Prolegomena to a Metaphysics of Video Games

The recent rise of this new form of ludic art, overcoming the obstacles that for a long time prevented games and pastimes – then considered cultural manifestations of lesser importance – from rising to the forefront of global economy and culture, is an absolutely unprecedented phenomenon that signals, in addition to profound economic transformations, a revolution in the way we understand the artistic, cultural and social role of games whose developments are only beginning to be felt. Indeed, they are part of an already established trend of progressive transformation of cultural processes into economically predicted and determined realities, but their distinctive characteristic, which is precisely unprecedented, lies in the fact that they are at the same time mass-produced goods, games endowed with interactivity and objects widely recognized as works of art by the public. Past mass culture realizations often exhibited some of these characteristics in isolation – for example, in a song one might find both the element of being an art object and its mass character, but not any interactivity, whereas in a board game one might find both its interactivity and its mass character, but not its status as an art object – but never or only rarely all three in combination.

In video games, however, we undoubtedly have the three elements present simultaneously. As is known, the logical systems that serve as the basis for computers and their executable programs have a primitive origin in the logic of Aristotle (without which computers themselves and, consequently, video games would never exist in a non-trivial sense of the term), but perhaps the philosopher's metaphysics is also of some use in helping us better understand the fundamental nature of electronic games through their direct relationship with the logic they presuppose and, indirectly, through their relationship with Aristotle's thought, which should not be surprising insofar as the philosopher himself, being a thinker of the structures, hierarchies and equivalences that govern reality, is in a privileged position to help us explain the metaphysical principles that underlie the activity of playing video games.

There can hardly be any doubt that most electronic games are art objects, and art, to offer a brief explanation, can be characterized as the human activity that aims to give expression to the idea of beauty. By its very definition, the act of giving expression to something presupposes an active role on the part of the one expressing something and a receptive role on the part of the entity to which expression is given, but this paradigmatic conjuncture does not fully contemplate the mutant capacity that exists in the world and in the objects that inhabit it. For instance, when a painter handles paint, transforming it into raw material for their painting, the paint does not merely offer a passive role, but resists and reacts to their brushstrokes as matter endowed with form, that is, as a physically existing object possessing certain sensory properties. Activity exists in all areas of the creation and interpretation of works of art, but it is considerably more pronounced in the appreciation of video games. This active principle also presents here a distinctive character: it is not limited to the subjective creation of meaning (as would happen, for example, in the appreciation of a painting) but modifies the form of the artwork itself, that is, interactivity, as the foundational principle of video games, actively creates and shapes – like an artist does – the work of art. This means that the characteristics – and, therefore, quality – of an artwork then become fluid and receptive, lacking, in a way, a given formal dimension, always awaiting the hand of the player which, like the hand of the artist, operates qualitative transformations that determine the greater or lesser aesthetic merit of the work.

From this one can easily understand how electronic games are radically different from all types of art ever created to this day, which begs the question: is there a sense in which video games could be said to be superior or, at least, qualitatively and aesthetically different from the great works of art of the past? The answer is obviously difficult and requires a critical assessment of this opposition between activity and passivity. On the one hand, the passivity of the traditional work of art allows the artistic genius to easily give vent to his brilliant expression without it being hindered by the potentially deleterious activity of the human receptacle, but, on the other hand, the activity of interaction opens up new possibilities that should not be wasted to the extent that they enrich the scope of possible artistic expression.

One thing, however, seems clear: given that the experience with games is recent, and that their process of deriving meaning is, in a sense, far more complex – due to interactivity – than that which exists and prevails in traditional art, the good use, the optimal use of interactive audio-visual resources must naturally be in a constant process of development since the possibilities are far too great to have been fully realized by the brief historical trajectory that ends today. Therefore, it is easy to argue that the art of the past is superior by virtue of its greater degree of maturity, but, at the same time, it suffers from the lack of a vital impulse that its decadent forms are no longer capable of expressing. Virtually all art today has been subsumed into the capitalist mode of production, which is to say that the purpose of a work of art is no longer the candid and disinterested exploration of the limits of human experience, but the creation of value in the commercial and economic sense of the term. The consequences of this have been mostly negative, conventional art has stagnated due to it, but in the realm of video games the new reality of interactive art – of game-art – adapts better to market demands and thrives where traditional art withers away and declines.

It can be easily established, therefore, that electronic games demand a high degree of player activity. This is not simply a matter of interactivity, even if inherent to the medium, since the participatory element also exists in other forms of art and entertainment. Someone watching TV, for example, interacts with the television, someone listening to music on the radio or any other device interacts with the radio or with the device, and a reader interacts with a book and so on. A video game’s active property, however, is a form of activity found at a foundational moment of the work of art, a pillar of its very existence. It is not merely the activity of interpretation, of decoding, the subjective creation of the artwork as an aesthetic phenomenon that exists in someone's mind, but a creation that takes on objective characteristics insofar as the activity creates the work of art as a selection from a limited series (or even from an infinite number) of possible configurations.

This is what previously I called the active principle of video games, which is a fundamental concept for their existence as artworks – their underlying reality. Through the experience of playing, the player, like a pair of scissors, cuts through possible realities, structures the elementary potency of the work of art and transforms it into a unique, irreplaceable and particular objective basis for subjective experience, that is, through the player's activity, the possibilities of the work are irreversibly (insofar as the experience of the work of art cannot truly be restarted from scratch) and singularly (insofar as each chain of actualized possibilities is unique) actualized.

This is quite evident in a game like Minecraft, in which the possibilities are innumerable and the player's freedom is almost absolute, so the structuring role of their actions is easily perceptible since the enjoyment of the game depends almost entirely on their creativity. However, even in a game like a kinetic novel the fundamental role of the player's activity can still be recognized. In a traditional novel, the reader may read with greater or lesser speed, with a greater or lesser level of attention, over a greater or lesser number of days etc., but the moment the act of reading is interrupted, the existence of the work of art as a linear subjective experience in the individual's mind momentarily ceases, only to return when reading resumes. In a kinetic novel, however, the subjective experience of the artwork continues even when reading is interrupted, and the player's attention, which must be divided between the textual, musical and visual elements displayed on the screen, can hardly fully appreciate the range of actualizable symbolic, semantic and aesthetic possibilities that this small audiovisual universe presents even in a brief moment in time. The player, therefore, must actively divide their attention between each of these competing elements, thus being forced to play a more active role than they themself recognize or admit.

It is true that games did not invent this principle: it already existed in the art of the past in the form of interactive art, but what previously had only a very secondary cultural relevance is transformed, through games, into a founding element of contemporary culture and mentality, into a way of being and acting that displays the potential to resignify our world.

It becomes clear, then, through the fully visible and undeniable potential of video games, that all their transformative capacity, their global cultural power, stems from a simple principle, the now augmented activity of the individual, their potentiated and amplified power.

The way electronic games increment the individual's potency is through joy. Unlike conventional art, in which the idea of beauty is expressed in a pure, unmixed way, and therefore in a more liberal and daring manner, in games the idea of beauty is typically subjected to the ludic character of the joy of playing. Thus, the object of the game-art is ludic beauty, that is, beauty in which there is the inalienable character of ludicity.

The practical consequences of this fact by which, on the one hand, there is the playing with its ludic dynamics, and on the other art with its transcendental ambitions – ambitions of representing and encompassing totality itself, of representing and encompassing what lies beyond being –, are, for the game, its transformation into something more serious and, for art, its final subjection to the meaning-giving capacity of the human receptacle of the work of art, that is, of the appreciator of the artwork. This process through which the work of art comes to have its quality determined by the very characteristics of the receptacle has a double meaning: on the one side, the limitations of the individual diminish the scope and aesthetic capacity of the artwork, potentially masking greatness where it was intended to exist, but, on the other, they also allow self-discovery in a way that traditional art would hardly be able to achieve. Thus, the game-art is also a kind of art that is turned inward, a means through which the subject reflects first on themself, then on others and the world around them.

Having briefly explained the peculiarities of beauty as it appears in video games, it is now necessary to examine in more detail how it contrasts with beauty as it appears in conventional art. Obviously, when I call beauty, as it appears in traditional art, passive, and beauty as it appears in games active, I do not intend to introduce an absolute qualification, but merely a comparison. Strictly speaking, all beauty is active insofar as it is the actualization of a potency of the subject carried out by the subject itself, that is, it is the power-to-feel-beauty-in-such-a-way that becomes the effective feeling of beauty in such a way. But the work of art that is also a game introduces a new variable into beauty, namely, the conscious creative capacity of the human receptacle of the work of art as a subjective experience, which marks the transformation of beauty from a more or less passive principle into a decidedly active principle.

That this is the primary characteristic of games as art is proven once again by the example of Minecraft when we consider the fact that this game, the best-selling of all time (if we disregard Tetris, as it is not strictly a game-art, but a simple game), is based exclusively on the magnification of the individual's power through the creation of virtual realities within the context of a permissive, highly mobile, fluid and liberal game-universe. The second best-selling game-art of all time, Grand Theft Auto V, presents the same characteristics: a fluid, permissive and liberal universe in which the individual – that is, the appreciator of the work of art – finds themself capable of exploring the possibilities of aesthetic experience that unfold before them and that are actualized by their will.

In Minecraft, specifically, beauty in the work consists simultaneously of the player's creations, which give vent to their desire for beauty, the randomly generated world that precedes the player's intervention and, finally, the harmonious fusion of these two. It is in this last aspect, much more than in the other two taken in isolation, that the beauty of the work truly manifests itself, since Minecraft's approximation to beauty occurs above all and first and foremost – that is, in a primordial way – through the presentation of an implicit idea about man and nature. Indeed, it is absolutely implicit in Minecraft not only that Steve – the "human" protagonist of the game and, therefore, the symbolic representative of mankind – should live in harmony with nature (because, if the player tried to destroy the world as it appears in the game, he would never succeed in this endeavor, since the game’s world is infinite and cannot be destroyed in such a way), but also that this harmony occurs through contrasts, through dialectical oppositions. On the one hand, it is necessary to modify nature to play the game, but, on the other hand, this modification never truly goes against nature in a way that would cause it to react and definitively turn against the player's presence and potential. If the player dies, he simply respawns and, in a way, begins his journey again.

All beauty is the manifestation of an idea. Beauty is nothing more than a sensible manifestation of the intelligible and, in this sense, it (beauty made real through the potency of matter) is, so to speak, the copy before the copy itself, if, like Plato, we understand that the sensible world is a "copy" of the intelligible world. Beauty approximates the real to the ideal, and it is the task of art to achieve this approximation. In the case of Minecraft, the implicit theses about the nature of man and the world around him are the pillar of this approximation, they are the intellectual root that transforms the game from a simple game into a game-art.

Insofar as ludic beauty demands action, and action, as is known, is, in a way, the enemy of reflection, the capacity of this form of beauty to translate the greatest ambitions of the human soul has been, until today, limited. The flight of ludic beauty is much lower, slower and more clumsy than the flight of its older sibling, contemplative beauty. Ludic beauty is, so to speak, a beauty of praxis for which theoria is still lacking, while contemplative beauty is a beauty of theoria that almost entirely dispenses with praxis. The subordination of praxis to theoria in traditional art allowed for an unprecedented broadening of the horizon of humankind, but this broadening was, as is evident, primarily theoretical, mental, hypothetical, noetic, ideal. That is why it is only very unfair to consider games as a kind of virtual prison, one’s "small piece of the Matrix", in the expression of a contemporary writer, since it is only in video games that the activity of the human receptacle of the work of art as a subjective experience abandons the field of theoria and definitively enters the field of praxis.

Video games were created at a paradoxical time when, in one respect, there is the apparent – and to a great extent real – liberation of the individual from the bonds of tradition and custom, but, in another, the unyielding tyranny of technology is accentuated and imposed like never before. They are, therefore, a product of this ambiguity and contradiction: simultaneously the effect of a relentless rationalization and a manifestation of revolt against that very process. It is no coincidence that so many subversive people of our time and the recent past have and had such a profound relationship with video games. In them the potency of matter is stirred, in them we can clearly feel its creative capacity insofar as the game, the very act of ludicity, being a becoming of the materially real, seeks the perfection of the form it lacks. Every game is a search for the finality of form in which the very lack of form is the motivation for the process of becoming: chess constantly seeks the form of the checkmate, a visual novel seeks the true ending and so on. The potency of matter, which is both in the game and in the player – that is, the mobile, mutable, fluid, plastic and malleable property of a transitory nature –, this is what speaks louder than anything else in the experience of the game and, consequently, in the experience of the game-art.

The pursuit of the perfection of form reflects the individual's desires, giving them an active expression. Through this, the subject becomes accustomed to acting upon the world, to the magnification of their potency, soon demanding its transformation into the ultimate type of act, that is, its effective manifestation in the "real world", beyond the virtual world, but, unable to give vent to their desires in this way, since the reality outside of games is, in a way, hostile and tends to appear vis-à-vis games as an impediment, as an anti-dream, the very antithesis of the amplification of power carried out by the game-art (or, in other words, as a negation or diminution of potency), they naturally transfer their impulse, their desire for the magnification of potency, to another sphere of social life. This sphere is the internet and, to a great extent, it is because of video games that it is so thriving. The development of games presents as a parallel phenomenon the development of social life on the internet. To each great step taken in the development of games corresponds a leap in the development of internet culture. The function of the internet as an alternative platform for social life thus becomes, in this sense, that of providing an outlet for desires and frustrations that cannot be actualized (or resolved) in the "real world".

The natural consequences of this process are a profound cultural transformation that we are only beginning to experience and understand. In the future, as the offline and online worlds merge and become increasingly indistinguishable from one another, it is possible that the magnification of potency afforded by the game-art will become increasingly difficult to contain and obfuscate, that the realization in the “real-world” of desires conceived and potentiated in games and by games will become an unavoidable reality – that is, that social life on the internet and social life outside the internet will become one, and that video games will play a fundamental role in it.

In this sense, it is beneficial to return, once again, to the unsurpassed example bequeathed to us by the Greeks. Truly, the Hellenes had certain ways of being that even today can still serve as an inspiration and an ideal for us. Every Hellenist, every scholar of ancient Greece teaches and agrees that Greek existence, as it unfolded in the classical period, was determined by two fundamental desires: the will to participate individually in the civic political duties and the desire to manage the economic and budgetary life of the city, but it is necessary to go beyond these observations and realize that in Greek social life there was something ludic – and not just liberal –, and that this ludic element would be impossible without the liberal element and that the liberal would be impossible without the ludic. We can see this very clearly, for example, in the typically Greek appreciation of sport. The Hellenics, inventors of the Olympic Games, were also the inventors of the gymnasiums and, of all the ancient peoples, they were the ones who most developed physical practice. The Greek appreciation for play and competition, however, does not stop at the realm of muscular sport, but goes far beyond it and manifests itself in an even more characteristic way in the noetic, aesthetic and dialectical spheres than in any other. In all the discursive arts developed by the ancient Hellenes shines through an intense pleasure felt in competition and dispute, in the intellectual "sport" played with the brain rather than with the muscles of the legs or the arms. Whether in dialectics (which, among the Greeks, was considered the most serious and the least exhibitive of all the arts of discourse), in eristics (the most heated and violent) or in the rhetoric (the most superficial), the notion always remains that it is necessary to win something, that the process through which one wins or loses is like a game and that this type of game is not just a game, but has serious consequences that the citizens of the polis understood very well.

Let us now look at what the Greeks called agonistics. According to Mário Ferreira dos Santos, "it was divided into endeietic and anatreptic. The first offered the rules for asserting propositions, while the second offered the way to counter them”. This means that, long before the invention of Valorant or CS:GO, the Greeks already knew what we now call “meta”, that is, the most efficient standard strategy for achieving victory. All this preoccupation with debate, with the game, with dispute, with victory, reveals an individualistic culture in which man is endowed with autonomy, with an unparalleled, unimpeded, free, active, pleasurable and playful productive capacity. The Greek man is a man who sees his own world as a challenge that can be overcome, as a sum of hidden potencies that can be actualized, depending on his will, favorably – in short, as a game. Everything in his universe is ludic and receptive to form. In politics, even practices like ostracism (in which someone could be banished from the city for ten years each year, depending on the outcome of the popular vote) and, most notably, the trial with the defense and prosecution sides, resemble a game and can only resemble it to the extent that the Hellenic citizen values the establishment of the balanced rule, of the "golden mean" as it appears, for example, in the ethics of Plato and Aristotle.

The Greeks knew perfectly well how to channel their impulses and their will to power towards the constant promotion of a wellness that is ever-growing. They had what we could call a “meta” – in the gamer sense – for life itself! A people as magnificent as this offers us a lesson that is even difficult to grasp. We have before us, in the form of the internet and video games, an unprecedented magnification of our power – of our possibilities – and we don't know what to do with it. We are constantly searching for new websites, new friendships, new memes, new games, all of it without ever achieving something that truly enriches us and makes us say to ourselves: "yes, it was worth it: the internet, games, the digital world, all of it was and remains worth it". On the contrary, we play games competitively and come away frustrated from the encounters that occur in the game, we open our hearts on the internet and are often humiliated or, at the very least, misunderstood, we form friendships that we believe to be true and then, one day, our "friends" disappear without explanation. A very elementary analysis of the internet is enough to conclusively show that it is no longer experiencing its most culturally vibrant period, and to some extent, at least, perhaps this can also be said of video games.

The lesson the Greeks have to teach us is nothing less than the overcoming of our own nihilism as a civilization – a lesson, I repeat, extremely difficult to internalize and even more difficult to put into practice. Since the advent of the new possibilities of being opened up by the dawn of modernity, we have constantly sought something that might once again fill the void left on the altar of our civilization, a void created by the collapse of the old idols – God, homeland, ancestry etc. At the end of his life, interested as well in the way the Greeks creatively and playfully dealt with existence, especially with the challenges and vicissitudes of existence, Michel Foucault coined the term "aesthetics of existence" to describe this aspect of the Greek genius. Now, the aesthetics of existence is something that perfectly aligns with the possibilities opened up by video games as art and by the player as, so to speak, a player-artist. It is necessary to conceive games and, most of all, the experience of playing games as “aesthetics of existence”, as life that is art and art that is life. It must be said: we are not up to the task of fully embracing both the possibilities of being that history makes conceivable – because what was can very well, if we so desire, be again – as well as the possibilities of being opened up by the technical reality of video games and the internet. We must, finally, take a qualitative leap towards the unknown and rise to the occasion. We must seize the day and allow the forces that we have unleashed to reach their maximum level of development, which means finding ourselves, becoming subjects and not objects of the historical processes. The forces unleashed at the dawn of modernity compel us to create a new way of being. This is the only way out. This is the only overcoming of the eternal midnight of modernity. Is it too much to ask that these processes reach the best possible conclusion among all imaginable outcomes? Yes, but this plea must be made. For love, this plea must be made!