We invite submissions on the topic of “Digital Artifacts” for the next issue of the open-access, peer-reviewed, online journal, Metaphysics, co-edited by Kathrin Koslicki and Michael Raven. (http://www.metaphysicsjournal.com)

 The guest-editor for this issue is Alexandre Declos (University of Neuchatel). 

Submission Deadline: March 15, 2024

Description: The category of digital artifacts includes things such as computer programs, simulations, websites, data, virtual environments, memes, videogames, NFTs, digital artworks, or smartphone apps. Although these entities have become pervasive in our daily lives, they have received comparatively little attention in the recent metaphysics literature. 

This special issue shall be dedicated to investigating the ontological issues raised by this peculiar sub-class of artifacts. We invite contributions around, but not limited to, the following questions:

• What differentiates digital artifacts from other types of artifacts?

• Are there different kinds of digital artifacts? 

• How do digital artifacts fit in or challenge extant accounts in the philosophy of artifacts?

• Do digital artifacts depend on the mind? If so, does it threaten their reality?

• Are digital artifacts material or immaterial? Can they be located? Are they reducible to a physical basis? 

• Are digital artifacts abstract entities? If so, how are we to explain the fact that they can be perceived, interacted with, or created? 

• How should we construe the relation between a digital artifact, seen as a type, and its various instances or tokens?

• Must we differentiate digital and virtual artifacts? If so, what sort of relation do they have to one another? 

• Can (some) digital artifacts be understood as social entities? 

• What makes the identity of a digital artifact? Its algorithmic structure? The intentions of its creator(s)? The use to which it is put? Its capacities or affordances?

• What are the persistence conditions of digital artifacts? For instance, what kind of change could a program survive?

• Are digital artifacts essentially defined by their function? How should we account for cases of multifunction, malfunction (e.g., bugs), or repurposing?

• Do digital artifacts have essences, whether as kinds and/or as individuals?

• What sort of process is involved in digital artifact production? Does it differ from what is involved in the production of non-digital artifacts?

• Should digital byproducts (e.g., bugs) count as digital artifacts?

• Do digital artifacts challenge common assumptions about creativity, authorship, or authenticity?

• Can digital artifacts be created by non-human agents? For instance, can ChatGPT’s  outputs be seen as digital artifacts?

Instructions: Papers should be submitted through the journal’s online platform. Prior to submitting your paper, please consult the journal’s submission guidelines: https://metaphysicsjournal.com/about/submissions/

For any query, please email: alexandre.declos AT gmail.com

Prof. Stefano Gualeni, well known contributor to the game philosophy community  (Institute of Digital Games, University of Malta) just released a new book with Routledge! The book is titled The Clouds and is a science-fiction novella. The Clouds is a unique kind of publication. It is not only a work of fiction, it is also a philosophical text. Its experimentation with its narrative format sets the stage for the exploration of a handful of philosophical ideas that might be especially relevant for game scholars and sci-fi scholars.

A particularly original aspect of The Clouds has to do with its editorial structure. The novella is only the first half of a larger book titled The Clouds: An Experiment in Theory-Fiction, which contains

• eight parts of fiction (the chapters of the novella)
• three parts of non-fiction (three canonical essays), and
• a dash of meta-reflection (the afterword by the author).

The various philosophical themes of the book are, thus, first presented as fictions (weaved into the narrative of the novella, typically as key components of its development), and then in the more traditional form of the essay (that is, explained argumentatively by leveraging actual facts as well as existing works on related themes).

As an example that hopefully resonates with game scholars, it might be useful to refer to the many fictional games that are featured in the novella. Fictional games are playful activities and ludic artefacts that are encountered exclusively in works of fiction, and whose uncommon qualities serve a number of interesting functions within the work of which they are part (see Gualeni & Fassone, 2022). Some of these functions relate to the fictional context in which the novella takes place, adding detail to the fictional world and contributing to the indirect characterization of the protagonists. Some other fictional games are less oriented on the narrative, and instead serve speculative and more broadly philosophical purposes. This second kind of fictional games invite the readers to infer the ideologies that are at work in certain scenarios or to think along their implausible and often uncanny rules and behaviours.

Within the fiction part of The Clouds: An Experiment in Theory-Fiction, these games are encountered by the reader as part of their subjective relationship with the fictional world. As a counterpoint to this narrative invitation to imaginatively explore philosophical and speculative ideas, the non-fiction part of the book offers a more canonical analysis of each of the fictional game in the novella with frequent references to academic literature concerning games in fiction, philosophical games, and fictional games in particular. It should now be clear that the essayistic part of the book takes a detached, analytical approach to the same philosophical themes treated in the narrative part, explicitly articulating broader and more general perspectives on themes such as the philosophical uses of games within fiction.

Recent works that also experimented with mixing fiction and theory in the context of philosophical enquiry include the 2021 volume Philosophy through Science Fiction Stories, edited by Helen De Cruz, Johan De Smedt and Eric Schwitzgebel, but also Federico Campagna’s Prophetic Culture: Recreation for Adolescents (also published in 2021) and Jack Bowen’s The Dream Weaver: One Boy’s Journey through the Landscape of Reality (2006).

Does The Clouds: An Experiment in Theory-Fiction manage to meaningfully combine theory and fiction? Will it convince game scholars and philosophy enthusiasts that there is more to their discipline than academic texts, lectures, or blog posts like this one? Well, pick this new book up and find out!

Works cited

Bowen, J. (2006), The Dream Weaver: One Boy’s Journey through the Landscape of Reality, New York (NY): Ace Books.

Campagna, F. (2021), Prophetic Culture: Recreation for Adolescents, London (UK): Bloomsbury Academic.

De Cruz, H., De Smedt, J., & Schwitzgebel, E. (eds.) (2021), Philosophy through Science Fiction Stories, New York (NY): Bloomsbury Academic.

Gualeni, S. & Fassone, R. (2022), Fictional Games: A Philosophy of Worldbuilding and Imaginary Play. London (UK): Bloomsbury.

It is a significant event that Grant Tavinor has a new book out. While it is about virtual reality rather than computer games, it will no doubt be read and used by many game philosophers.  This is the book description:

This is the first book to present an aesthetics of virtual reality media. It situates virtual reality media in terms of the philosophy of the arts, comparing them to more familiar media such as painting, film and photography.

When philosophers have approached virtual reality, they have almost always done so through the lens of metaphysics, asking questions about the reality of virtual items and worlds, about the value of such things, and indeed, about how they may reshape our understanding of the real world. Grant Tavinor finds that approach to be fundamentally mistaken, and that to really account for virtual reality, we must focus on the medium and its uses, and not the hypothetical and speculative instances that are typically the focus of earlier works. He also argues that much of the cultural and metaphysical hype around virtual reality is undeserved. But this does not mean that virtual reality is illusory or uninteresting; on the contrary, it is significant for the altogether different reason that it overturns much of our understanding of how representational media can function and what we can use them to achieve.

The Aesthetics of Virtual Reality will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in aesthetics, philosophy of art, philosophy of technology, metaphysics, and game studies.

Stefano Gualeni and Nele Van de Mosselaer have a new paper out in the online first issue for Journal of the Philosophy of Games. This is the abstract:

Drawing from narratology and design studies, this article makes use of the notions of the ‘implied designer’ and ‘ludic unreliability’ to understand deceptive game design as a specific subset of trans-gressive game design. More specifically, in this text wepresent deceptive game design as the delib-erate attempt to misguide players’ inferences about the designers’ intentions. Furthermore, we argue that deceptive design should not merely be taken as a set of design choices aimed at misleading players in theirefforts to understand the game, but also as decisions devised to give rise to experien-tial and emotional effects that are in the interest of players. Finally, we propose to introduce a dis-tinction between two varieties of deceptive design approaches basedon whether they operate in an overt or a covert fashion in relation to player experience. Our analysis casts light on expressive pos-sibilities that are not customarily part of the dominant paradigm of user-centered design, and can inform game designers intheir pursuit of wider and more nuanced creative aspirations.

Mike Ridge has another paper out, this time in Philosophy and Phenomenology Research. Here is the abstract:

In this paper, I develop an account of play and playfulness, argue it is superior to its rivals and investigate the value of play so understood. I begin by laying out some interesting semantic features of ‘play’ which have not previously been systematically investigated (section 1). A failure to note these distinctions can lead theorists (and has led them) into unwitting equivocations and confusions. Drawing on this broader semantic framework, I lay out and motivate a positive account of the meaning of ‘play’ and the nature of play full-stop (section 2). I then survey some of this account’s main advantages (section 3) and argue that the theory helps us better understand the value of play (section 4), where this value should inform both moral theory and political philosophy. I then compare the proposal with rival theories (section 5). I conclude by suggesting directions for further research.

An interesting paper about rule-constituted kinds was recently published by Manuel García-Carpintero in Review of Philosophy and Psychology.

Here is the abstract for the paper:

The paper distinguishes between two conceptions of kinds defined by constitutive rules, the one suggested by Searle, and the one invoked by Williamson to define assertion. Against recent arguments to the contrary by Maitra, Johnson and others, it argues for the superiority of the latter in the first place as an account of games. On this basis, the paper argues that the alleged disanalogies between real games and language games suggested in the literature in fact don’t exist. The paper relies on Rawls’s distinction between types (“blueprints”, as Rawls called them) of practices and institutions defined by constitutive rules, and those among them that are actually in force, and hence are truly normative; it defends along Rawlsian lines that a plurality of norms apply to actual instances of rule-constituted practices, and uses this Rawlsian line to block the examples that Maitra, Johnson and others provide to sustain their case.

A discussion note by Michael Ridge about gamification has recently been published in the “Online First” issue for Journal of the Philosophy of Games.

JPG is interested in pursuing the discussion note format, so please contact the editor if you have an idea for a discussion note about emerging issues in the philosophy of games.

The abstract:

Gamification, roughly the use of game-like elements to motivate us to achieve practical ends “in the real world,” makes large promises. According to Jane McGonigal, gamification can save the world by channelling the amazing motivational power of gaming into pro-social causes ranging from alienation from our work to global resource scarcity and feeding the hungry (McGonigal 2011).  Even much more modest aims like improving personal fitness or promoting a more equitable division of household labour provide some license for optimism about the ability of gamification to improve our lives in more humble but still worthwhile ways.  On the other hand, Thi Nguyen has argued that there is a dark side to gamification: what he calls “value capture.”  Roughly, gamification works in large part because it offers a simplified value structure – this is an essential part of its appeal and motivational power.  However, especially in the context of gamification which exports these value schemes into our real-world lives, there is a risk that these overly simplistic models will displace our more rich, subtle values and that this will make our lives worse: this is value capture. The point is well-taken.  The way in which number of steps taken per day can, for an avid user of “FitBit,” displace more accurate measurements of how one’s activities contribute to one’s fitness is a compelling example.   If I become so obsessed with “getting my 10,000 steps” that I stop making time to go to the gym, jog or do my yoga/pilates then that is not a net gain.  However, there is an important range of cases that Nguyen’s discussion ignores but which provide an important exception to his critique:  value capture relative to behaviours that are addictive and destructive.  Here I have in mind things like alcoholism, drug addiction, and gambling addiction.  With these kinds of activities, value capture can not only be good but essential to a person’s well-being because (and not in spite of) of its displacement of the person’s more rich, subtle values.  Interestingly, the point is not limited to cases of addictive behaviour, though they put the point in its most sharp relief.  Any situation in which making rational decisions one by one can leave one worse off than “blindly” following a policy which is itself rational to adopt also turns out to illustrate the point, thus further expanding the role for value capture as itself a force for good.  The more general point is that certain kinds of sequential choice problems carve out an important and theoretically interesting exception to Nguyen’s worries about value capture.  In these kinds of choice contexts, value capture not only does not make our lives go worse, it may be essential to making our lives go better.

The latest online first issue of The Journal of the Philosophy of Games includes a paper on “Videogame Cognitivism” by Alexandre Declos (Collège de France).

Abstract: The aim of this article is to examine and defend videogame cognitivism (VC). According to VC, videogames can be a source of cognitive successes (such as true beliefs, knowledge or understanding) for their players. While the possibility of videogame-based learning has been an extensive topic of discussion in the last decades, the epistemological underpinnings of these debates often remain unclear. I propose that VC is a domain- specific brand of aesthetic cognitivism, which should be carefully distinguished from other views that also insist on the cognitive or educational potential of videogames. After these clarifications, I discuss and assess different broad strategies to motivate VC: propositionalism, experientialism, and neocognitivism. These map the different ways in which videogames can prove epistemically valuable, showing them to be, respectively, sources of propositional knowledge, experiential knowledge, and understanding. I eventually argue that neocognitivism is a particularly promising and yet underexplored way to defend VC.

The paper is available here : https://journals.uio.no/JPG/issue/view/415