Agency and Ambiguity: From Beauvoir to Nguyen on the Existentialist Art of Videogames

Marilyn Stendera (University of Wollongong)

In Games: Agency as Art, C Thi Nguyen argues that agency constitutes the medium that game design uses and shapes, and therefore also the source of the unique challenges that it must grapple with in creating a work of art. This paper will place Nguyen’s approach in dialogue with another influential voice in the philosophy of games that, I will suggest, emphasises the importance of freedom, constraint, and self-creation in remarkably similar ways: existentialism. Since MT Payne coined the term ‘existential ludology’ in 2009, there has been significant interest in the prospects opened up by applying conceptualisations such as Sartre’s account of the situation and the project to the experience of the player making meaning as they navigate the game-world and the choices it presents them. In setting up such a dialogue, I want to focus on one philosopher associated with the existentialist tradition who has been neglected by existential ludology: Simone de Beauvoir. I argue that the account Beauvoir develops in Ethics of Ambiguity offers a wealth of resources for analysing the ways in which agency is enacted, encountered, developed, and experienced for both, the player and the game designer, and that the resulting framework resonates with and supplements Nguyen’s conceptualisation of agential gaming. This new take on the existentialist art of videogames generates insights about a range of important issues in the philosophy of games, including the role of ethics, mastery, and repetition in gaming and game design.

Bio: Marilyn Stendera is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Wollongong; she previously held positions at Deakin, Monash and Melbourne, where she also completed her PhD. Working mostly across the phenomenological tradition, the philosophy of cognition and the history of philosophy, she is particularly interested in time, especially its role in cognition and relationship to power. She is the co-author, with Emily Hughes, of the recently-published book Heidegger's Alternative History of Time (Routledge).