Gaming Under the Influence
[Podcast]
E.63

The Special Merits of Video Games
[as an artistic medium]

The “trans-subjective” nature

Drinking this week: Mash Up the Jam (Collective Arts), The Darkest One Stout (The George)

Playing this week: Disco elysium, Red Dead Redemption 2

What makes video games different (or better) than other artistic mediums at expressing a given subject matter? This week, Mike & Alex discuss the special qualities of video games over text, film etc in the context of Red Dead Redemption 2’s epilogue.

The Special Merit of Video Games (using the epistemic terminology of Jacques Maritain):

Intellective knowledge by concepts [in philosophy or science] presents an objectifiable or “transobjective” subject, stripped of its own existence… taken under this or that one of its determinations… in a state of abstraction and universality. Poetic and sensory knowledge present the extramental thing “connaturally”, as it acts upon the [sense] organ[s] through its qualities, offering itself to be sensed with the selfsame existential mode it exercises outside the mind; the thing is known concretely but still as object. Video games impose a transsubjective nature, not [like a transobjective subject] presented to the mind [of the knower-player] as object, but [habitually, as a persistent quality or condition perfecting in the line of ITS OWN NATURE the informed subject,] interpolated atop [an erasure or transgression of] the knower’s own subject-position and univocal “quidditative determination”, known as [and only in so far as] we know ourselves, “not as object but subject, in midst of [in contradistinction to] all other subjects we know only as object”.