The latest two issues of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism include three new publications on the aesthetic philosophy of video games.

Marissa D. Willis’s paper, Choose Your Own Adventure: Examining the Fictional Content of Video Games as Interactive Fictions, which appears in the Winter 2019 issue, “explores the unique philosophical challenges that video games pose as forms of interactive fiction and examines the different types of fictional truth which they present.” She argues that video games are an important development in the narrative arts that should be of natural interest to philosophers.

Appearing in the Spring 2019 issue are Players, Characters, and the Gamer’s Dilemma by Craig Bourne and Emily Caddick Bourne and On Virtual Transparency by Grant Tavinor. The former addresses the apparent moral “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” and seeks to provide a new means of approaching this question through an account of the differing fiction-making resources available to players in the different cases.

Tavinor questions whether virtual media, including those in recent video games, allow users to literally see the world and objects presented by virtual media, and “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.” The paper considers the differing uses of VR and concludes that there may be token uses where VR counts as a “virtual prosthesis.”

Volume 77, Issue 1, Winter 2019

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/15406245/2019/77/1

Volume 77, Issue 2, Spring 2019

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/15406245/2019/77/2

We are happy to announce that the The Aesthetics of Videogames is now available. The book is a contribution to Routledge’s Research in Aesthetics series and is a collection of essays written by philosophers working in the tradition of analytic aesthetics, where videogames are now frequent topic. Among the issues discussed are transmedial games, the definition of videogames, game ontology, games and performance, videogames and creativity, virtual media and videogames, interactivity and fiction, the representation of women in games, videogames and the genre of romance fiction, and pornographic games.

We hope that our volume will show the potential in analytic aesthetics for the discussion and analysis of videogames, and further establish videogames as a focus for philosophers working in that area.

Ontology and Transmedial Games, Christopher J. Bartel – Videogames as Neither Video nor Games: A Negative Ontology of Videogames, Brock Rough – Videogames, Constitutive Rules, and Algorithms, Shelby Moser – Appreciating Videogames, Zach Jurgensen – The Beautiful Gamer? On the Aesthetics of Videogame Performances, Jon Robson – Creativity and Videogames, Aaron Meskin – Interactivity, Fictionality, and Incompleteness, Nathan Wildman and Richard Woodward – Why Gamers Are Not Narrators, Andrew Kania – Videogames and Virtual Media, Grant Tavinor – On Videogames and Gendered Invisibility, Stephanie Patridge – The Moral Transformation of Videogame Violence, Thi Nguyen – Videogames and the “Theater of Love”, Mark Silcox – Pornographic Videogames: a Feminist Examination, Mari Mikkola