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Freedom and the value of games

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Jonathan Gingerich
Jonathan Gingerich*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
*
E-mail: jgingerich@humnet.ucla.edu
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Abstract

This essay explores the features in virtue of which games are valuable or worthwhile to play. The difficulty view of games holds that the goodness of games lies in their difficulty: by making activities more complex or making them require greater effort, they structure easier activities into more difficult, therefore more worthwhile, activities. I argue that a further source of the value of games is that they provide players with an experience of freedom, which they provide both as paradigmatically unnecessary activities and by offering opportunities for relatively unconstrained choice inside the ‘lusory’ world that players inhabit.

Keywords

Aestheticsethicsgamesfreedomachievement
Type
Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 48 , Issue 6 , December 2018 , pp. 831 - 849
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Journal of Philosophy 2017

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