C. Thi Nguyen

Games are a unique art form. The game designer doesn’t just create a world; they create who you will be in that world. They tell you what abilities to use and what goals to take on. In other words, they specify a form of agency. Games work in the medium of agency. And to play them, we take on alternate agencies and submerge ourselves in them.

What can we learn about our own rationality and agency, from thinking about games? We learn that have a considerable degree of fluidity with our agency. First, we have the capacity for a peculiar sort of motivational inversion. For some of us, winning is not the point. We take on an interest in winning temporarily, so that we can play the game. Thus, we are capable of taking on temporary and disposable ends. We can submerge ourselves in alternate agencies, letting them dominate our consciousness, and then dropping them the moment the game is over.

Games are, then, a way of recording forms of agency, of encoding them in artifacts. Our games are a library of agencies. And exploring that library can help us develop our own agency and autonomy. But this technology can also be used for art. Games can sculpt our practical activity, for the sake of the beauty of our own actions. Games are part of a crucial, but overlooked category of art — the process arts. These are the arts which evoke an activity, and then ask you to appreciate your own activity.

And games are a special place where we can foster beautiful experiences of our own activity. Because our struggles, in games, can be designed to fit our capacities. Games can present a harmonious world, where our abilities fit the task, and where we pursue obvious goals and act under clear values. Games are a kind of existential balm against the difficult and exhausting value clarity of the world. But this presents a special danger. Games can be a fantasy of value clarity. And when that fantasy leaks out into the world, we can be tempted to oversimplify our enduring values. Then, the pleasures of games can seduce us away from our autonomy, and reduce our agency.

Art can be addressed, not just to individuals, but to groups. A neighborhood mural calling for a community to take care of itself, a patriotic statue — these speak to a group, urging it to adopt a particular value or stance. In some cases, art can play an even more integral role in the inner lives of groups: art can be part of how groups think to themselves and how groups commit themselves to difficult-to-express values. I focus on monuments as a case study and prime exemplar. Monuments, I claim, can function as commitments to group values. They are a way for groups to declare values and principles in a publicly accessible form, for the sake of long-term action guidance. This account weighs in favor of two surprising theses. First, it demonstrates the existence of art for groups — that is, art that is primarily addressed to collective entities rather than to individuals. Second, the account shows how art can make group emotions possible, even if those groups lack any kind of emergent group consciousness. Art can do so by making emotions sufficiently public so as to be the object of a group commitment. Group agents can, via a group decision process, select an artwork and designate its emotional content as action guiding. Monuments and their kin can thus function as an artistic equivalent to a constitution or a mission statement. They can permit groups to guide themselves with values and principles too subtle to be captured in explicit propositions.

Discussion of the phenomena of post-truth and fake news often implicates the closed epistemic networks of social media. The recent conversation has, however, blurred two distinct social epistemic phenomena. An epistemic bubble is a social epistemic structure in which other relevant voices have been left out, perhaps accidentally. An echo chamber is a social epistemic structure from which other relevant voices have been actively excluded and discredited. Members of epistemic bubbles lack exposure to relevant information and arguments. Members of echo chambers, on the other hand, have been brought to systematically distrust all outside sources. In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined. It is crucial to keep these phenomena distinct. First, echo chambers can explain the post-truth phenomena in a way that epistemic bubbles cannot. Second, each type of structures requires a distinct intervention. Mere exposure to evidence can shatter an epistemic bubble, but may actually reinforce an echo chamber. Finally, echo chambers are much harder to escape. Once in their grip, an agent may act with epistemic virtue, but social context will pervert those actions. Escape from an echo chamber may require a radical rebooting of one’s belief system.

I propose to study one problem for epistemic dependence on experts: how to locate experts on what I will call cognitive islands. Cognitive islands are those domains for knowledge in which expertise is required to evaluate other experts. They exist under two conditions: first, that there is no test for expertise available to the inexpert; and second, that the domain is not linked to another domain with such a test. Cognitive islands are the places where we have the fewest resources for evaluating experts, which makes our expert dependences particularly risky. Some have argued that cognitive islands lead to the complete unusability of expert testimony: that anybody who needs expert advice on a cognitive island will be entirely unable to find it. I argue against this radical form of pessimism, but propose a more moderate alternative. I demonstrate that we have some resources for finding experts on cognitive islands, but that cognitive islands leave us vulnerable to an epistemic trap which I will call runaway echo chambers. In a runaway echo chamber, our inexpertise may lead us to pick out bad experts, which will simply reinforce our mistaken beliefs and sensibilities.

In The Great Endarkenment, Elijah Millgram argues that the hyper-specialization of expert domains has led to an intellectual crisis. Each field of human knowledge has its own specialized jargon, knowledge, and form of reasoning, and each is mutually incomprehensible to the next. Furthermore, says Millgram, modern scientific practical arguments are draped across many fields. Thus, there is no person in a position to assess the success of such a practical argument for themselves. This arrangement virtually guarantees that mistakes will accrue whenever we engage in cross-field practical reasoning. Furthermore, Millgram argues, hyper-specialization makes intellectual autonomy extremely difficult. Our only hope is to provide better translations between the fields, in order to achieve intellectual transparency. I argue against Millgram's pessimistic conclusion about intellectual autonomy, and against his suggested solution of translation. Instead, I take his analysis to reveal that there are actually several very distinct forms intellectual autonomy that are significantly in tension. One familiar kind is direct autonomy, where we seek to understand arguments and reasons for ourselves. Another kind is delegational autonomy, where we seek to find others to invest with our intellectual trust when we cannot understand. A third is management autonomy, where we seek to encapsulate fields, in order to manage their overall structure and connectivity. Intellectual transparency will help us achieve direct autonomy, but many intellectual circumstances require that we exercise delegational and management autonomy. However, these latter forms of autonomy require us to give up on transparency.

What is a game? What are we doing when we play a game? What is
the value of playing games? Several different philosophical sub disciplines have attempted to answer these questions using very distinctive frameworks. Some have approached games as something like a text, deploying theoretical frameworks from the study of narrative, fiction, and rhetoric to interrogate games for their representational
content. Others have approached games as artworks and asked questions about the authorship of games, about the ontology of the work and its performance. Yet others, from the philosophy of sport, have focused on normative issues of fairness, rule application, and competition. The primary purpose of this article is to provide an
overview of several different philosophical approaches to games and, hopefully, demonstrate the relevance and value of the different approaches to each other. Early academic attempts to cope with games tried to treat games as a subtype of narrative and to interpret games exactly as one might interpret a static, linear narrative. A faction
of game studies, self‐described as “ludologists,” argued that games were a substantially novel form and could not be treated with traditional tools for narrative analysis. In traditional narrative, an audience is told and interprets the story, where in a game, the player enacts and creates the story. Since that early debate, theorists have
attempted to offer more nuanced accounts of how games might achieve similar ends to more traditional texts. For example, games might be seen as a novel type of fiction, which uses interactive techniques to achieve immersion in a fictional world. Alternately, games might be seen as a new way to represent causal systems, and so a
new way to criticize social and political entities. Work from contemporary analytic philosophy of art has, on the other hand, asked questions whether games could be artworks and, if so, what kind. Much of this debate has concerned the precise nature of the artwork, and the relationship between the artist and the audience. Some have
claimed that the audience is a cocreator of the artwork, and so games are a uniquely unfinished and cooperative art form. Others have claimed that, instead, the audience does not help create the artwork; rather, interacting with the artwork is how an audience
member appreciates the artist's finished production. Other streams of work have focused less on the game as a text or work, and more on game play as a kind of activity. One common view is that game play occurs in a “magic circle.” Inside the magic circle, players take on new roles, follow different rules, and actions have different
meanings. Actions inside the magic circle do not have their usual consequences for the rest of life. Enemies of the magic circle view have claimed that the view ignores the deep integration of game life from ordinary life and point to gambling, gold farming, and the status effects of sports. Philosophers of sport, on the other hand, have approached games with an entirely different framework. This has lead into investigations about the normative nature of games—what guides the applications of rules and how those rules might be applied, interpreted, or even changed. Furthermore, they have investigated games as social practices and as forms of life.

The current debate over aesthetic testimony typically focuses on a very narrow set of cases. This paper first broadens the sorts of cases under consideration, especially the wide variety of practical uses for aesthetic trust - where we substantively follow the aesthetic recommendation, instruction, or advice of another. These new cases do not yield a simple optimism about aesthetic testimony. Rather, they reveal a puzzlingly assymetrical structure in our intuitions. Consider the following cases: we seem unwilling to accept somebody hanging a painting in their bedroom based merely on testimony, but entirely willing to accept hanging a painting in a museum based merely on testimony. The switch in intuitive acceptability seems to track, in some complicated way, the line between public life and private life.

These new cases weigh against a number of standing theories of aesthetic testimony. I consider a number of alternate accounts, and suggest that something like a sensibility theory, in the style of John McDowell and David Wiggins, will prove to be the best fit. This gives us the following explanation of our odd intuitions: we are willing to accept testimony about whether a work merits being found beautiful; but we are unwilling to accept testimony about whether something actually is beautiful.

Adapting Bernard Suits' account of game-play, we can show that, in games, competition can be converted into cooperation. Suits says that to play a game is to voluntarily take up unnecessary obstacles for the sake of overcoming them. Thus, in games, we can become each others' desired obstacles. Others in the philosophy of sport have argued for such cooperation, but typically but the weight of conversion on player consent or player intention. I argue for a more distributed model of conversion, in which player consent, proper match-ups of player temperament and skill, features of game-design, and psychological fit of players with game design all contribute to the conversion process. As a result, conversion isn't guaranteed, even when all players have consented. Finally, I use the conversion model to argue against the popular view in philosophy of sports that the purpose of sport is the display or development of excellence; instead, the social function of converting competition into cooperation is just as plausible an account of the purpose of sport.

Most game studies research on ethics and games examines the ways games encode, express, and encourage ethical reflection and ideas through their systems, mechanics, and representational elements. However, not much attention has been paid to the ethical aspects of games as/when they are played by more than one player. In this article we use literature from the philosophy of sports to discuss how competition can be framed as an ethical activity and how doing so allows us to examine commonly used value-laden terms such as ganking, spawncamping, and trash talking. We propose the idea of the ideal moral competitive game: a game in which the best moves or plays are coincidentally those that result in the best possible degree and type of challenge for my opponent. From this baseline we then articulate a preliminary ethics of play, centered on competition that can be productive for examining and understanding the ethics of inter-player interactions.

Many theorists suppose that there is only one form of game-play. I argue, instead, that there are multiple forms. There is make-believe play - the play of imagination, pretend, and role-play; there is also striving play - the play of competition, challenge, and overcoming obstacles. I draw on Kendall Walton’s analysis of make-believe and Bernard Suits’ analysis of games to develop the distinction between these two forms.

These two forms of play are conceptually distinct, and not reducible to one another. I argue against various attempts to reduce one of these forms to the other, including Suits’ argument that make-believe play is a kind of competitive acting challenge. The difference can be seen most clearly in the different ways the two forms break. Striving play is broken by cheating, and make-believe play is broken by spoiling the illusion. Reductionist accounts cannot explain the way that one can cheat without spoiling the illusion, and vice versa. Reductionist accounts also cannot explain oft-observed frictions between different play-styles.

Finally, I argue that the two form of play is not fixed by the game, but dependent on the intentions and practices of the player. Crucially, this means that play can be fluid -- different players can play the same game in different ways, or one player can change between forms of play.

The pleasures of rock climbing and the pleasures of philosophy turn out to be strangely similar. Most non-climbers have the wrong idea about climbing — it is, in the popular imagination, a particularly thuggish way of courting death. Before I'd actually tried it, my mental image of climbing was some kid of vague blend of pull-ups, screaming and gargling Red Bull. But it turns out that rock climbing is this subtle, refined and often hyper-intellectual sport.