Video Game Philosophy
‘Gaming Under the Influence’
What is this stuff?
We use Neo-Thomistic philosophy [Lagrange, Maritain, Grenier] to interpret video games and their place in the world. This project began as an addition on gaming to Jacques Maritain’s “Art and Scholasticism”, which is the greatest inspiration behind Green Dragon CVR. It can be read here in full. Maritain holds, though “the perception of the beautiful takes place without discourse and without any effort of abstraction, [that] conceptual discourse [and the study and rational explication of works of art] can nevertheless play an immense [dispositive and material role] in the preparation for this act”. We perform such study and explication (while drinking and swearing a bit) to uncover the “brilliance of form and the light of being” in video games.
Why does any of it matter?
To decide if games are art, we must invoke an aesthetic, ethics and ontology. What is beauty? What is art? What relation does art have to human nature… and to reality at large? The dispute over games as art is, therefore, a “battleground for the human mind, where humanity is won or lost” (as [creator of Disco Elysium] Robert Kurvitz opines). The participant in the debate is forced into a stance on being: what is human, beautiful and real.
Further, if games are art, then they are its most advanced phase, which “effaces the contradiction between the real and imaginary”; in games we “penetrate and occupy the very subject-coordinates of the signified thing”.
