Playing with Puzzling Philosophical Problems - Creativity in the Digital Age - page 65

Fig. 4.2 A more recent update of the game features a new game mode and additional monstrous
parts including those of a human being
fantasize of, discuss, write legends about, etc. As such, according to Hume, the idea
of a Pegasus does not fall under the category of simple ideas, which is to say ideas
that can be simply caused by immediate sensory 'impressions' of the objects. It
must, therefore, be recognized as a complex idea: a mental combination of elements
and properties of which the human mind has had previous experience of and eventu-
ally creatively reassembles into a new idea (Fig. 4.2 ).
By means of fantastic beasts of the same combinatorial nature as Hume's
Pegasus, Gua-Le-Ni asks the players to reverse the creative capabilities described in
A Treatise of Human Nature and use them as logical tools: impossible paper beasts
will parade across the screen (the page of the taxonomist's fantastic bestiary) only
to be recognized as combinations of parts of existing animals. In other words, Gua-
Le- Ni is a playful and interactive materialization of the Humean notion of 'complex
ideas'. This philosophical objective was openly discussed in several reviews,
conferences and interviews about Gua-Le-Ni . The Italian independent game devel-
opers' community website www.indievault.it , for instance, quoted a passage of a
discussion with them about this point. In that occasion I explained that
[i]f one learns how to play the game, one implicitly understood Hume's text, regardless of
whether one aspired to do so or not. The player does not need to use her imagination or her
interpretative capabilities in accessing those concepts of Hume's precisely because the