid expression at one point in the middle of the essay that made a lot of it click for me:

For sin is what distances from God. The absurd, which is the metaphysical state of conscious man, does not lead to God. Perhaps this notion will become clearer if I hazard this enormity: the absurd is sin without God.

In context of an essay advocating the “absurd life” as the highest state of being one can aspire to, Camus is saying that sin is now the highest state of being. The false idols that the bishops railed against are now the only idols we have. It does not imply that they are any more meaningful than before – Camus is very clear that nothing has meaning in Aquinas’s higher sense – but rather that we must draw a paradoxical enthusiasm from our terrifying freedom and our infinite ability to choose our commitments.

A Don Juan who lives life to the full is one example of a newly admirable sinner he dwells on. Another example is a novelist who writes purely for their own present satisfaction, in full knowledge that posterity is hollow and that the most copied works will still someday return to dust.

–

Chains of meaning in games

OK videogames! One angle I have been getting at is that a life spent getting level 60 by fighting level 1 enemies on WoW panda tutorial island is at least based on the first principles of existentialism alone, no more or less valuable than a life contemplating art or working on socially valuable causes. It is a highly literal example of the “absurd life” which Camus extols.

The other angle is that within games, most games reproduce an Aquinas-like substructure of meaning where basic actions serve the top of a pyramid of goals – winning, getting a cheevo, or getting “stronger” or “more complete”. This meaning substructure is often more psychologically motivating when the pyramid is deeper or has complex whirls in the cause-and-effect connections. And even more effective is to hide the rewards for action – to vaguely imply an achievement will unlock of a new biome to explore or new mechanics to try out. That’s why I’m more likely to quit a game at the final boss than any previous boss.

So videogames are on the one hand, the epitome of the obviously absurd from the getgo – on the other, once started, some of them go to great lengths to make the absurdity recede ever further in the distance.

–

Glitches and the revenge of “thickness”

The world is thick – it eludes science, it eludes rules of thumb, it eludes being described in words or mathematics at all, and always holds back strange surprises. Modern society as a whole tries to hold back the inherent chaos and provide a world by humans for humans, where every incline has a working escalator. But we have seen especially this year that the attempt is flimsy.

Videogames offer a salve. They are a construction of words, art and mathematics and amenable to full understanding using those same comfortable human tools, with a concomitant experience of steadily increasing mastery. Other people, too, are part of the physical world and thus incomprehensible by means of human formal constructions, so videogames offer a salve for that too. In Stardew Valley I can look up any NPC’s location over the day and what they like and dislike, and maneuver them to marry me.

I said “full understanding” but I went too far. Games, too, have hidden depths, unknown to both the original developers and decades of players, until they are unearthed by a speedrun “scientists”. Computers and their programs too are part of the physical world, and it turns out that being meticulously human-created bit by bit is not enough to make them “shallow”. When we have a sense of almost horror upon witnessing an out-of-bounds glitch, we have experienced Camus’s “thickness”.

[Broco]

@shelter

my understanding of the existentialism i’ve encountered (i’m not an expert by any means) is that the subject encounters the void (or the absurd), the external indifferent inhumanity of the non-experience of death, which undoes her and causes her to lose faith in meaning. rationality and science begin grandly and dissolve gradually into absurd poetics in the face of the void, and eventually she finds freedom in this, the energizing absence of meaning.

Seems to match Camus more or less well yeah. Then he takes a further step that we should aspire to understand and be rational anyway, and also that it may be appropriate to enslave ourselves to our self-selected meaning instead of simply enjoying “freedom”. The idea is to assert our humanity even when (or especially because) it’s futile.

@shelter

the subject is the figure that forms in response to the Real of trauma/the void, through which we access it as an impasse in formalizing the contradictions of the subject (that would be a function of psychoanalysis for lacan)

Interesting, it took me several rereads to understand your paragraph but this made it click for me. I probably only managed to follow because a similar concept is explored at one point in Koestler’s Darkness at Noon which I read just last year.

Sounds like good stuff, one of my biggest questions after reading Camus is that he implicitly assumes a coherent self for a lot of it and since I’m inclined to think the self is fragmentary and chaotic, does it undermine much of it?

we don’t even get the satisfaction of living absurdly on our own terms, because our terms are fundamentally not ours.

Yeah, I agree. Camus kind of overrates the satisfaction of the absurd life anyway and I don’t quite see why it matters so much whether one is proudly self-aware. I am much more sympathetic to the self-deceiving life than Camus is. I’m inclined favor Camus’s steely-eyed honesty as a useful phase, that should be followed by a deliberate “reillusionment” of false meaning as appropriate. In essence, treating every aspect of life like dipping in and out of a videogame and only caring about the outcome while I’m playing.

[Titus]

[captainlove]

Thank you for starting such an interesting thread.

Some of this ‘extolling of the absurd’ is echoed in Bernard Suits’ discussion of games in The Grasshopper (largley an attempt to define ‘game’ but has some interesting things to say about where they fit into meaningful life). Particularly when he suggests that games are one of the few (if not only) criteria for helping determine if humanity has reached utopia. The logic goes something like this.

If every major instrumental threat facing humanity was theoretically solved, everything would become a game by [Suits’] definition. Nothing would have any meaning beyond its intrinsic value as an act of play e.g. people might theoretically solve cancer for fun in the same way they might solve a crossword puzzle. This is summarised in the capstone of Suits’ work.

Playtime comes after we save civilisation

This statement is in direct response to the contemplation of God which, if not done to gain favour with others, for self-improvement, for solving a practical problem or to be a better God-contemplator, is an absurd activity that should effectively be reserved for utopia (civilisation post-saving).

The dedicated, inveterate player of games is always an outsider in society for this reason which I think gels well with your link to existentialism and how games epitomise its central concerns.

I don’t think this discussion need be specific to videogames though since all play and games runs into the same issue. This may be where Camus’ original use of the word game takes on its likely broader meaning to include informal and formal practice that is inherently playful and of no ‘use’.

---

This discussion is also calling to mind a passage from Bertolt Brecht’s ‘Baal’ which was probably more about hedonism than games specifically but I’ll leave it here.

Any vice for Baal has got its useful side
It’s the man who practices it, he can’t abide
Vices have their point, once you see it as such
Stick to two for one will be too much
Slackness, softness are the sort of things to shun
Nothing could be harder than the quest for fun

Vices (games) are fine in Baal’s eyes as long as you’re balancing the practical side with the fun. One may be ‘too much’ because then a person may be taking their vice (game) too seriously.

---

I think performance theory may also be useful here. I’ve explored the notion of playing bad, worthless or boring games as part of a self-imposed challenge to justify my own hobby to myself before. A lot of this was done when I practiced performance art and I think it also raises some of the same questions about the quest for meaning in any action and if it is all just performance (and whether we should accept this good or bad). I think the comparison to Sisyphus is apt and I lean towards agreeing with Camus’ positive evaluation of Sisyphus. However, I am extremely biased since I am likely romanticising the dedication of much of my life to games to give it meaning which kind of counters the acceptance of the absurd. Weird paradox that positively evaluating the absurd seems like a justification for it being not really that absurd?

[Broco]

@captainlove

If every major instrumental threat facing humanity was theoretically solved, everything would become a game by [Suits’] definition. Nothing would have any meaning beyond its intrinsic value as an act of play e.g. people might theoretically solve cancer for fun in the same way they might solve a crossword puzzle. This is summarised in the capstone of Suits’ work.

Playtime comes after we save civilisation

This is good stuff and it’s a line of thinking I used to idly go down a lot.

For me on a personal level, this problem intersects with workist culture. In college I would often procrastinate by playing games and get intensely frustrated at myself for wasting time. Yet, one of the things that I aspired to do as a potential career was to create games, and I also did small fiction projects on the side. As I was working on this fiction the paradox of workism really undermined my spirit. It is creative “work” and therefore valid. Yet, just one level deeper, the only end result of this work is to allow others to waste time by enjoying it. Furthermore, it would merely compete for others’ time with a vast amount of other existing art that they could enjoy instead.

Whenever I mentioned it to other people, they’d just tell me I was inventing silly paradoxes for myself and I should just be creative and not worry too much about it. But I could not put it out of my mind.

One way to try to resolve my paradox is to fork it logically: it’s either 100% a waste of time both experiencing and creating this stuff and I should go become a doctor or something, or it’s 0% a waste of time and I should totally clear my mind of these poisonous worries and pursue creativity.

The 100% side leads to the unbearable weight of self-abnegating utilitarian sainthood that once sent John Stuart Mill into a crisis. In this world very far from utopia and with a utilitarian scale that necessarily weighs a child dying of malaria much much higher on the negative side than the satisfactions of a normal life on the positive side, it is hard to focus on the positive. So it amounts to seeing the world as consisting of suffering and the only good as ameliorating these suffering. There is little positive vision of what human life can be but only endless trench warfare against entropy. Each second not spent in the field of battle against human suffering is a tiny moral failure.

To connect back to what you said, utilitarianism can also be intersected with Hegelianism for a vision of aiming for “utopia”. The great irony of the utilitarian utopia is that one fears reaching it and even takes a bit of relief in the fact that it’s impossibly distant. Peter Singer, the most prominent living utilitarian, has written that he doesn’t think that humans have evolved to live in a hypothetical world where all human whims are met and it would certainly itself a problem if we reached it – but whatever, because it will not be reached anytime soon.

Singer also dodges the “100%” sainthood problem simply by saying that it’s impractical to expect most humans to aim for even close to that, so we can just forget about it as a goal. Personally I am trying to solve the problem by coming up with my own not-entirely-gelling synthesis of existentalism and utilitarianism which I continue to work through. It sounds from my reading of your summary of Suits that his attitude might be a bit closer to Singer’s (formally Suits’s moral theory devalues games relative to other social goals, but he ignores that within the scope of his own life because is not trying to formulate a totalizing theory of how to live).

Should I then go with the 0%? Don’t worry be happy? But I could not and still do not accept this. Playing games while procrastinating really did feel like an hollow, poisoned waste of time. And people are struggling out there that I could help as a young person in the prime of their career. We need a more subtle joint theory of aesthetics and meaning that lets us untangle these knots – simplistic principles won’t do the job.

–

To go back representing Camus’s existentialism as it was rather than my own not-fully-developed attempts at synthesizing different traditions – it would be fair to describe Camus’s philosophy as radically relativist (so he’s curtly dismissive of utilitarians), as well as radically present-ist (so he’s curtly dismissive of Hegelian movement-towards-utopia). Neither of those philosophical traditions follow at all from his basic outlook, which includes deep skepticism of rationalistic frameworks and an absolute absence of hope for the future (which, he always immediately follows by saying, is not to be confused with despair).

Personally, I have searched for but not found where exactly Camus’s core principles exclude actively hurting others. In his later work Revolt he makes a cursory attempt to expand his rejection of suicide to reject murder as well, but it felt half-baked to me. In The Stranger I think he may be implying that the act of murder results from the state of “poisoned peace”, but I’m not sure of my interpretation there. Above all there is an openly ancient-Greek flavor to his cosmology, and if I step away from Sisyphus to look at a less modern-morally-neutral character like Achilles, then I immediately sense that Achilles’ energized self-actualizing attitude is in the spirit of existentialism as well.

But, Camus liked to help people and be socially responsible anyway, merely as one of his self-decided existential whims – he neither advocates nor refutes sociopathy. Instead, he likes to dismiss the idea that his philosophy endorses things like crime by saying: let us not be puerile here, petty crime is not existentially satisfying anyway. Although at some level he’s just dodging his critics, at another level I do agree with him there and am overall more concerned with what positive actions different philosophies call for, in my own search for meaning.

On the grander moral scale, it must be added that Camus risked his life to undermine the Nazi occupation whereas the vast majority of French subscribing to conventional morality did not. His valuing of honesty and individual freedom, and his glorification of revolt, was justification enough. But the key difference that made him act honorably was his acute awareness that every human action is ultimately futile anyway, so the high likelihood that acting against the well-entrenched occupation would not lead to any practical outcome did not deter him. In a way, Camus opposed the Nazis for what you referred to as “performance theory”.

[captainlove]

@Broco

Should I then go with the 0%? Don’t worry be happy? But I could not and still do not accept this. Playing games while procrastinating really did feel like an hollow, poisoned waste of time. And people are struggling out there that I could help as a young person in the prime of their career. We need a more subtle joint theory of aesthetics and meaning that lets us untangle these knots – simplistic principles won’t do the job.

This tension between 0-100% seems like a really fruitful thought exercise. One thing I tried for a while was to take an ascetic approach to play. Treating it as serious, instrumental and necessary, almost a ritual, but that made sitting down to play a videogame feel pompous and placed on a pedestal. The opposite has worked better (but is by no means perfect). Trying my best to see work/play as two sides of a coin. Work sometimes feels like play (if you’re lucky) and play often feels like work when excessive failure and lack of progress set in. This doesn’t adequately quantify the balance though but maybe that’s not the point.

I think a non-serious approach to life is generally better than a serious one since seriousness leads to less honest self-criticism. And when things are revealed to be evidently futile you don’t go mad trying to maintain seriousness that is hollow. However, that’s not to say one shouldn’t find some peace with existence and maybe some principle to drive one’s self forwards. I’ve not read Camus in much depth but I find his embrace of the inevitability of the absurd attractive because it feels honest about what’s really going on with these work/life/play tensions.

[Mr_Mechanical]

This is a fun topic! I hope you’ll post your translation somewhere when you’re finished. I’ve not read Camus much so it’s nice to see you explore him in depth.

I don’t have much to add at the moment other than I often struggle with my own form of the 0%/100% paradox you’ve described and one solution is to collapse the two together. I try to imagine a story in which all my seemingly “wasteful” creative activities/playtimes are actually in the service of some grander “useful” work. For instance I spend a lot of time day dreaming about spacetime as a single object where the past, present and future are all somehow existing simultaneously. This is a fun creative exercise for my mind (and something that’s inspired a range of people from medieval theologians to modern physicists to scifi authors and comic book artists) that I find simply entertaining to engage with but also at the same time I recognize that in doing this I might have some potential insight into this concept that might one day be useful to society’s overall understanding of it. The artist who is able to visually represent these kinds of un-intuitive, difficult-to-grasp concepts can do a lot to further public understanding of the various physical theories of how reality really works etc.

What this ends up looking like for me is a tautology where I am able to say that everything is meaningful because nothing is meaningful and since nothing is meaningful then therefore everything is meaningful. I accept it’s tautological and I don’t get there by reason, rather my personal framework involves an acceptance of my own very limited understanding and acknowledgement of my ability of reason to only get me so far. So I fall back on a kind of pre-rational mysticism that I think is incredibly useful so long as I’m able to avoid traps like magical thinking. I use the term pre-rational because I think this is a more basic form of reasoning that existed in humans prior to the development of reason (and one that is still persistent today if the way the majority of people go about thinking about reality is any indication) but that this does not automatically make it irrational in itself.

So I think Camus is right to be skeptical of rationalistic frameworks. They’re pretty new, relatively speaking, and it’s probably intellectually irresponsible to attempt rationality without first attempting to understand the pre-rationalistic frameworks so often dismissed as mystical mumbo jumbo but nonetheless still incredibly useful even today.

I look forward to reading more of your thoughts on this topic!

[Broco]

The original text is still under copyright so I’m not sure what I’ll do with my completed translation. I was thinking I’ll simply put it in the metaphorical drawer and maybe dust it off to publish on the Kindle store in 2030 when it falls into the public domain. I can privately share it if you’re interested in reading it at length though, send me a PM and I can send you the first half (about 70 pages) which stands pretty well on its own. Or just read the published translation of course, I assume it’s fine (I have not read it to avoid accidental plagiarism).

@Mr_Mechanical

So I fall back on a kind of pre-rational mysticism that I think is incredibly useful so long as I’m able to avoid traps like magical thinking.

Camus proposes a middle path between rationalism and mysticism and musters arguments against both sides. He even ties in the retreat to mysticism to his theme of suicide by giving it the label “philosophical suicide”. And the reason he rejected the label “existentialist” is precisely because many people who were described as part of that school ended up in some form of it. Jaspers, Chestov, and Kierkegaard all come in for criticism along these lines.

The attitude you’re proposing sounds most similar to Chestov’s. It doesn’t exactly match since although you use the word “mysticism”, it doesn’t sound like it has much of the character of epiphany that rubs Camus the wrong way about Chestov. In any case, let me quote the passages about Chestov, I think you’ll find them interesting.

Chestov, throughout a philosophical career of admirable monotony, ceaselessly tending towards the same truths, demonstrates without pause that the tightest system, the most universal rationalism always winds up abutting the irrational within human thought. None of the obvious ironies, of the derisory contradictions that discredit reason escape him. Only one thing interests him: the exception, be it in the history of the heart or of the mind. Through the Dostoevskian experiences of the death row inmate, the exasperated adventures of the Nietzchean mind, the imprecations of Hamlet or the bitter aristocracy of Ibsen, he tracks, shed lights on, and magnifies the human revolt against the irremediable. He refuses his reasons to reason and begins to walk decisively towards the center of the colorless desert where every certainty has turned into a stone.

[…] A commentator reports a quote of his which merits some attention: “The only real issue,” he says, “is precisely where there is no escape for human judgment. Otherwise, what need would we have of God? One turns towards God only to obtain the impossible. As for the possible, men suffice.” If there is a Chestovian philosophy, I would say that it’s in its entirely summarized there. For when, at the conclusion of his passionate analyses, Chestov discovers the fundamental absurdity of existence, he does not say: “here is the absurd” but “here is God: he is the one it’s appropriate to hand ourselves over to, even if he does not correspond to any of our rational categories”. So as to make confusion impossible, the Russian philosopher even insinuates that this God is perhaps heinous and detestable, incomprehensible and contradictory, but in the very measure in which his visage is hideous, his power is affirmed. His grandeur is his incoherence. His proof is his inhumanity. We must spring towards him and by this leap deliver ourselves from rational illusions. Thus, for Chestov, the acceptance of the absurd is contemporaneous to the absurd itself. To note it is to accept it, and all the logical effort of his thought is to bring it to light so that at the same time, the immense hope that comes with it may gush forth. Once again, this is a legitimate attitude. But I want to stubbornly consider one single problem and all its consequences. I don’t need to examine the pathos of a thought or an act of faith. I have my whole life to do that. I’m well aware that the rationalists find Chestov’s attitude irritating. But I also sense that Chestov has the better of the rationalists and I wish only to know whether he is loyal to the commandments of the absurd.

Indeed, if we admit that the absurd is the opposite of hope, we see that existential thought, for Chestov, presupposes the absurd, but demonstrates it only to dissipate it. This subtlety of thought is a poignant magician’s trick. When Chestov elsewhere opposes his absurd to common morality and reason, he calls it truth and redemption. There is thus at bottom in this definition of the absurd an approbation that Chestov brings to it. If we recognize that all the power of this notion resides in the manner that it clashes with our elementary hopes, if we sense that the absurd demands – if it is to remain – that we do not consent to it, we see that it has lost its true face, its human and relative character, to enter into an eternity at once incomprehensible and satisfying. If there is the absurd, it’s in the universe of man. The moment his notion transforms into a springboard of eternity, it is no longer linked to human lucidity. The absurd is no longer the evident truth that man notes without consenting to it. The battle is eluded. Man integrates the absurd and in this communion conjures away its essential character which is opposition, divorce, the sense of being torn apart. This leap is a dodge. Chestov who so willingly cites Hamlet’s The time is out of joint, writes with a kind of fierce hope that I’d be justified in attributing particularly to him. That is not how Hamlet spoke or how Shakespeare wrote. For Chestov, reason is fruitless, but there is something beyond reason. For the absurd mind, reason is fruitless and there is nothing beyond reason.

The leap, at least, can illuminate a bit more the true nature of the absurd. We know it only has worth in an equilibrium, that it lies above all in comparison and not in the terms of the comparison. But Chestov puts all the weight on one of the terms and destroys the equilibrium. Our hunger to understand, our nostalgia for the absolute are explainable only in the precise measure whereby we are able to understand and explain many things. It is futile to absolutely deny reason. It has its domain in which it is effective. Indeed, it’s that of human experience. That’s why we want to render everything clear. If we cannot, if the absurd is born upon this occasion, it’s at the encounter between this effective but limited reason and the perpetually renascent irrational. Indeed, when Chestov becomes irritated at a Hegelian proposition of this sort: “the movements of the solar system conform to immutable laws and these laws are its reason”, when he commits all his passion to dislodge Spizonan rationalism, he justly concludes that all reason is vanity. From there, by a natural and illegitimate path, to the preeminence of the irrational. But the passage is not evident. For the notion of limit and the notion of domain can intervene here. The laws of nature can be valid up to a certain limit, past which they turn against themselves to give birth to the absurd. Or, they can be legitimate in the domain of description without being true in that of explanation. Everything is sacrificed here to the irrational, and the demand for clarity having been conjured away, the absurd disappears with one of the terms of its comparison. Absurd man, on the contrary, does not proceed to this flattening. In so doing he recovers all the data of experience, and he is not much disposed to leap before he knows. He only knows that within this attentive consciousness, there is no longer a place for hope.

Note that videogames form one space suited for the exercise of reason – a “domain in which it is effective”. One can’t win a game via mysticism (except maybe King of Dragon Pass!)

[Broco]

Dark Souls and the absurd

(sorry, but I had to)

There’s a comic aspect to existentialism that is much more prominent in Kafka than in Camus’s relatively self-serious work. captainlove put it very well above:

@captainlove

I think a non-serious approach to life is generally better than a serious one since seriousness leads to less honest self-criticism. And when things are revealed to be evidently futile you don’t go mad trying to maintain seriousness that is hollow.

The absurd universe is a bad joke, a joke that is willing to make us actually suffer and not just by its poor taste. As such, Kafka is one of the funniest novelists and Dark Souls is one of the funniest games. But criticism often glosses over that because these are difficult jokes to swallow – misleadingly both bodies of work have a reputation which solely emphasizes difficulty and harshness.

There is a story about Kafka that when he first read Metamorphosis out loud to his private group of friends, he was cracking up the whole time and it was infectious. It’s basically a sitcom with Gregor trying to get out of his bed by swinging back and forth on his carapace, while his boss has shown up at his door because he’s one whole hour late and demanding to see him. The whole time Gregor is panicking about the fact that he was scheduled for an important business trip. It gradually dawns on him that the situation is becoming serious: he might actually lose his job here!

Likewise, watch any Twitch streamer playing Dark Souls for the first time and they can’t stop laughing. Hmm, what’s the worst that can happen with that dark knight with his back turned… is that a snoring sound I hear in Firelink shrine? … let me cast chameleon and lay in wait for that invader and backstab him when he comes by! It’s packed with silent-movie-style slapstick antics, perhaps as may have been the Prague Jewish improv theater scene that was low-key one of Kafka’s main sources of imagery.

A pithy summary of Dark Souls I paraphrase from Felix is that the game is about “being a nothing in a nothing world”. Dark Souls lore hammers from the beginning that all is vanity and nothing matters. Most inhabitants of this world have not managed to tolerate this. Many try obsessively to recreate sources of meaning they remember, be it O&S defending the princess, Gywn the kiln, Frampt and Kaathe replaying their futile game of spy-vs-spy world-historical manipulation that never goes anywhere, the butcher in the depths continuing to make meat, and so on. Others are emaciated figures who put their head in their hands and become inert scenery, in a pose like one of Kafka’s drawings:

The friendly NPCs seem to indicate the more human ways to exist in this world. Solaire is altogether too cheerful and merry-go-lucky but he does turn his ethic of being a general-purpose helper into what feels like a decent way to live. He takes his obsession with gross incandescence very far, but we must imagine him fulfilled. Our immediate reaction to him is “this guy is missing a few marbles but I like him!”. He has exactly as many marbles as he needs: insanity has no meaning in this world.

A single player’s interaction with Dark Souls has a performative quality – it’s not by accident that Twitch streams come to mind – but it really comes into its own in multiplayer. Each player dresses up in a costume to prepare to play a bit role in someone else’s epic play. Perhaps today I will put on the armor I got from murdering Solaire, put down a golden summon sign and play the strong and honorable Don Quixote. (The improv might go in the predictable way, or perhaps I the savior shall die at the boss anyway in a pathetic twist!). Then my whim will change and I shall put on dark executioner’s gear to invade someone in the catacombs. Joining players who have invited me in to participate by becoming fully human, I try repeatedly to stand at the bridge lever to topple them into the pit, but the shrewd heroes repeatedly foil my plan and take a detour around the bridge to murder me, and in a way I too am relieved that the story had a happy ending. One time my improv partner finally cooperates and blithely goes over the bridge, and I observe with glee the janky physics as his figure is toppled down. A messagebox appears: “You Were Indicted”. Does he actually resent me or is he just performing resentment because my actions deserve the response? Does it matter? I change gear again to perform as an honorable duelist in the forest.

It doesn’t really matter whether or not I go ring two bells for them to ring in the emptiness and across universes. It doesn’t matter if I become strong with all my souls, or if I don’t use them and prove a point to myself by beating everything at level 1. It doesn’t matter whether I swear to defend the princess or whether I murder her, and it doesn’t matter whether I link the fire or plunge the world in eternal darkness. These are all games and performances: they matter as little or as much as when I entered another player’s world and we both put sparkly glowing bits everywhere and danced.

[shelter]

since we’re talking about comedy now, i appreciate frank ruda’s riposte to existentialist fatalism that he terms “comic fatalism”: “existentialist fatalism [. . .] emphasizes the human condition but ultimately asserts that freedom relies on freeing oneself from all external determination just to discover the nothingness inside of oneself—the nothingness that is freedom and the only thing we can rely on. comic fatalism asserts against existentialist fatalism that there is not even a stable or given nothing or nothingness to rely on.”

@Broco

one of my biggest questions after reading Camus is that he implicitly assumes a coherent self for a lot of it and since I’m inclined to think the self is fragmentary and chaotic, does it undermine much of it?

@Broco

Camus kind of overrates the satisfaction of the absurd life anyway and I don’t quite see why it matters so much whether one is proudly self-aware. I am much more sympathetic to the self-deceiving life than Camus is. I’m inclined favor Camus’s steely-eyed honesty as a useful phase, that should be followed by a deliberate “reillusionment” of false meaning as appropriate.

the first point is true, but even worse, i think the same then has to be true about the nothingness that he casts against the self too, if the nothing constitutes the self. i agree about overrating the satisfaction, but i think that camus’ honesty might not be honest enough. reason has to move to its end without either satisfaction or reillusionment, and even camus has to admit that it does not find anything determinate there. couldn’t the “presence” of nothingness itself be a form of reassurance? my worry is that the conception of nothingness in existentialism might itself be a kind of irrational reillusionment, rather than its logical conclusion, especially if somewhat conservative values like self reliance and satisfaction through a middle path are the ultimate aims anyhow. you risk missing out on the joke if you stop there, before the punchline, which ruda formulates: “there is no there is.”

/

this isn’t in response to any particular post in this thread, but it might be a useful framing of the question of games, meaning and the relationship between aesthetics and world. last year i read peli grietzer’s phd dissertation, a cognitive-mathematical “ambient meaning” approach to modernist literary theory. at several points, he critiques many 20th century aesthetic theorists for reading modernist works like kafka’s and beckett’s as essentially representations of a fractured, dead modern world bereft of meaning. instead, he argues that “modernist forms[…] are concrete adaptations or developments in the technology of cognitive mapping—they are pragmatically sociohistorically contingent methods for creating mental models of the structures and dynamics of phenomena. [… t]he ‘ambient meaning’ viewpoint treats modernist form as a method of map-making, rather than as a map: i treat abstraction, parataxis, fragmentation, indeterminacy, polysemy and polyvalence not as representations of a psychological or cultural predicament but as methods of a process of cognition.”

these methods are rational ways of cognitively processing and developing concise reductions of worldly information, rather than merely imitations of external worldly crises. informally, they’re aesthetic-informational ways of organizing vibes. in this reading, works by kafka or beckett are actually very similar in internal structure to videogames; they are a series of possible positions, permutations or transformations of a set of information, curated, articulated and compressed by a certain “style” (beckett’s entire mid to late style is very transparent about this process, but it’s true for other modernist works as well, even ones that may not consciously avow it). in fact, videogames might be the paradigmatic example of what grietzer is describing.

likewise, someone who experiences a work of art undergoes a process of learning and reconstructing the contours of its vibe, learning how to “see it best” and then bringing that way of seeing with them into the world (for instance, when you recognize something in the world as “kafkaesque”). that is what defines (ambient) meaning for modernist works. for grietzer, this has a computational underpinning he links to the function of unsupervised autoencoders in deep learning AI algorithms, but it’s not important to get into that here. in any case, it could likewise be useful to think about playing a game both as an individual experience and as a process of learning the “shape” of a game as an informational structure or manifold, functionally compressed for a particular playstyle. we then bring that mental model out into the world, where it interacts with all sorts of real-life cognitive phenomena.

i’m not sure what this means for the conversation on existentialism going on in this thread yet, except that if we think of artworks as rational cognitive methodologies that draw out weak affinities in the world into dense structures of ambient meaning rather than only as representational devices for producing meaningless existential experience then it seems like we are going to have a lot of trouble clawing our way back into the asemic abyss.

[Broco]

@shelter

@Broco

Camus kind of overrates the satisfaction of the absurd life anyway and I don’t quite see why it matters so much whether one is proudly self-aware. I am much more sympathetic to the self-deceiving life than Camus is. I’m inclined favor Camus’s steely-eyed honesty as a useful phase, that should be followed by a deliberate “reillusionment” of false meaning as appropriate.

the first point is true, but even worse, i think the same then has to be true about the nothingness that he casts against the self too, if the nothing constitutes the self. i agree about overrating the satisfaction, but i think that camus’ honesty might not be honest enough. reason has to move to its end without either satisfaction or reillusionment, and even camus has to admit that it does not find anything determinate there. couldn’t the “presence” of nothingness itself be a form of reassurance? my worry is that the conception of nothingness in existentialism might itself be a kind of irrational reillusionment, rather than its logical conclusion, especially if somewhat conservative values like self reliance and satisfaction through a middle path are the ultimate aims anyhow. you risk missing out on the joke if you stop there, before the punchline, which ruda formulates: “there is no there is.”

Thanks for the very thoughtful response that also brings in additional reading. Personally I just read these original authors and interpret them myself for appreciation or self-help purposes and have only consumed a few drops of the ocean of commentary I know exists. In truth I read them more to admire the beauty of their prose than to reflect – my abiding interest is literature not philosophy, and it’s only just in recent years that I’ve dipped back into some philosophy after starting to ignore the discipline midway through college.

Camus would say I mischaracterized him completely by saying that he presented awareness of the absurd as satisfying. He insists he advocates for the exact opposite: perpetual dissatisfation. Yet I cannot help noting that a tone of self-satisfaction exudes from his prose. I have been mulling over a personal theory which I imagine has been explored in the literature: his self-deceit lies in a hidden ultimate goal he never admits even to himself: the performance of masculinity. It’s the unifying factor behind the values like “honesty” and “revolt” which he does not admit are values subject to futility just like everything else, but somehow put apart on a pedestal without justification. And his use of Don Juan as one of his key images is unmistakable. As perceptive as he was, he seems to have been blinded by the rarely questioned patriarchy of his era.

You are right to read between the lines my aim to support those conservative values but that is me talking, I dabble in existentialism, haven’t made a system, and am quite happy to twist existentialist frameworks to support what they oppose. As anyone who has read The Stranger knows, Camus’s bitterness about conservatism is intensely felt. In the Myth he also has these occasional brief explosions of venom expressing to-me-startling contempt about the life of, for instance, a French state postal service functionary. All I can say to that is: Camus, how would you have felt if the manuscript of your essay had been lost in the mail on the way to the publisher?

(Note that there’s no doubt to me that what you call “comic fatalism” is fully realized in Kafka, and not really realized in Camus. And this seems like as good a way as any to justify the preeminence of Kafka among existentialists. If I have focused on Camus it’s partly that my formulation of “here’s what existentialism argues” is only coherent for Camus: the arguments formulated by characters in Kafka’s novels are plentiful, self-undermining and lead nowhere.)

–

For your other point, interesting and I’m sympathetic to the substance of it. I however struggle with a fundamental aspect of your summary of the Adorno interpretation which does not seem to have been improved on by the complications of Grietzer: Kafka’s works “feel like” they stand timelessly in their own self-contained world and I do not wish to diminish them by calling them representation or some form of meta-representation. This timeless quality is of course an illusion: it was an absurd aspiration of Kafka’s which is instantly contradicted by the nature of language itself. The form of the work thus reflects its content and this is one of the keys to its power. To relate it either to real history and society, or a process of cognition whose “purpose” (?) is to be applied as a lens on a set of possible societies and not others, erases the absurd tension. Although maybe I’m just overreacting to a couple of words like “representation” as the meat of the argument about computation in the brain sounds right to me (modulo that nobody has any real proof that the brain actually resembles machine-learning networks yet). But anyway, that’s my first inclination as to how to relate your discussion back to existentialism itself.

[Broco]

I looked up Frank Ruda and his book title Abolishing Freedom caught my eye, I downloaded a sample of it. I was really struggling with the paragraphs on freedom in my Camus translation, I find I can’t make heads or tails of the concept and it’s one of the most twisted ideas in philosophy. Thanks for the recommendation!

[shelter]

no problem! it’s an extremely twisty and difficult idea. i found that book immensely useful - and twisty and difficult i will respond to your previous response at some point in the coming days.

[Titus]

If Elden Ring isn’t half as chortlesome as Souls it might just be a failure…

Please include Gregor Bug pajamas in your new game Miyazaki San MIYAZAKI SAN

[Broco]

I discovered this 2011 lecture by Brian Moriarty where he surveyed pre-20th-century philosophy for any and all mentions of games. The most interesting part was about Schopenhauer:

Schopenhauer believed that the essence of the universe is a blind, irrational, unquenchable thirst to exist he called Wille zum Leben.

Everything we perceive is a representation of this will to live, this desire to be.

Because we ourselves are products of Will, we spend most of our lives trapped in a cycle of striving and boredom.

We’re constantly willing ourselves to attain our goals, and when we do attain them, we’re disappointed and move on to something else, again and again, until the ultimate disappointment of death.

To Schopenhauer, “free will” and real choice were cruel illusions, and desire a prison.

Schopenhauer does have a reputation for being pessimistic. But he really wasn’t. Because he also believed that there’s a way to leap off the wheel of desire.

That way is the contemplation — the contemplation — of sublime art.

Sublime art is the door to a perspective on reality that transcends Will.

It frees us from the agony of contingency and causality, and give us a brief, precious glimpse of what we really are, one thing, already complete, and perfectly ambiguous.

Bob Dylan echoed Schopenhauer when he said that the purpose of art is to stop time .

[…]

Schopenhauer appears to be alone among pre-20th-century philosophers in directly considering the relationship between art and games. His assessment was not flattering. In The World of Will and Representation , he condemns game-playing as an egregious form of “excitement” precisely opposed to the experience of sublime art, specifically calling to task “the invention and maintenance of card-playing, which is in the truest sense an expression of the wretched side of humanity” (Payne translation). This may be the first allusion to game designers in a major philosophical text.

Why is this?

As you all know, games are about choices. Sid Meier famously defined games as “a series of interesting choices.”

And choice is the most fundamental expression of Will.

How can an activity motivated by decisions, striving, goals and competition, a deliberate concentration of the force of Will, be used to transcend Will itself?

You might as well try to smother a flame with oxygen.

It seems that Camus and Schopenhauer’s frame for the human condition were structurally similar but reversed: one glorified Sisyphus and the other disparaged him.

[captainlove]

This talk by Moriarty is one of my favourite GDC lectures and one I wish was in the discourse about games and art more often. The same talk also raises a problem that very few have managed to tackle in arguing whether games might be considered ‘high art/culture’ or not which sort of relates to the initial points raised here about absurdity and games in opposition to work.

I’m paraphrasing Moriarty but if Chess is not considered great art (especially through the wisdom of the ages) why should Missile Command? When searching for meaning through games I feel like the fact that games have been around since ancient times but are only now being brought into discussions of meaningful culture must be interrogated.

One response has been to suggest that videogames are a fundamentally different medium. I agree they are played on a different platform that allows for automation, real-time simulation etc. but I think this argument kind of discredits non-videogames (board games, parlor games, sports, etc). As Moriarty points out it may also stem from corporate interests to talk up the industry. The most prominent use of justifying that games are art is to give them first amendment protection (in the USA) and allows their developers to qualify for tax relief (in the UK). Isn’t there a meaning beyond all the awards, legal protections and corporate hype that speaks to the same meaning games have given us for literally millennia?

Taking this train of thought leads to a difficult historical discussion of the origin of games which is not well understood in anthropology, biology or history. There are mostly theories about the value of play-fighting in animals, how games link to religious ritual in ancient culture, debates about the amount of labour/leisure available to prehistoric humans and unanswered questions about the link between games and language development.

The desire to play is very human and this might always have been a means of engaging with the absurd or perhaps it has never held any meaning until recently. It may be that only recently we have managed to shrug off the Puritanical stigma of play but this is a very Western way of seeing it. I don’t know if any of this is fruitful and I would wager that developing a personal, meaningful relationship with games has always been more powerful than trying to convince the public at large that games are equally as important as gallery art or work or education and healthcare (see serious games).