Video Games as Mass Art

Videogames are one of the most significant developments in the mass arts of recent times. In commercial terms, they are now among the most prominent of the mass arts worldwide. This commercial and cultural success does not exhaust the interest in videogames as a mass art phenomenon because games such as Grand Theft Auto IV and Fallout 3 are structurally radically different from previous forms of mass art. In particular, the ontology of videogames, the nature and identity of their works, and how they are instanced and evaluated is a departure from the familiar mass arts of film and popular music. This paper explores these differences in an attempt to fit videogames into a theory of mass art, but also to provide guidance on the issues of criticism and evaluation that surely follow from their ontological distinctiveness

Definition of Videogames

Can videogames be defined? The new field of games studies has generated three somewhat competing models of videogaming that characterize games as new forms of gaming, narratives, and interactive fictions. When treated as necessary and sufficient condition definitions, however, each of the three approaches fails to pick out all and only videogames. In this paper I argue that looking more closely at the formal qualities of definition helps to set out the range of definitional options open to the games theorist. A disjunctive definition of videogaming seems the most appropriate of these definitional options. The disjunctive definition I offer here is motivated by the observation that there is more than one characteristic way of being a videogame

Players, Characters, and the Gamer's Dilemma

Is there any difference between playing video games in which the player's character commits murder and video games in which the player's character commits pedophilic acts? Morgan Luck's “Gamer's Dilemma” has established this question as a puzzle concerning notions of permissibility and harm. We propose that a fruitful alternative way to approach the question is through an account of aesthetic engagement. We develop an alternative to the dominant account of the relationship between players and the actions of their characters, and argue that the ethical difference between so-called “virtual murder” and “virtual pedophilia” is to be understood in terms of the fiction-making resources available to players. We propose that the relevant considerations for potential players to navigate concern (1) attempting to make certain characters intelligible, and (2) using aspects of oneself as resources for homomorphic representation.Peer reviewe

Virtual media and pictorial seeing

In this paper I argue that stereoscopic VR headsets involve a kind of picturing in which users see visual scenes through a depictive surface. A problem for this account is to explain whether and how VR visual media involve the “seeing in” typical of some “twofold” theories of picture perception, given that virtual media differ in certain important respects from other pictures. One such difference is that virtual media provide a kind of egocentric seeing that is lacking in customary pictures. I will argue here that this difference can be accommodated by a theory of VR picturing, but that this accommodation may necessitate changing our assumptions about how pictures can function

On virtual transparency

Virtual worlds are notable for their realism, both for the sense of psychological immersion they provide and the apparent potential for users to perform activities and interact with objects and people “within” such worlds. This article asks whether the concept of “photographic transparency,” introduced by Kendall Walton to account for the inherent realism of photography, can be extended to account for the realism of virtual media. Specifically, I investigate whether virtual media allow for a kind of prosthetic seeing that enables users to see the real world in potentially expanded ways. The complications for the thesis of “virtual transparency” arise from the analysis of the objects and egos involved in virtual seeing. These complications show that virtual reality as a medium is not transparent, even though token uses may be

Tension and opportunity: Creativity in the video gaming medium

Structural tensions within artistic media have always provided much of the impetus for the creative development of art forms. This is equally the case with the new art of video games. Many recent games are complex and creative artifacts, involving multiple formal and interactive aspects, and engaging the player in a variety of modes of interpretation and play. A game may aim to furnish a fictional world to be explored, allow for collaborative multiplayer game play, tell a complex interactive story, depict complex characters and character development, or provide the player with a range of traditional game play puzzles and challenges. How these formal, depictive, and interactive features fit together within a single game is often a complicated affair, providing the design problems that provoke many of the more creative episodes in game design. This chapter explores how the structural tensions and complications within video games provide opportunities for creative development within the medium

Videogames, VR media and fiction

Owing to the development and successful commercial release of VR headsets such as PlayStation VR and the HTC Vive, virtual reality headsets are beginning to have a real influence on videogaming. A handy illustration of the potential of videogame virtual media is The London Heist (2016) a demo game included in the PlayStation VR Worlds bundle. Thematically, The London Heist draws on recent British crime cinema tropes and the gameplay contains some genuine surprises for the initiate to virtual reality. A striking feature in the game is the imposing presence of the characters one encounters in the gameworld: standing menacingly before you with a blowtorch in hand, it is hard not to feel threatened by one particularly muscular, tattooed, and cockney-accented fellow. The experience of interacting with the world is similarly impressive: in one sequence a virtual cell phone rings, and it is natural to reach for the phone in virtual space, answer it and put it to your ear. And because the PlayStation 4 camera tracks the position of the controller and places sound sources within the virtual world, equally startling is that you will hear the voice on the other end as coming from the virtual mobile phone in your hand

Fictionalism and videogame aggression

Videogames undoubtedly contain a great deal of apparent violence and aggression. This depictive content has frequently led to both public moral condemnation and the scientific investigation of the possible effects games have on aggression and violence beyond the context of gaming. This paper is not concerned with either the moral or the empirical questions of the effects of game violence, rather it concerns a conceptual problem with the analysis of in-game aggression. The frequently unacknowledged status of almost all videogames as fictions has important implications for our understanding of the content of games and the attitude of players toward it, and has proved a very poor starting point for understanding the function of apparently aggressive and violent gameplay. This paper investigates how the fictional nature of videogames affects the analysis of game aggression and violence, both undermining various assumptions of scientific accounts of game violence, but also leading to promising avenues of investigating the role of fictional aggression in gameplay

Towards an account of virtual realism

That VR media are realistic, and even more realistic than other traditional forms of depictive media, has sometimes been claimed to be a “common-sense” view. It is tempting to frame a new concept of virtual realism to refer to cases where a virtual world overwhelms its users with a sense of the reality of the items, places and people they encounter within it. Yet, the notion of “virtual realism” might also seem like an oxymoron. “Virtual” implies that something is not a real instance of its kind, but merely has the powers or capacities of that thing. What is it for something to be virtually realistic? Indeed, is the concept even a sensible one? In this paper I analyse the several senses in which virtual media might be claimed to be realistic and argue that these senses are materially distinct and of differing usefulness and credibility