Three New Papers on Gaming Published in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

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