On What Makes Some Video Games Philosophical

1 Introduction

Considered a unique mode of expression for philosophical insight, the kind of interactive process encountered in video games has thus far been explored by only a relatively small niche of research. Leading voices on the topic of expressive interactivity – on the ways in which messages or insights can be expressed non-verbally through interactive processes – have necessarily focused first on establishing the possibility and actuality of interactivity as a mode of expression; this initial premise had to be established prior to fully addressing the question of how works of expressive interactivity (such as video games) might be evaluated qua works of philosophy. Even without an explicit evaluative framework, some video games just seem to be more philosophically valuable than others, but it is not clear exactly why that might be the case.

This article aims to stimulate conversation on how instances of expression through interactive processes (especially the interactive processes encountered in video games) might be evaluated as more or less philosophically valuable. I will begin with a brief review of prior literature on the subject of philosophically expressive interactivity in video games, give reasons why a framework for evaluating video games qua works of philosophy would be desirable, and outline two approaches to the evaluation of video games qua works of philosophy, ultimately favoring an approach which would judge a game’s philosophical value as an extrinsic property dependent on its orientation toward truth within an ongoing conversation. This approach will draw on conditions for philosophical expression outlined in Plato’s Phaedrus: Plato’s conditions can be applied to spoken, written, and nonverbal modes of expression alike, making Plato’s account of philosophical expression one possible “mode-agnostic” evaluative framework potentially capable of explaining the intuition that some video games are more philosophically valuable than others.

2 Procedural Rhetoric

In Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, Ian Bogost describes “procedural rhetoric” as “the practice of using processes persuasively, just as verbal rhetoric is the practice of using oratory persuasively and visual rhetoric is the practice of using images persuasively.”^[1] As indicated by the title of his book, Bogost is particularly interested in how the gameplay mechanics of video games can express nonverbal messages or insights through interactive processes; such messages are forms of procedural rhetoric. One of the many examples of such procedural rhetoric analyzed by Bogost is The Grocery Game, which “has a goal (save as much money as possible) and a set of simple rules (stockpiling and couponing) that constitute its procedural rhetoric”:^[2]

The Grocery Game makes two major claims. For one part, it claims that the grocery business relies on weekly shopping for higher profits. Playing for a month and checking one’s monthly budget against a previous month easily confirms this claim. For another part, the game claims that grocery shopping is fundamentally an exercise in spending as little money as possible.^[3]

Even if The Grocery Game’s claims were never made verbally explicit, they would nevertheless be expressed through the rules of the game itself; in this way, The Grocery Game expresses these claims through its procedural rhetoric. Throughout Persuasive Games, Bogost analyzes how other games with different rules can express various claims through their respective procedural rhetorics.

Among the examples of procedural rhetoric explored by Bogost in Persuasive Games, he is from the outset particularly critical of “serious games” which are designed as mere tools for some institution or another:

Educational games translate existing pedagogical goals into videogame form; health games provide doctors and medical institutions with videogame-based tools to accomplish their existing needs; military games help armies and soldiers address existing global conflicts with new, cheaper, and more scalable simulations; corporate games provide executives with videogame-based tools to accomplish their existing business goals…Such goals do not represent the full potential of persuasive games.^[4]

This category of “serious games” might include games such as America’s Army, a government-funded military recruitment tool with two major goals identified by Bogost:

On the one hand, as a U.S. Army recruiting tool the game creates a representation of army life that draws interested youth into recruiting offices. On the other hand, as a manifestation of the ideology that propels the U.S. Army, the game encourages players to consider the logic of duty, honor, and singular global political truth as a desirable worldview.^[5]

The “logic of duty” advanced by way of procedural rhetoric in America’s Army is found in the game’s integration of “honor” as a game mechanic: “While the use of abstract honor points may seem contrived at first,” Bogost observes, “the system bears much in common with the actual practice of military decoration.”^[6] Because the player is rewarded with honor points for unquestioning obedience to authority, Bogost finds America’s Army particularly expressive of the notion that “the U.S. Army recruit…is an apolitical being.”^[7] Ultimately, the message expressed through the game’s mechanics is a message intended to serve the interests of the institution which developed the game; it does not reach – or encourage players to reach – beyond the official positions of its sponsor institution.

Dissatisfied with the limitations of such “serious games,” Bogost suggests that other kinds of persuasive games might approach closer to exemplifying the full potential of the art form:

Persuasive games can also make claims that speak past or against the fixed worldviews of institutions like governments or corporations. This objection—which bears some resemblance to Socrates’ opposition to sophistic and technical rhetoric in the fifth century BCE—suggests that persuasive games might interrogate these institutions themselves, recommending correctives and alternatives.^[8]

One example of a game that critiques institutions through its procedural rhetoric is Lizzie Magie’s board game The Landlord’s Game, a precursor to the board game Monopoly. In an account of the origins of Monopoly referenced by Bogost as illustrative of procedural rhetoric,^[9] Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman describe how Lizzie Magie created The Landlord’s Game as “as a fun-filled vehicle for teaching the evils of land monopoly…The Landlord’s Game was distinctly anti-capitalist in its conception.”^[10] More specifically, Magie drew inspiration for her game from the economist Henry George, who “advocated a single tax on land alone to meet all the costs of government, a policy that would erode the power of monopolies to suppress competition, and therefore equalize opportunity.”^[11] When Parker Brothers subsequently released a game called Monopoly, strikingly similar to The Landlord’s Game with some choice alterations, the original anti-capitalist messaging expressed through the gameplay of Magie’s original work was changed as a result of changing the game’s rules. Salen and Zimmerman contend that Monopoly, a game otherwise almost identical to The Landlord’s Game, expressed a different message through the processes of its gameplay:

Because properties in [The Landlord’s Game] could only be rented [rather than bought or sold], there was no opportunity for domination by a greedy land baron or developer. Monopoly, on the other hand, championed the rise of the land baron and the art of speculation. Players were encouraged to exploit the financial weaknesses of other players to become the wealthiest monopolist, a conception of power in direct opposition to that explored within Magie’s original design.^[12]

The economic messages expressed by Monopoly and The Landlord’s Game were delivered primarily through “the language of the written rules, naming conventions of game properties, and the rules and victory conditions,”^[13] rather than through verbal propositional argumentation of the kind one might encounter in the writings of an economist. These games delivered messages through the processes of gameplay that people interacted with while playing by the rules; like the messages found by Bogost in The Grocery Game, these were messages delivered through procedural rhetoric.

In another particularly illustrative example of the potential of games to engage in social critique by way of procedural rhetoric, game developer This Game Is Haunted released the computer game Trash the Planet in 2021, wherein players “play as a group of raccoons who start out collecting trash and end up ruling the planet.”^[14] This Game Is Haunted categorizes Trash the Planet as a “clicker,” situating it in a genre of computer games wherein players accumulate virtual rewards through clicks of the mouse. The game’s media kit summarizes how interactivity is used by Trash the Planet to express a critique of capitalism:

You’ll play as the raccoons across five discrete acts as the world grows trashier and gameplay systems gradually build in complexity. You’ll begin by making small choices about where to allocate raccoons in your community, and eventually you’ll be manipulating an entire stock market to own the entire means of trash production on Earth. At the game’s climax, the moral and ecological debts of the raccoons’ actions come due and they have to decide what’s worth saving…In our minds, the addictive nature of most clickers is a direct reflection of capitalism’s constant need to devour and grow — what better game system to use to critique it?^[15]

In one episode of the podcast The Short Game, commentator Laura Nash contrasts Trash the Planet with a broader tradition of “educational games” which are “bummers from the start”:

If there’s a game that’s called “Don’t Be Evil”, a lot of those games make being evil feel bad, and at the end they’re like, “Shouldn’t have been evil!” But that was the point of the game. This game knows that the only way to make its point is for it to feel fun to be part of this capitalist machine—you enjoy this roller coaster that you’re on, and that’s the point of it, that it’s fun or people wouldn’t do it.^[16]

Co-host Nate Heininger suggests that for this reason, Trash the Planet may be more effective than the board game Monopoly in critiquing capitalism:

Monopoly—the board game, right?—was designed to teach people how bad capitalism is…By the end of it, everyone except for the winner is supposed to be having a horrible time, right?…But, because [the original rules are] so un-fun for people, everyone has a little bit of the house rules, or you just never actually finish a game, or whatever it is. So that lesson, of Monopoly, in a children’s board game—no one ever really got that lesson from it, I think. [Trash the Planet] does a good job of actually having that fun part where you’re winning, but then you get the lesson.^[17]

Heininger’s comment helps us locate Trash the Planet within a broader tradition of games as social critique that includes the aforementioned Monopoly and The Landlord’s Game. Whereas Salen and Zimmerman emphasized the ways in which Monopoly’s messaging departed from Magie’s anti-capitalist original (since it allowed one player to have fun from a game’s beginning to its end), Heininger recognizes a degree of anti-capitalist messaging that was still preserved in Monopoly (since the game becomes un-fun for most players by the end of the game). However, as Heininger observes, the expression of anti-capitalist critique through un-fun game mechanics ultimately repels players from playing the game by its written rules in the first place, preventing those players from receiving any messaging that might be expressed through its procedural rhetoric. On Heininger’s interpretation, both Monopoly and Trash the Planet express critiques of capitalism through interactivity, but Heininger here suggests that the latter game was more effective in delivering critique through its procedural rhetoric, primarily because it is fun even as it illustrates the most destructive aspects of capitalist accumulation and waste. In any case, Trash the Planet clearly expresses a message through the procedural rhetoric of its gameplay, and its messaging can even help us view other expressive games – like Monopoly – in a new light.

The examples of Monopoly and The Landlord’s Game illustrate that although video games are particularly illustrative and potent sites of expression through rule-defined interactivity, procedural rhetoric can be found outside of modern digital computers, as well: Bogost describes procedural rhetoric as “a domain much broader than that of video games, encompassing any medium – computational or not – that accomplishes its inscription via processes.”^[18] The medium of a board game like Monopoly can express something through the rule-bound processes that occur when people play it; the procedures in this case are defined (or inscribed) in a rule book written in natural language, rather than in a computer program that is written in code, but the processes that follow from those rules are nevertheless capable of expressing insights through nonverbal means. Nevertheless, the computer allows for rules to precisely determine interactive processes relatively independently of human players’ abiding willingness to “play by the rules” which might be found in a board game’s rulebook. Thus, the inflexibility of programmed computational processes makes the computer a particularly hospitable site for procedural rhetoric^[19] and investigations thereof. What follows will focus on the particularly illustrative case of philosophical expression through the interactivity of video games, setting aside questions of procedural rhetoric considered more broadly.^[20]

In “Can Video Games Be Philosophical?,” Thomas J. Spiegel argues that there are ways “in which video games are sui generis philosophical in a way that is special to them qua being a video game, and not merely derivative as a mimicking of philosophical practice.”^[21] Whereas Bogost draws from theories of rhetoric to describe the phenomenon of expressive interactivity, Spiegel describes this phenomenon through the lens of a Wittgensteinian distinction between “saying” and “showing”: philosophical insights verbally expressed are said, but the insights expressed through the processes depicted in video games are shown. ^[22] One illustrative example offered by Spiegel is Papers, Please, a video game wherein the player is forced to confront tragic dilemmas in the role of a bureaucrat:

Papers, Please is a game that forces the player to juggle different commitments…The player becomes uncomfortably aware of political and ethical issues like poverty, economical coercion, totalitarianism, and refuge…The game does not simply tell you outright that poverty is bad or that borders enforcement can be brutal…Rather, it shows the player what it is like to be in the iron cage of bureaucracy…This showing through the gameplay itself is different and, arguably, more effective than the mere saying.^[23]

In his discussion of some video games as philosophical qua video games, Spiegel explicitly focuses on the ways in which games like Papers, Please “allow philosophical insights through non-propositional means, an insight whose contents can, of course, be made propositionally explicit in a second step.”^[24] Thus, whereas Bogost accounts for video games as capable of expression through procedural rhetoric, Spiegel’s article demonstrates the capacity for video games to express philosophical insights in particular through their procedural rhetoric (although Spiegel uses the term “showing” to denote that mode of nonverbal expression through interactive processes).

Skeptics might be anticipated to suggest that Spiegel’s sharp distinction between showing and telling is ultimately a distinction without a difference. Indeed, verbal expressions within a game and the procedural rhetoric expressed through the game itself are typically complementary; the meaning of a game’s procedural rhetoric (e.g., that bureaucracy is like an iron cage) depends on verbal expressions and other symbols in the game (e.g., text and graphics situating the player-character within a bureaucratic setting), and those symbols are contextualized and given meaning by the processes (e.g., processes of bureaucratic decision-making) in which they appear. Regardless of this complementarity, however, there is indeed a difference between procedural rhetoric and verbal rhetoric in video games, because verbal expressions that occur in video games are always only a part of an encompassing process (defined by the programmed rules of the game), which can express its own messaging via procedural rhetoric. Verbal propositions are products, rather than processes; they are not interactive, in that they do not exhibit behavior that changes in response to various inputs or actions. The processes inscribed in video games, and the insights expressed through those processes, may indeed rely in part on verbal propositions expressed therein – as in the case of Papers, Please, wherein gameplay is constituted in part by simulated written and verbal exchanges between characters – but it would nevertheless be a category mistake to conflate the two modes of expression involved (verbal and procedural).

Aside from Bogost and Spiegel, another noteworthy contribution to the literature on philosophically valuable video games is Marcus Schulzke’s “Simulating Philosophy: Interpreting Video Games as Philosophical Thought Experiments,” wherein Schulzke observes that “video games can be interpreted as functioning like thought experiments even though they are usually not designed with this purpose in mind.”^[25] Given that such a re-purposing of interactive media constitutes a mere imitation of the use of thought experiments already common in verbal academic philosophy, Spiegel contends that Schulzke’s article “leaves the question untouched” of how video games might be philosophical qua video games,^[26] but the connection that Schulzke makes between philosophical thought experiments and video games draws attention to the edges of verbal philosophy which already lay tangential to the realm of procedural rhetoric.

Indeed, the counterfactuals supposed in thought experiments suggest rules of interactivity which video games might effectively instantiate: alongside Papers, Please and the Grocery Game, one might add the Trolley Problem^[27] and the Famous Violinist^[28] as blueprints for philosophical expression through procedural rhetoric. Both of these thought experiments have been extracted from their initial contexts in verbal philosophy as interactive artifacts in their own right: the Trolley Problem has inspired a virtual reality simulation for moral psychology research by Michigan State University scholars,^[29] and the Famous Violinist has been simulated as a physical object and submitted by Make Philosophy as an entry in the Critical-Creative Philosophy Game Jam contest on independent game publishing website Itch.io.^[30] These examples further illustrate the potential of procedural rhetoric as a mode of philosophical expression, reinforcing Schulzke’s connection between thought experiments and interactive artifacts such as video games. In turn, they also reinforce Spiegel’s contention that video games can be philosophical.

Ultimately, the aforementioned examples of procedural rhetoric all point to two modes by way of which philosophical insights can be expressed. Verbal expression is one of these modes, and it is the primary mode of expression currently occupying academic philosophical practice. Another mode of expression is procedural: the delivery of philosophical insights through interactive processes such as the processes enjoyed by players of video games. Such instances of expression through interactivity can properly be called “procedural” because they are governed by rules, i.e., procedures, which constitute the processes of gameplay. The integrity of such procedures is key to their expressive function: if one alters the rules of The Landlord’s Game in order to make it more fun or fair, then the message of the game’s procedural rhetoric – that capitalist economics are neither fair nor fun for the majority of participants – may be compromised. Video games are particularly useful in preventing such compromises from occurring, even when rule sets are vastly sophisticated, because those rule sets are precisely executed by a computer rather than agreed upon by whichever game player(s) happen(s) to be reading the rule book. Even when games allow for “cheating” of various kinds – like when raccoons in Trash the Planet have the option of cheating within the capitalist system in order to accumulate even more resources – such opportunities to cheat are typically a result of the way that the rules are written, rather than a result of players changing those rules themselves.

3 Seeking Conditions for Philosophical Expression

In addition to establishing the possibility of video games as vehicles of expression, Bogost also uses evaluative language to designate works of procedural rhetoric as better or worse approximations of praiseworthy ideals. As noted above, for example, he compares “serious games” designed in service of institutional goals to the pseudo-philosophical sophists of ancient Greece, in contrast with an exemplary Socratic approach which would take a more critical stance toward those institutions.^[31] In Plato’s writings, Socrates characterizes the sophist’s discourse as rhetorical and aimed at persuasion^[32] (i.e., at winning arguments), whereas the philosopher engages in dialectic aimed at the truth^[33] (regardless of who “wins” an argument); it seems that Bogost sees the expressions of “serious games” as more reminiscent of the sophistic type. Yet, despite his indication that some games are more Socratic than sophistic, Bogost responds to J. Anthony Blair’s and Sherry Turkle’s respective warnings against the propagandistic power of images^[34] and simulations^[35] by placing limits on the expectations that could be reasonably placed upon works of procedural rhetoric:

Even verbal arguments usually do not facilitate the open discourse of the Athenian assembly. Instead, they invite other, subsequent forms of discourse, in which interlocutors can engage, consider, and respond in turn, either via the same medium or a different one. Dialectics, in other words, function in a broader media ecology than Blair and Turkle allow. This objection applies equally to all rhetorical forms—verbal, written, procedural, or otherwise.^[36]

Thus, Bogost’s contribution suggests a reasonable expectation for would-be philosophical games as somewhere between propagandistic sophistry and the ideal dialectic of “open discourse” – typified by the Athenian assembly – wherein concerned parties might respond to each other as participants in a dynamic and evolving conversation. Bogost emphasizes the similarity between books and video games in their discursive (in)capabilities: the most which can be expected of such artifacts, insofar as they might play a positive role in Socratic philosophical dialectic, is that they might “invite” further discussion and debate.

In contrast with Bogost’s emphasis on similarities between verbally and procedurally expressive artifacts as concerns their philosophical value, Spiegel explicitly relegates video games to a periphery outside of “the ‘downtown’ of academic philosophical practice,” because video games “do not offer the same standard of philosophical research one can find in peer-reviewed journals” and because philosophy requires the “truth-aptness” of verbal language to express and evaluate propositions.^[37] However, it is not apparent how research and truth-aptness could account for the importance of Papers, Please as a particularly philosophical game; Spiegel acknowledges that the game “offers a practical simulation of moral akrasia through its gameplay mechanics,”^[38] but the simulation of akrasia ^[39] is not obviously related either to truth-aptness or to the trappings of academic philosophical research.

Bogost and Spiegel have carved out a space for the discussion of procedural rhetoric as a mode of philosophical expression, but this discussion is still in its nascent stages. Bogost has explained how games can be expressive qua interactive artifacts, and Spiegel has explained how video games can be philosophically valuable qua artifacts of expressive interactivity. Bogost has indicated that some games are better or worse than others at approximating Socratic dialectic, but he has not provided an account of what makes verbal “open discourse” the paradigmatic model of philosophy; Spiegel has suggested some reasons why verbal philosophy occupies a privileged position in academic discourse, but those reasons do not explain what it is about some games that demarcates them as more philosophical than others. Thus, we still lack an account of proper philosophical expression which would both explain the primacy^[40] of verbal philosophy and also demarcate some video games that are more philosophical than others. How might we understand the distinction between philosophical and unphilosophical (or pseudo-philosophical) video games? How might game designers engage in procedural philosophy (characterized by dialectic) rather than procedural sophistry (characterized by mere rhetoric) through the processes that they inscribe in their computer programs? Supposing (with Bogost and Spiegel) that some expressive artifacts are especially philosophically valuable, what could it be that sets them apart in this way?

A deeper understanding of what makes some video games more philosophical than others could be helpful for aspiring philosophers regardless of their choice of mode of expression (verbal or procedural). This is because ultimately, the question of what makes some video games philosophical will likely have some impact on our understanding of what makes anything philosophical; it will shed some light on underlying notions of philosophical value and clear the way for discussions about whether those notions are valid. In the meantime, an understanding of what is considered properly philosophical will help aspiring game designers determine whether a philosophical approach is what they aim to exemplify. Likewise, such an understanding could help academic philosophers to understand their own craft and more clearly teach that craft to students; to learn what it is for a video game to be philosophical, we will have to learn something about what it is for any expressive artifact to be philosophical, including academic research articles from students and professors alike.

If the expressions of procedural rhetoric can often “be made verbally explicit”^[41] – as Bogost and Spiegel do in their interpretations of games like The Grocery Game and Papers, Please (respectively) – then it might be possible to indirectly judge the philosophical content of those games by constructing verbal propositional arguments from such verbal explications. Thus, one could posit that a video game is more philosophical qua video game if and only if the contents of its procedural rhetoric can be used to construct a better work of verbal philosophy. However, such an approach raises a significant issue of ambiguity, as the quality of the resulting philosophical text will depend predominantly on the amount of effort invested by the explicator in transforming the original procedural expression into a verbal form. Even if the content of a given artifact’s procedural expression could be precisely interpreted, the form and style of a propositional argument derived therefrom would typically reflect the philosophical skill of the explicator more so than the contents of the procedural expressions that were made verbally explicit.

A more promising route to pursue would be to seek out a shared set of criteria which could account for the philosophical value of verbal and procedural expression alike, without first having to make works of procedural expression verbally explicit. If games occupy the outskirts of a philosophical city whose downtown is dominated by verbal academic research, then a common geography is implied; some games are authentically philosophically valuable, and thus closer to the downtown of philosophy, whereas others are not philosophically valuable, and thus further removed from that downtown – as determined by a shared set of criteria which can be applied to classify written and procedural works alike as more or less philosophical. The pursuit of such a mode-agnostic standard is the object of this present article: the task at hand is to orient oneself such that one might gain a general sense of the direction in which lies true philosophy, regardless of its mode of expression.

In attempting to explain how expressive artifacts may approach or recede from a standard of true philosophy, I draw inspiration from “Conditions of Personhood,” an article in which Daniel Dennett outlines some of the necessary conditions implied in moral and metaphysical notions of personhood. Ultimately, Dennett provides a set of conditions necessary for proper ascription of personhood to a creature, but maintains (in agreement with his interpretation of Rawls) that

The concept of a person is inescapably normative or idealized; to the extent that justice does not reveal itself in the dealings and interactions of creatures, to that extent they are not persons…Our assumption that an entity is a person is shaken precisely in those cases where it matters: when wrong has been done and the question of responsibility arises.^[42]

As with the requirement of justice as a condition of personhood, there may be conditions for philosophical value needed by expressive artifacts in order for those artifacts to be considered more philosophical. Dennett acknowledges that “human beings or other entities can only aspire to being approximations of the ideal [of personhood], and there can be no way to set a ‘passing grade’ that is not arbitrary”^[43]; there may likewise be a lack of objective boundaries delineating philosophical video games from un-philosophical ones, but it can still be helpful to understand the conditions which might qualify expressive artifacts better or worse approximations of a distant philosophical ideal.

The foundation of this article’s account of philosophical value is the ideal of truth-aimed philosophical dialectic as described by Plato’s Socrates, in contrast with merely persuasion-aimed sophistic rhetoric. In focusing on philosophical ideals as they are depicted in Plato’s works, I do not intend to presuppose “Platonism” as a fundamental or comprehensive account of philosophy as a whole. Rather, this article looks to Plato simply in order to suggest one plausible set of conditions which might account (at least in part) for the special philosophical value of certain works of procedural and verbal expression alike. One need not subscribe to Plato’s metaphysics, ethics, or politics in order to admit a general acceptance of his ideas with respect to philosophical discourse; this is evident from the number of philosophers who prioritize truth-aimed dialectic over mere persuasion-aimed rhetoric without subscribing to those more controversial of Plato’s doctrines. Plato’s account of truly philosophical expression has been favored even by non-Platonists; it may also prove useful even in the evaluation of nonverbal expression, as in cases of philosophical procedural rhetoric.

4 Plato’s Conditions for Philosophy

In the Phaedrus, Socrates aims to dissuade a young man (Phaedrus) away from the unphilosophical rhetoric typical of speechwriters like Lysias, such that Phaedrus might rather pursue the art of true philosophical discourse. Technically, Socrates frames his ideal here as “true rhetoric,” but the relevance of the Phaedrus to this article lies in its account of the kind of speech described in the Phaedrus and depicted throughout the Socratic dialogues as exemplary of philosophical practice – regardless of whether it is called “dialectic” or “true rhetoric.” The exegetical project of demarcating such concepts is beyond the scope of this article. Rather, this article will trade precision for clarity in its aim to distinguish praiseworthy philosophy from blameworthy sophistry, following Daniel Werner^[44] in de-emphasizing any distinction between “true rhetoric” and the dialectic approximated by philosophers like Socrates. It is also worth noting that while an understanding of Plato’s ontology may be necessary for a comprehensive understanding of Phaedrus’s account of true philosophy,^[45] such a higher-order account is not necessary for that account to be examined in relation to procedural or verbal rhetoric. There is a rich literature on interpretations of the Phaedrus and the philosophical style prescribed therein, but this article only seeks to point the way toward an account of philosophical expression which might help us evaluate works of procedural expression qua works of philosophy.

In “Rhetoric and Philosophy in Plato’s Phaedrus,” Werner enumerates three conditions for philosophical discourse found in the dialogue, including “knowledge of truth,” “knowledge of soul,” and “structural organization.”^[46] Werner describes the philosopher’s speech as interactive^[47] in its dynamic responsiveness to the soul of the interlocutor; expanding on this observation, I will consider together the first two conditions – knowledge of the soul and knowledge of truth – grouped together as conditions of responsiveness. In the Phaedrus, the Socratic philosopher’s discourse is described as a function of both the truth^[48] and the soul of one’s interlocutor;^[49] the philosopher’s speech is responsive to these factors, whereas mere sophistry is non-responsive.

The conditions of responsiveness to truth and to the souls of interlocutors provide a plausible account of contemporary academic research: these contemporary practices stimulate the production of compositions which are based on true premises and answer anticipated objections from possible interlocutors. Well-researched articles aim to be responsive to the truth; the coherence of an article with prior peer-reviewed investigations into a subject marks the article as more likely to be descriptive of an independently existing phenomenon, i.e., the common subject matter of an ongoing conversation of research. Likewise, a work of academic philosophy does not transform itself or its propositions in response to different readers, but rigorous research allows it to approximate a similar effect by integrating a large amount of evidence and anticipating objections before they are made against it; the kinds of souls^[50] to which an article is responsive are the kinds of souls who would advance objections such as are addressed in the article itself. In light of these observations, it would seem that the Platonic conditions of interactive responsiveness to truth and interlocutor can account for academic philosophy’s current position in the relative “downtown” of philosophy.

Can these conditions of responsiveness also explain why some games seem more philosophical than others? One might inquire as to whether the interactivity of a video game could likewise approximate the Socratic ideal of philosophical dialectic by emulating the kind of responsiveness that Socrates ascribes to philosophical speech in the Phaedrus. One approach would be to design an interactive artifact which returned different verbal expressions in response to player input such that it could simulate a philosophical discussion. Spiegel acknowledges this possibility, but explains how it is irrelevant to the discussion of sui generis philosophical video games insofar as it would express through “saying” rather than “showing”;^[51] for this same reason, this article will not linger on the possibility of such simulated verbal philosophical dialogues.

Nevertheless, a similarly dialogical video game could be imagined as a meta-process in which a game’s procedural expressions were responsive to the “soul” of the player as indicated through player input or play style. Forerunners and examples of such dynamic procedural expression might be found in role-playing games where a player’s choices can influence gameplay dynamics over time; the insights expressed through the gameplay of someone who has chosen to develop their character’s “stealth” skill, for example, might be very different from the insights expressed through the gameplay of someone who has neglected stealth in order to maximize their character’s skill in wielding heavy weapons. Combined with a process of intentional design aimed toward procedural expression of true insights, such works of procedural expression might thereby succeed in communicating differently to different kinds of players, approximating Plato’s conditions of responsiveness.

Regardless of the potential of such meta-interactivity in responsive procedural expression, however, the third Platonic requirement of structural organization presents a problem for verbal and procedural works of philosophy alike, to the extent that they would aim to satisfy the conditions of responsiveness. More specifically, Plato presents a problem for the aspiring philosophical game designer and the speech writer by stating “What we need are speeches that are neither long nor short but of the right length.”^[52] To the extent that a philosophical expressive artifact (such as a research article or a video game) meets the norms of responsiveness by containing within itself responses to multiple possible interlocutors, it must distance itself from the structural condition of “right length,” because it will thereby contain latent expressions (verbal or procedural) which will not be necessary for each situation in which the work of philosophy is received. A video game programmed to adjust its procedural rhetoric in response to different kinds of players, like a philosophical essay written to anticipate and answer in advance objections which could be made against it, could only replicate Lysias’s unphilosophical efforts to impress Phaedrus by repeating the same speech in multiple ways: as Socrates observes, Lysias “seemed to be showing off, trying to demonstrate that he could say the same thing in two different ways, and say it just as well both times.”^[53] Philosophical speech as prescribed by Socrates, on the other hand, knows when to leave things out, disqualifying both video games and research articles insofar as they contain responses to potential objections that will turn out to be unnecessary for the actual situations in which they are deployed – that is, precisely insofar as they meet the conditions of responsiveness.

Whereas conventionally coded video games and written works of verbal philosophy are forced into a tradeoff between the conditions of responsiveness and proper length, it might be suggested that a suitably trained generative artificial intelligence could “have its cake and eat it” by responsively generating a game’s rules dynamically in real-time conversations with its interlocutors.^[54] Such an artificial intelligence may be a possibility, but the tradeoff between responsiveness and structural organization is in this case replaced by a tradeoff between generative freedom and procedural integrity. Procedural expression is constituted by rules; computers are particularly adept tools of procedural rhetoric precisely because they act in strict accordance with programmed rules. To the extent that a generative artificial intelligence is freed from those rules – i.e., to the extent that it fills the role of the game designer rather than the game itself – it becomes less like a determined process and more like an autonomous person. Such a dynamically generated video game might be computational, but it would only get around the tradeoff between responsiveness and logographic necessity insofar as the processes determining its responsiveness are obscured as a “black box,” ruling out the interpretation of those processes as procedurally expressive of its developers’ philosophical insights. The possibility of philosophical artificial intelligence which might generate philosophical expression (procedural or otherwise) ultimately does not overcome the tension between structural organization and interactive responsiveness in an expressive artifact; such artificial intelligence would simply be a way of replicating or enhancing the human intelligence which already creates such artifacts.

Plato held promise as an avenue to seek out an account of philosophical value in verbal and procedural works of philosophy alike, but the conditions for philosophical discourse outlined in the Phaedrus have not shown that the content of expressive artifacts can account for the philosophical value of those artifacts. As indicated in Bogost’s discussion of dialectic, neither video games nor written works are effectively capable in themselves of bringing people together to discuss matters of truth and falsehood, right and wrong, à la the Athenian assembly; as has just been demonstrated, they are also incapable of simultaneously approaching the norms of responsiveness and proper length typical of philosophical dialectic as it is described and prescribed in the Phaedrus.

It would seem that according to Phaedrus’s normative account, both video games and academic research articles are to be relegated to the status of “amusements,”^[55] alternately translated as “jokes”^[56] from the Greek term paidia. Rather than creating such expressive artifacts, Socrates advises Phaedrus to instead “be more serious about these matters, and use the art of [conversational] dialectic”;^[57] has Plato thus directed us away from the pursuit of truly philosophical video games? Should we exile written and procedural works alike to the outskirts of philosophy, without discrimination?

5 The Product of a Game in the Process of Philosophy

While Socrates sets a high bar for philosophy in the Phaedrus which appears unattainable for video games and research articles alike, Plato nevertheless shares this teaching by way of a written work, i.e., the Phaedrus itself, which would seem to fall short of the ideals prescribed therein. Indeed, Socrates seems to confirm this in his description of the conversation with Phaedrus as a “playful amusement regarding discourse.”^[58] If the Phaedrus is paidia (i.e., a plaything, a joke, an amusement), then ought it be discarded as a potential guide for aspiring designers of philosophical works of procedural rhetoric? No – as a matter of fact, this apparent self-undermining of the authority of Plato’s written work points the way toward a clarified understanding of the role of paidia in philosophical education and the ideals toward which philosophical paidia might strive.

As Arthur A. Krentz^[59] and Timothy Ignaffo^[60] have observed, there is a deep connection between play (paidia) and education (paideia) in Plato’s thought. In Book VII of the Republic, for example, Socrates advises Glaucon to teach children through play instead of work^[61]; the Laws likewise state that

A man who intends to be good at a particular occupation must be surrounded by the special ‘tools of the trade’. For instance, the man who intends to be a good farmer must play at farming, and the man who is to be a good builder must spend his playtime building toy houses; and in each case the teacher must provide miniature tools that copy the real thing.^[62]

Thus, playthings in Plato are not always bad or useless; indeed, these passages suggest that they might be necessary in education. The Phaedrus sets high expectations for philosophical expression, but it does not go so far as to deny that playthings can have any value in philosophy; it only indicates that such amusements are not the ultimate goal of philosophy.

Socrates suggests in the Republic that “our children’s games must be law-abiding,”^[63] implying that there are criteria by which philosophical paidia should be judged. Recalling Plato’s emphasis in Republic VII on play in contrast with work as a method of education, law-abiding play should not be confused with a legalistic kind of play which does not allow for freedom and creativity. Rather, as Ignaffo explains, the lawfulness of lawful play consists in that “in playing [this good kind of paidia], one does not disengage from the world but rather engages in an intimate ‘conversation’ with their environment…it is coherent with how human beings naturally engage with one another in society.”^[64] Ignaffo here recognizes a parallel in Plato between “play-for-play’s sake” and “sophistic argument” insofar as the latter is undertaken “with the wrong orientation and the wrong goal (winning).”^[65] In this way, we come across another mode-agnostic condition of philosophical expression which might be applied to video games and research articles alike: philosophical works point toward a truth beyond themselves (either about the world or about the players themselves), whereas unphilosophical works (and poor works of philosophy) fail to point beyond themselves (often aiming instead solely at their internally defined “win condition” of persuasion in accordance with some pre-defined idea).

The criterion of proper orientation may seem difficult to define, but even in the absence of a comprehensively precise definition, it can help account for the distinctions which this paper set out to explain. Spiegel’s placement of video games at the periphery of philosophy, for example, can be explained by reference to the fact that compared to publications in peer-reviewed journals, they are typically relatively isolated artifacts, generally produced and presented as standalone products rather than as intermediary steps in an ongoing conversational search for truths beyond themselves. The “serious games” likened to sophistry by Bogost can be explained as sophistic insofar as they are not oriented toward any truth beyond the narrow concerns of the institutions whose values they express; instead of aiming toward truth or wisdom that transcends the definitions of the institution, they aim to persuade and manipulate in such a way that ends conversation rather than advancing it. On the other hand, a game like Papers, Please draws attention toward broader philosophical and cultural conversations on moral failure and the impacts of immigration policy. It does so not by filling the role of a person or interlocutor, but by functioning as one more expressive artifact which might be used by interlocutors to advance the broader sociopolitical conversation in which it is situated. It expresses insights and it raises questions.

A game’s orientation toward the truth is defined not solely in relation to its own processes, but also in relation to the dialectical context in which it is employed; this means that the philosophical value of a game is not entirely within the control of the designer. Thus, Schulzke’s description of the philosophical value of video games as “observer relative”^[66] can be generalized even beyond the games discussed in his article; it would appear to be the case that even when games are intended to advance philosophical discussion, they may be used as mere amusement for amusement’s sake, or they may be taken so seriously as to be mistaken for ultimate truth, depending on how the game is oriented within a broader conversation. Therein lies another danger, recounted by Plato in the Phaedrus, of expressive artifacts which might otherwise be considered philosophical: “When it has once been written down, every discourse roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it.”^[67]

Yet, this is not to say that game designers cannot therefore practice their craft more or less philosophically. To pursue truly philosophical game design – to approximate the ideal of procedural dialectic, avoiding the pitfalls of sophistry to the best of her ability – a game designer might, like Socrates, “pray to become” a philosopher who believes that her expressive artifacts “can only be a great amusement.”^[68] In Marie-Pierre Noël’s understanding of Plato, “written speech always has to reassess the primacy of oral speech to get philosophical value”;^[69] Mariangela Esposito might add the qualification that memorized oral speech must reassess the primacy of original philosophy,^[70] and that philosophy conducted through words (logoi) must likewise reassess the primacy of the truth at which it grasps.^[71] Likewise, the content expressed procedurally by a more truly philosophical game designer will at least allow – if not outright encourage – the player to move beyond their virtual world and into further inquiry in pursuit of wisdom. This is one sense in which a work of procedural expression can approximate Bogost’s ideal^[72] of drawing out further dialogue from other interlocutors.

In addition to crafting the contents of their games’ procedural expressions to be valuable in a process of truth-aimed dialectic, game designers are also capable of publishing their games in a manner crafted specifically for the time and place in which their games are released, taking on the ongoing responsibility of responsiveness rather than attempting to program it into their product. A game’s orientation with respect to external truths – and thus, its philosophical value – is not only observer-relative, but also author-relative; a game designer should not overestimate the philosophical value of their work, but for that very reason they should deliver it in a way that is responsive to its audience as well as to the truth, such that their interlocutors might be guided toward that truth at which it points – if, of course, they do in fact aim to approximate Plato’s philosophical ideals.

6 Procedural Dialectic

The norm of proper orientation presents philosophical dialectic as a process rather than a product. One can, no doubt, find procedural rhetoric in video games, and even procedural rhetoric concerning topics typically discussed by philosophers, but a Socratic dialectic consisting of procedural expressions would itself be an ongoing process; the moment a game designer stops using their games to point toward deeper truths, they cease engaging in true philosophy and return to the sophistical practice of mere rhetoric. As Esposito observes,

Both the philosopher and the sophist know that they do not know…but if on one side this pushes the philosopher to undertake a quest…on the other side, this same ignorance is where the sophist decides to dwell and perform his art.^[73]

In this respect, Plato finds commonality with the Nietzschean understanding of martial arts described by Michael Monahan: “The martial artist never expects to truly perfect his or her art; it is always and can only ever be an ongoing striving.”^[74] Likewise, the philosophical author of expressive artifacts does not take solace in the accomplishment of having created a “work of philosophy,” but rather looks (and points!) beyond her product toward further dialogue, lest she become satisfied with the amusements she has crafted.

This position’s comparison with Nietzsche also suggests a tension with Platonism: does not the idea of dialectic as an ongoing process of becoming – rather than an idea of Being – fly in the face of Platonism? In some ways, it may, but thinkers like Anthony P. Petruzzi^[75] and Hans-Georg Gadamer^[76] remind us to question whether such interpretations of “Platonism” are actually representative of the views of Plato. Although Socrates may be the protagonist of Plato’s dialogues, it is important to recognize that the dialogues are ultimately depicting processes of conversation, rather than simply repeating Plato’s teachings as finished products. Regardless of this qualification, the validity of this article’s approach to evaluating would-be philosophical video games is not dependent on Plato’s intent; Plato need not give us a comprehensive mode-agnostic set of criteria for philosophical procedural rhetoric, if he can only give us clues as to the way.

Ultimately, the relation between the process of philosophical dialectic and the products involved in that process (including research articles and video games) is analogous to the relation between procedurally expressive video games and the products (such as tools, signs, and propositions) depicted within those video games; they are complementary and their meanings are mutually conditioning, but they are different sorts of things which are not interchangeable. Characters in video games create and exchange expressive products within the context of the game’s interactive processes; likewise, philosophers create and exchange expressive products within the context of a process of ongoing philosophical dialectic, but these products are distinct from the broader processes. Video games can be valuable in the pursuit of wisdom, but neither they nor their written counterparts can be truly philosophical by virtue of their own contents; they can only be properly evaluated qua works of philosophy in relation to the context of dialectical interactions in which they are deployed and consumed.

7 Some Conditions Qualifying Games as More or Less Philosophical

If philosophical dialectic – whether procedural, verbal, or otherwise – can be categorized as more of an ongoing process rather than a static product, we can move past models which would categorize video games as philosophical in themselves and consider the criteria by virtue of which video games might be considered more or less philosophical as useful products within the process of philosophy.

Indeed, the very word useful brings us to a first condition in light of which video games might be judged qua works of philosophy. This pertains to the “use/mention” distinction commonly used in philosophy of language: the insight(s) expressed procedurally through the interactivity of truly philosophical video games can be used in philosophical discourse, rather than merely mentioned. Indeed, any expressions whatsoever could be mentioned in the course of philosophical dialectic, even if they are only being mentioned as examples of decidedly un-philosophical expression (e.g., the way “serious games” are mentioned by Bogost in his philosophical critique thereof). On the other hand, playing a game like Papers, Please or Trash the Planet challenges players to examine their life and draws them further into an ongoing process of philosophical dialectic, even in the absence of philosophical commentary which might happen to mention the games in service of that goal.

An orientation toward external wisdom, evident in or compatible with the expressed message and contextual release of the game, can be taken as another condition for philosophical value. An expressive artifact’s expressions can explicitly point beyond the artifact itself – as when Plato questions the value of the written word through writing – or it may assign more responsibility to the player for seeking truth beyond its virtual confines, but the message expressed in a philosophical video game, in any case, will not announce itself as an ultimate truth beyond which no further investigation is necessary. Thus, games which present themselves or their messages as complete truths are relatively un-philosophical.

This orientation toward external wisdom is closely related to the Socratic condition of responsiveness to truth, which is another criterion that we can use to distinguish philosophical video games from relatively un-philosophical ones. Whereas orientation toward external wisdom is more about the intellectual humility of a game’s expressions, responsiveness to truth balances the need for humility with the need to distinguish between truth and falsity. A game may be designed by a scholar or a layperson, but in order to be useful in philosophical dialectic, there has to be something true in its message. Trash the Planet and Papers, Please are responsive to truths about the ways in which power systems operate; through the procedural rhetoric of their interactivity, they express those truths in the style of their designers, and this makes them more philosophically useful than a game which was not so informed by true life.

Video games can also be properly categorized as philosophical by virtue of their responsiveness to their audience (as a game developer might think of it), or to the soul of their interlocutors (as a Platonist might think of it). They must be released in the context of a conversation which will benefit from their procedural expressions. Importantly, this often means that philosophical video games must also be fun. Thus, while The Landlord’s Game may have been a philosophical video game by virtue of its basis in the philosophy of Henry George, Trash the Planet is even more philosophically useful because its fun mechanics tailor the effective delivery of an anti-capitalist message to a target audience.

The idea of a target audience brings us to another condition for philosophical video games which we will mention here: philosophical video games have a defined target audience, and they have a relatively defined message, even if that message is never verbally expressed. Indeed, there may be significant ambiguity in the message, or it may be exceedingly difficult to be put into words, but in order for a game to be expressive there must be some idea or insight which it expresses. Philosophical video games, therefore, do not therefore try to be all things to all people; they are designed specifically for the effective communication of their message within their historical context, rather than attempting to “show off” like Lysias does in his lengthy, repetitive speeches.

None of these conditions need to be met intentionally in order for the game to be philosophical; video games can be created with or without the aim of philosophical engagement, but ultimately such intentions are neither necessary nor sufficient for a game to be philosophically useful in a process of philosophical dialectic. A game designed without philosophy in mind could be used by a philosopher to simulate or illustrate a thought experiment, for example, just as easily as a game designed with philosophy in mind might never actually contribute meaningfully to a philosophical conversation. That being said, a game is more likely to be philosophically useful if its creator takes these conditions into account as she designs, develops, and releases the game to its target audience.

These conditions are not meant to constitute an exhaustive list, but rather to start a conversation on how video games might be used to advance philosophical discussion, not only in academic philosophy but also with respect to the philosophical issues faced by millions of people who also happen to play video games. Fun, philosophically insightful video games could potentially even be more philosophically useful than verbal expression, for many of these players; the discerning philosopher will add the tool of procedural rhetoric as one more way in which she might advance philosophical discussions, all depending upon her intended audience and its particular dispositions and receptivities.

8 Conclusion

Starting from the notion of video games as capable of expressing philosophical insight qua video games – that is, through procedural rhetoric constituted by rule-defined interactive processes – this article has sought an explanation of why some video games might be properly considered more philosophical than others. The beginnings of such a possible explanation were located in the Phaedrus, an ancient text wherein the philosophical value of writing itself was similarly called into question. The inability of verbal and procedural works of philosophy alike to meet the norms outlined in the Phaedrus challenges the would-be philosophical game designer to see video games as helpful playthings in a philosophical process, rather than finished products which may be considered truly “philosophical” in themselves. Video games and written works alike can function as products which persons may use to express themselves within the context of an ongoing dialectical process.

Whereas Bogost posited dialectic as characteristic of a “broader media ecology” than the domain of a single expressive artifact, I have sought to further clarify the relationship between the process of dialectic, the persons involved in it, and the expressive products by means of which such persons engage with each other to further conversation. More specifically, I have further explained the limitations of expressive artifacts while recognizing the (albeit limited) freedom and responsibility of philosophical game designers to tailor their products such that they contribute to philosophical dialectic in the contexts in which they are released. With respect to Spiegel, I have qualified the sense in which games can be considered “philosophical,” suggesting that games like Papers, Please are philosophical not solely by virtue of their own contents, but rather primarily by virtue of their function within ongoing conversations of philosophical dialectic; this understanding of the philosophical value of games can account for the location of verbal expression in the “downtown” of philosophy while allowing for the special philosophical value of games like Papers, Please. Ultimately, my expansions on the insights of Bogost and Spiegel can be understood through the lens of Schulzke’s notion of the philosophical value of video games as observer-relative. Observer-relativity is a property not only of the philosophical value of video games designed for entertainment, but of verbal works of philosophy, as well. The role of such expressive artifacts in dialectic is not only observer-relative, but also author-relative, insofar as the author can determine the artifact’s orientation upon release by ensuring that her game’s publication is responsively suited to her particular audience.

This has been merely a preliminary exploration in understanding how insights can be expressed through interactivity in more or less philosophical ways; further investigation is needed. For example, questions remain as to how or whether properties such as the “truth-aptness” ascribed to verbal language by Spiegel might be understood in relation to procedural expression. Likewise, the parallels drawn by Schulzke between thought experiments and interactive media prompt new investigations into the history of philosophy through the lens of Bogost’s notion of procedural rhetoric: how have thought experiments historically expressed insights through (imaginary) rule-defined processes? As for the current article, I hope that this stride toward a mode-agnostic account of the philosophical usefulness of some expressive artifacts might help aspiring philosophers and aspiring philosophical game designers in their efforts to understand the ways in which video games can hope to be philosophical.