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employed on the background of the awareness that play is a complex and irreducible
activity which is deeply rooted in what makes us humans and that its experience can
never be completely anticipated and controlled by the game designers or fully cap-
tured in questionnaires, interviews or the statistical analysis of data.
4.3
(The Question Concerning) Philosophical Play
In what was discussed until this point, the most deterministically controllable
dimensions of the activity of 'play' were recognized as viable contexts to develop
and communicate philosophical ideas. To be sure, the possibility for critical design
and philosophical 'doing' must also be recognized as latent in each of the ways in
which human beings extend and objectify their physical functions, their ideas and
their desires via technical artefacts. As already purported by several academics in
the fi elds of philosophy of technology and game studies, all technologies cannot
avoid to materialize ideologies as well as fundamental aspects of who we are as
human beings (Haraway 1991 ; Coolen 1992 ; Flanagan 2009 ; Dunne and Raby
2013 ; Gualeni 2013 ; Yee 2014 ).
As novel and fl exible opportunities for philosophical as well as critical perfor-
mance, digital simulations and videogames are recognized here as particularly
interesting mediators. In the virtual worlds disclosed by those media forms, the
'players' have the opportunity for actively negotiating notions and hypotheses that
are materially presented to them. When acting within digital simulations, the user
(or player) is actively co-authoring the virtually-materialized philosophical argu-
ments in which the extent of the authorship depends on the game genre, on the
quantity of agents involved and, clearly, on the degree of interactive autonomy
granted to the 'players' by the developers of the simulation.
The two philosophical videogames that I will discuss in the fourth and fi fth sec-
tions of this essay were single-player videogames that were explicitly designed to
direct the player's behaviour towards simple and non-negotiable objectives and to
offer the player very limited operative options. As playful systems aimed at restrict-
ing and funnelling the behaviour of the player, those videogames can be considered
capable of explaining philosophical notions and articulating arguments in ways that
are largely unambiguous.
It must be noted, however, that - at least in line of principle - it is always possible
to develop interactive simulations and videogames with philosophical scopes and
themes that are less constraining and more expressive than the ones purposefully
designed to control 'play' and to materialize a specifi c set of notions. By defi nition,
acting in worlds that allow for freer and more ambiguous types of agency cannot
lead to the emergence of univocal and clear meaning but can still interactively dis-
close worlds that are alternative to the ones human beings can experience in their
everyday engagement with the world commonly labelled as 'actual'. More suc-
cinctly stated, all videogames allow their players to experience alternative phenom-
enologies, but not all videogames can function as communication instruments.
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