 Bioshock is deeply philosophical, at least that's what we're told. It's a deconstruction of the objectivist philosophy of Iron Rand, a theorist who valorizes the virtue of selfishness, and so what are the implications in the game? Andrew Ryan constructs an underwater city, no gods, no masters, and it leads to ruin. A supposed libertarian utopia is destroyed from within, as people, unbound by a petty morality, indulge their own desire for godhood. It also shows the difficulty of isolating any economy, as even though rapture is under the sea, goods are smuggled, and the outside inevitably interferes. And so then the gameplay tries to reflect this. We inject ourselves with all manner of plasmids in our quest to escape the city. We are confronted with conundrums aplenty as we are tasked with saving or harvesting little sisters. And then, well the whole would-you-kindly revelation happened. We have no agency, we have been manipulated from the start, just as we are in any game. But then how can the game critique the notion of pure selfishness, of pure agency, when it is incapable of affording players that very freedom? The little sister choices are perhaps the most egregious violations of its own philosophy. Because it isn't a real sacrifice, we get the same resource regardless. There is no altruism, there is no moral reflection, just strategic optimization. The lovely term Ludenarative Dissonance was inspired by Bioshock, when Clint Hawking critiqued the game for its incoherence between gameplay and story, system and fiction. The game has a philosophy, but it's not the philosophy of the game. There is a disconnect between the meanings at layers of resolution. Games are philosophical, says the critic. Soma explores the paradoxes of the philosophy of mind. Neurotomata is existentialist in its creed. Everything systemizes the worldview of Alan Watts, right? We see monist ideas at play as we move between different scales. We experience ritualized meaning as we act out cycles by playing games repeatedly. But then I present an alternative. Could you not just read a book? Seriously, if an understanding of the intricacies of a system of thought is what you're after, should we not just read Wittgenstein, Kant and Hegel? I suspect most will agree. Games are not the best medium for the communication of philosophical ideas. They are good at systemic representation, engagement, the aesthetics of strategic optimization and metacognition. And so comes our first distinction. Between having philosophy expressed through games and the philosophy off games. When we think of the expression, the philosophy of games, we think about how games have philosophical themes. But games have philosophical themes the same way any work of fiction does. Now, I'm not saying that crime and punishment doesn't interrogate deep philosophical ideas about the nature of evil, whether Metal Gear Solid 2 is in a powerful examination of the ideas of postmodernism. But this is philosophy as an aesthetic. I am talking about a different project with the philosophy of games, of understanding the philosophy of games as a medium. Funnily enough, the Would You Kindly Revelation is philosophical in this sense. It interrogates something about the nature of games using games themselves. Of course, this overlaps with the age-old question between free will and determinism, but it is also earnestly reflective about the nature of games as text. It is about the philosophy off games. Play is a field of study, a field of serious examination. Formally, it is traced to Johann Wazinger's book, Homo Ludens, where he argues play is foundational in the creation of culture, and takes place in a magic circle and bound by reality itself. We then have works like The Ambiguity of Play by Brian Sutton Smith, who argues play expresses itself differently in different cultures. However, pluralism gives way to unification in more recent work by people like Thomas Henricks. Games may involve play, but play doesn't encompass what games are. This begs the question though, what even is a game? Here comes our first question about the philosophy of games, the ontological question, the metaphysical question. Games are the voluntary imposition of unnecessary obstacles at Bernard's suits. Games have these six characteristics that just per you. No one can really define a game, said Wittgenstein. Interesting, we are back to philosophy proper. We can't segment games as an isolated discipline amenable only to its mode of inquiry. It is part of the philosophical canon. Wittgenstein says we play language games, the different fields of study have their own jargon. He also said we can only define things by their family resemblances. There is no sharp dividing line between one type of game or another. And so, maybe the same is true of games and philosophy. Games are philosophical, but philosophy is very game-like. Daniel Dennard argued many philosophers are engaged in higher orders of a game called commesce. A game played in academia where people invent problems to solve that are further and further removed from reality. Interestingly, in perhaps one of the most philosophical of books about games, The Grasshopper, Bernard's suits argues that in Utopia, we would just invent games for ourselves to play. Games are in close systems of meaning, just like philosophy is. However, these systems can map on to reality. They can reflect things about the world around us. What of the other fields of philosophy and how do they apply to games? What of epistemology, how we know? Ethics, what is right? And aesthetics, what is beautiful? Let's start with aesthetics for that is the easiest of questions. We have had books on the aesthetics of play that try to understand what makes games beautiful. Frank Lance has also thrown his hat in the ring and says that games are the aesthetic of thought themselves. They create an art form out of our minds at play. I for one am sympathetic to this explanation, but with a caveat. When we pose the question of the aesthetic of play, there are two words there, aesthetic and play, both of which are independent fields of inquiry. Play I have already covered, but aesthetics goes back to Aristotle and Plato who questioned the utility of art. The debate persisted and then reached a fever pitch with David Hume, Emmanuel Kant and Hegel. They disputed, what is beauty? Is it subjective? Can we peer into universals? Should it be instrumental? Modern aesthetics was birthed by these fellows and now we ask similar questions and just apply it to games. Again, the line dividing philosophy and games is broken. What of ethics then? And Miguel Saccard's the ethics of computer games. He argues games allow moral reflection by getting us to examine our own values. They allow for the formal modeling and instantiation of all those silly trolley experiments you learned in philosophy class. What is paper's pleas if not a trolley experiment? Of how there are sometimes no good solutions to ethical conundrums. What of the other theories of ethics though? We are told there is consequentialism, deontology, virtual ethics. Saccard advocates viewing games through a virtual ethics lens, how we can get players to cultivate virtues through play. This has a deeper history though. Jean-Pierre G. argued that children develop morally through the playing of games and Lawrence Colberg made this more explicit when he said play is instrumental towards moral development. The truth may be that philosophy and player actually fundamentally intertwined. The separation of these fields may have been the mistake itself. With the work of Derek Parfit, he argues all ethical theories are pointing towards the same destination, ascending a mountain from different sides. Perhaps play can help with this ascent. The epistemology of games is interesting in that every game, as Greg Gostickian argues, is defined by uncertainty. The point of play is to push through the uncertainty, to get to a place of stable knowledge by learning, inferring, and theorizing. Some might insist on reliving the debate between empiricism and rationalism, but games deconstruct this. Chess masters have memorized thousands of patterns, lines, and strategies, but they can never have all the information they need. Inevitably, they defer to heuristics or a more intangible thing, intuition. Games are fascinating in that they have led to the generation of philosophy itself. They inspire thought about thought. Games have led to the development of probability theory and understanding of the dynamics of human interaction and game theory. They even provide the subdomain necessary for the development of artificial intelligence itself. In fact, puzzles, a type of game, have inspired literary works, religious revelations, and treatises on math, as outlined in the book, The Puzzle Instinct. Games are what Daniel Dennard claims philosophy is, they are intuition pumps. In his book of the same name, Daniel Dennard argues that philosophy is basically a set of intuition pumps. He says, a popular strategy in philosophy is to construct a certain sort of thought experiment, I call an intuition pump. Intuition pumps are cunningly designed to focus the reader's attention on the important features and to deflect the reader from bogging down and hard to follow details. Of course, he goes on to critique this idea as they sometimes omit, obfuscate, and deceive, but the point still stands. Any student of philosophy knows the allegory of the cave by Plato. The Chinese Room Experiment, the Encomium of Helen, The Liar's Paradox. These are parables, analogies, sequences of action. Arguments expressed as an idea in a scenario or in a thought experiment. And so here lies the crystallization of my argument at last. Philosophy and games have a lineage that is intertwined and can inform one another, but they are both instrumental in that they function as intuition pumps. They prompt us to think about things we may never have thought of. In this way, Bioshock is an undeniable success. It gets us to question not only deep philosophical ideas about free will, ethics, and purpose, but also about the nature of games themselves. Clint Hawking may have critiqued Bioshock for its mishandling of its elements, but the very fact that it inspired such thoughts was a testament to its ability to provoke us to think. It is a successful intuition pump. Games inspire philosophy and philosophy is a game. This is the philosophy of games.