Going under the game

Philosophy Through Video Games

Jon Cogburn

While hanging out at the library today, I finished most of Jon Cogburn's Philosophy Through Video Games, one of those books that makes me wish I was still teaching History and Philosophy to Computer Gaming Majors at Champlain. It gave me numerous ways to make connections between the General Education History requirements and the discipline, something that I think altogether too many General Education History classes lack.

Cogburn uses his ample experience in computer gaming to reveal how small is the leap between the games we play and the philosophy we think. How, for example do philosophers ask us to think about the definition of the self, and who is the self when we each can be, through the medium of computerized immagination, many different selves. Are we our facebook page? Are we our avitar? Are we our profile? Another chapter deals with the way that computer games structure themselves ethically to either reward or punish people who play with certain tendencies. One obviously could not win in World of Warcraft by following the teachings of Ghandi. In the game Bioshock, the programmers have decided to let the players try on different ethical "selves" to see how they compare. These moral frameworks could be used as a great tool for talking about who establishes the rules of any given society and how those rules affect people with different levels of moral consciousness. If you were creating a game, would you set it up so that players had an equal or better chance of winning if they adopted moral codes different from those used in "the real world"?

Another issue that is given an engaging treatment is the discussion of reality itself. We all know that a bat experiences reality differently than we do and we must at somepoint in time, ask if our experience is the authentic one and the experience of the bat is the modified version. In short, we would be naturally inclined to think of the bat's experience of reality as "distorted" from normal in certain ways. But what if the bat is actually in better touch with reality? Or what if we were to some day, for one day, experience the world with ALL of the observational tools of all living things? Would we, forever after, think of ourselves as "blind" or "legally blind"? If so, what does this say about the meaning of the phrase, "The REAL WORLD"?

Cogburn goes deep into the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hume, Descartes, Nietzsche, Berkely, etc. This would not be an easy introduction to these works but if it took a focus on computer gaming to get someone interested in exploring them further, I would highly recommend it.

Question for Comment: What is your favorite computer game? Is there some philosophical reason why you find yourself interested in it more than others?