Playing with Puzzling Philosophical Problems - Creativity in the Digital Age - page 66

game offers that portion of his thought in the form of an objectively present, interactive
allegory. (The complete interview is available online at http://www.indievault.it/2011/11/23/
gua-le-ni-una-perla-made-in-italy-per-ipad/ - translated from Italian)

As author of Gua-Le-Ni , I was responsible for the game design, the game balanc-
ing and the direction of the aesthetic and creative content of the game. In this last
role, my tasks included the design of the game's narrative, the supervision of the
production of music and sound effects and the way in which visual design related to
gameplay. The creative goals and the research objectives that I had in mind for this
video-ludic project were constitutive for Gua-Le-Ni since its inception. The game's
design aspirations were pursued by embracing virtual worlds not only as inherent
factors of cultural change but also (as elaborated upon earlier in this text) as media
that can disclose experiences and information in ways which are alternative to, and
in some contexts more desirable than, the abstraction and infl exibility of text. When
designing the game, I thought it would have been amusing to question the dominant
and largely unquestioned textual framing of the philosophical discourse by present-
ing my criticism in the form of a (digital) topic.

4.5 Necessary Evil

The second philosophical videogame that I will analyse here is titled Necessary Evil
and - as mentioned before - is a free, self-refl exive videogame that I originally
designed as a contribution to 'G|A|M|E on Games: the Meta-panel' at the 2013
DiGRA conference.
The philosophical observation that inspired Necessary Evil is the following: the
interactive worlds of videogames objectify what is effectively an idealistic perspec-
tive on reality. According to a radical version of idealism, in fact, the qualities that
we can experientially encounter in objects (regardless of their actual or digitally
mediated nature) are not objective properties: it is our experience of these objects -
for example, in George Berkeley's subjective idealism - that is responsible for
bringing them and their properties into existence as mental contents.
Videogames and their worlds are customarily conceptualized and developed with
the design goal of disclosing certain player experiences and to elicit certain emo-
tions through combinations of aesthetic stimuli, interaction, and narration. Similarly,
from the specifi c perspective of software architecture, videogame worlds are techni-
cally structured around the player's possibility to perceive them or interact with
them. I believe it is revelatory, as an example, to think about the fact that objects in
the game world are too far from the player, whose sight is occluded by other objects,
or are momentarily irrelevant, for gameplay effectively does not exist as far as the
game states are concerned. This approach to the representation of virtual worlds has
the functional scope of limiting the amount of calculations that are needed to suit-
ably materialize the game world by a computer. Technically speaking it is a desir-
able, if not necessary, evil.