Ready Player One? A Response to Ricksand

I thank Martin Ricksand (2021) for the careful attention he has paid to my arguments that gamers are not performers (Kania 2018). Despite the (irresistible) title of this response, we seem to be involved in something more like a family dispute than a battle for victory. In the spirit of family disputes, I will thus (mostly) leave others who sit around this particular table to assess both the objections Ricksand makes to my arguments in the first third of his article, and those he considers in the final third to his own central argument. I focus instead on that central argument—Ricksand’s suggested replacement for my arguments in “Why Gamers Are Not Performers”—which constitutes the long central paragraph in his response.

If I understand the argument correctly, it could be summarized as follows:

1. Video games are games.

2. No game can be a work for performance.

3. Therefore, no video game can be a work for performance.

We seem to agree that from (3) it would quickly follow that no gamer (qua gamer) is a work-performer, since there is no performer role for them to play (qua gamer).

Ricksand is at pains to defend premise (2), but it is also worth considering premise (1). Ricksand seems to think that it is something like an analytic truth that all video games are games. But there is little agreement over the meaning or extension of the term “video game”—one reason why I hesitated to enter the fray over its definition in my article. One issue here is the definition of “game.” Though, like Ricksand, I am sympathetic to Bernard Suits’s account of gamehood (Suits 2014 [1978]), and will assume throughout that that account is correct, it is by no means uncontested. So, given the centrality of the concept of gamehood to his argument, I am not sure that Ricksand can be as open to different accounts of gamehood as he suggests. That is, even if Ricksand is right that no Suitsian game can be a work for performance, it is not obvious that all plausible accounts of gamehood will be incompatible with the possibility of games that are works for performance.

Putting the definition of “game” aside, consider some excellent philosophical work on the concept of video games: Three of Aaron Smuts’s necessary conditions on video-game–hood (2005, n5) could reasonably be read as implying that they are games. In Grant Tavinor’s definition of video games (2009, 26), gamehood is one disjunct of a necessary condition, and thus not necessary for video-game–hood. Berys Gaut, Dominic Lopes, and Jon Robson and Aaron Meskin could all be read as suggesting that “video game” is a folk concept in need of sharpening up. Lopes (2010, 103–8) argues that we should sharpen it up by making gamehood necessary; Robson and Meskin (2016) disagree, arguing that the more interesting category is “self-involving interactive fictions.” Gaut (2010), focusing sometimes on video games that are games, sometimes on video games that are interactive fictions (but may not be games), seems to think that different sharpenings will be useful for different purposes. One reason people are hesitant to make gamehood a necessary condition of video-game–hood is the existence of “sandbox” video games. These are video games that are not (Suitsian) games, for instance, virtual worlds with no prelusory goal, where one simply creates virtual artifacts.

Now, of course, Ricksand could simply stipulate that gamehood is one necessary condition on video-game–hood. (He says nothing about the other necessary conditions.) But then his argument might fail to engage with the nascent debate to which I intended to contribute. After all, as Ricksand points out, given his conception of video games, his argument is only incidentally about them—the central premise is premise (2), about the incompatibility of gamehood and work-for-performance–hood. Yet games (and works for performance) have been around for a long time, and no one (as far as I am aware) has been tempted to argue that any (non-video-)games are works for performance. It is only with the arrival of video games that people begin to argue that these “games” in particular are works for performance—and do so via the claim that (video-)gamers seem to be performers. It seems plausible, then, that something other than video games’ gamehood is motivating these arguments. This would explain, for instance, Berys Gaut’s substantial discussion of video games’ “automated compliance” in his argument that gamers are performers (2010, 145–6; see Kania 2018, 190–3). It also explains one of the dialectical moves that Ricksand takes me to task over. He argues that I beg the question by claiming that accepting that all gameplay (video- and otherwise) is performance is “less appealing than giving up on the idea that gamers are performers.” But the point of this move was that my principal interlocutor—Gaut—is clearly making a case that players of video games but not all games are performers.¹

Because I did not assume that all video games are games, I could not rely on Ricksand’s premise (2) to argue that no video game can be a work for performance, and no gamer a work-performer. But—assuming a Suitsian definition of games—is premise (2) true? Ricksand says his argument is that “the inherent [essential?] features of games and works for performance … are mutually exclusive.” In particular, he argues that “there is no role for a spectator” prescribed by a game, while a work for performance necessarily prescribes a role for a spectator.² But it is not clear to me that the latter claim is true. I am sympathetic to the idea that the kinds of works we have in mind here are works not just for playing but for performance. For example, Prokofiev’s Sonata for Solo Violin, op. 115, prescribes not only that someone play certain notes in a certain way on a violin, but that they perform that music, where the notion of performance requires the musician to play for an audience. But it seems to me that the audience in question is an intentional object. That is, as long as one directs one’s playing to an audience one has in mind, which one believes is in a position to appreciate one’s playing, one is performing.³ One reason this view is appealing is that it allows us to distinguish between mere playing (e.g., practice and rehearsal) and performing, yet does not hold hostage whether a performance has occurred to whether anyone was around to appreciate it. Such a view comports nicely with the general idea that objects of artistic (and related kinds of) appreciation are objective, in the sense that they do not require being experienced to exist.⁴

But suppose I am wrong about this, and that a performance does require an actual audience, who is at least in a position to appreciate it.⁵ I must admit that I am not sure I follow Ricksand’s reasoning from this point on. I detect three different arguments in the remainder of Ricksand’s positive case. Before we turn to those, however, we must consider what Ricksand means by “spectator.” In the preceding paragraph I have treated “spectator” as synonymous with “audience member,” but sometimes Ricksand suggests that a “spectator” is necessarily a “mere observer,” excluding the possibility that the spectator instantiates the work. If this is how Ricksand understands the term, however, his argument is question begging: If performance requires such a spectator, and a work is interactive just in case its audience (properly) instantiates the work, then of course no interactive work (e.g., a game) can be for performance. But now the contentious claim would be that performance prescribes a role for spectator (so understood), a claim for which Ricksand does not argue.⁶ As a matter of interpretive charity, then, I will continue to treat “spectator” and “audience member” as synonyms, that is, not to exclude the possibility that the spectator plays other roles (such as instantiator of the work).

Ricksand’s first argument asks us to consider a hypothetical example of a game in which (if I understand it correctly) one must figure out the optimal way of combining various musical elements (something like solving a musical jigsaw puzzle) as one performs those elements. The idea is that even though music is “usually thought of as [work-]performative,” this work is clearly not a work for performance: “Playing such a piece of music would not amount to a performance for the same reason that one does not perform Monopoly.” But here, again, it seems to me that Ricksand begs the question. The work he describes is, ex hypothesi, a game. It also prescribes musical performance for an audience. So why is it not a game-work for performance?

Perhaps because, moving on to Ricksand’s second argument, one appreciates an interactive work (such as a game) by (and while) instancing it, rather than “by observing a potential final product from the gameplay (for instance a recording of a playthrough).” I am unsure how Ricksand intends these considerations to apply to typical cases of musical work-performance. An audience appreciates a musical work for performance by attending to a performance of it (ideally, multiple performances of it). Such a performance need not be a “final product … for instance a recording,” if by that one means an enduring object: Live performances are ephemeral. But if ephemerality is no objection to something’s being the object of appreciation (or through which appreciation occurs), then why should a gamer be unable to appreciate a game by (and while) playing it?⁷

And so, we come to the final argument: “[P]erformances are communicative …, which video games do not seem to be (unless [it is argued] that video games are an essentially self-directed kind of performance art).”⁸ I agree that current, typical video games are not communicative, that is, in playing such a game one does not typically use it to communicate an interpretation of the game to anyone, including oneself. But it is not true that the only way to refute this claim is to argue that video games are essentially self-directed performance art. All it would take is to demonstrate that many video games are in fact works for self-directed performance. Of course, Ricksand and I are skeptical that such a case could be made. But Ricksand commits himself to demonstrating something further: that no video game could possibly be communicative. All it would take to demonstrate that that claim is false is a single, possible example of a video game that is a work for performance, whether self-directed or otherwise. Such examples are likely to be contentious, which is one reason I plumped for the weaker claim. But another reason is that I am not at all sure that such an example is not to be had.

Consider Ricksand’s own hypothetical musical game, in which the performer is required to assemble the very (instance of the) piece they are playing while playing it. And suppose that the composer of this work made it abundantly clear that a central point of the work is to put the performer simultaneously in the shoes of a composer, performer, and audience member: They intend to put the performer in a composer’s shoes by having the performer select and arrange the musical materials the performer plays. They intend to put the performer in a performer’s shoes (unsurprisingly) by having them play those materials for someone’s appreciation. And they intend to put the performer in the audience’s shoes by insisting that the performer be the very appreciator of these musical activities as they happen. Though others might observe the performer instancing the work, they are not in a position to fully appreciate it (says the composer), since it is an interactive work, to be appreciated by being instanced.

We might worry that this composer has read both too much philosophy (the piece seems more conceptual than musical) and not enough (they seem confused about the nature of composition). But it is not obvious to me that the composer has failed to create something that is both a Suitsian game and a work for performance. Moreover, it seems possible that such works will catch on in a big way in the gaming world, with the result that most typical video games are of this kind. If such a brave new world is possible, it demonstrates why my conclusions had to be so modest, and why Ricksand’s cannot be correct.⁹

Ready Player Two?

Footnotes

1

This point seems relevant to another of Ricksand’s subsidiary arguments (2021, n11).

2

For Ricksand’s purposes, of course, the former claim must amount not only to the fact that no games include a role for spectator, but that no game could include such a role.

3

For further discussion of the role of the audience in performance, see Kania (2020, 157–63), and the references therein.

4

For reasons of space, I leave the reader to explore how these considerations (not to mention larger issues about the relationships between artistic norms and ontology) relate to Ricksand’s comments about the role of the audience in musical works for performance.

5

Further problems loom: Must the required audience be in a position to fully appreciate the performance? If so, there are few, if any, performances of complex works of art.

6

Another problem for this interpretation of “spectator” is how to understand Ricksand’s claim that recognizing that games prescribe no role for a spectator “has the added benefit of obviating arguments to the effect that video games are self-directed performance works (since all spectators are ruled out, including those that also occupy the roles of performers).”

7

I am not sure if Ricksand intends to put any weight on the “while” qualification (in my formulation). I am sympathetic to the ideas that appreciation does not require “aesthetic distance” (e.g., Gaut 2010, 236), and that appreciation extends beyond direct perceptual or cognitive contact with a work (e.g., Lopes 2010, 90–2, 116–18).

8

Ricksand correctly attributes at least the first part of this argument to me, but I do not see how, as he also claims, the preceding argument (that the instantiation of interactive works fails to generate a “final product” for appreciation) is “very much in line with” it.

9

Thanks to Julie Post and students in my spring 2021 course Philosophy of Film & Videogames for helpful discussion of this response.