Games and the Good Life

Games and the Good Life

Games and the Good Life

Michael Ridge

Abstract

“It is widely agreed that play and games contribute to the good life.  One might naturally wonder how games in particular so contribute?  Granted, games can be very good, what exactly is so good about them when they are good?  Although a natural starting point, this question is perhaps naive.  Games come in all shapes and sizes, and different games are often good in very different ways.  Chess, Bridge, Bingo, Chutes and Ladders, Football, Spin the Bottle, Dungeons & Dragons, Pac-Man, Minecraft and Charades are all games, and can all contribute to a good life, but each will characteristically enrich someone’s life in its own distinctive way.  Some games facilitate socializing and sociability, other games improve physical fitness, some develop a sense of fair play and reciprocity, while others enhance concentration and analytic skills.  Asking ‘what is good about games?’ and assuming a simple answer is as naïve as asking ‘what is good about fiction?’ or ‘what is good about sex?’ However, a less naïve question and philosophically interesting question is not hard to formulate.  Plausibly, much of the heterogeneity of the value of games stems from the different kinds of instrumental value of different games.  Perhaps we should therefore ask in what ways the activity of playing games is characteristically good for its own sake. Unfortunately, the philosophical literature on the non-instrumental value of playing games is sparse. One of the few sustained treatments of the topic can be found in an underappreciated exchange between Thomas Hurka and John Tasioulas.  Interestingly, despite taking different views of what it is to play a game, they both make room for the non-instrumental value of play and achievement in game play and they both argue that these two goods stand in important an important explanatory relation. However, they take diametrically opposed views as to which of these good is more basic.  Roughly, on Hurka’s view, the good of achievement is more basic, and it is because of the non-instrumental value of achievement that what Hurka calls “playing in a game,” which involves playing (full-stop), is itself non-instrumentally good because of the non-instrumental value of achievement.  The idea is that if something is non-instrumentally good then loving that thing is also non-instrumentally good, and that playing in a game involves loving the activity for its own sake. In this way, the value of achievement in a game grounds the value of playing in a game.  Tasioulas takes exactly the opposite approach. He argues that there must be something independently good about playing a game which grounds the value of achievement in that game.  On his view, the typical grounding good or “framing value” of games is play itself – what I am here calling “playing (full-stop).””.

Reference

Ridge, M. (2021). Games and the good life. J. Ethics & Soc. Phil., 19, 1. https://www.jesp.org/index.php/jesp/article/view/1618 

Keywords 

Play, games, independent