What is it about?
English philosophy George Berkeley is primarily known for his idealist philosophy, which supposes that the material world is in fact insubstantial, being wholly the product of our imaginations. Berkeley goes as far as to suggest that, were it not for the constant watching of God, trees, buildings, and furniture would disappear and reappear with our blinking. This article shows how Berkeleyan idealism can be used to understand the representation of both space and time in digital games, which likewise are actively generated and destroyed in response to a player's active observation.
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Why is it important?
Ludologists have regularly written on the subject of time, including Mark J.P. Wolf ("Time in the Video Game"), José P. Zagal and Michael Mateas ("Analyzing Time in Video Games"), and Christopher Hanson (Game Time: Understanding Temporality in in Video Games). This article's application of George Berkeley's philosophy to digital games—along with that of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Henri Bergson—results in a number original interpretations of how players experience and affect time and space, both at the literal (graphical) and metaphorical level.
Perspectives
While aesthetically similar to cinema, literature, and painting, digital games are also distinct from those media in a number of interesting ways. As games continue to be treated as a unique medium, it can be enlightening to show how the work of past philosophers, which grappled with difficult questions of perspective, participation, and ontology long before the invention of the microchip, can prove surprisingly relevant to the media of today. In the case of subjective idealism, in which reality is instantiated by and with our looking, an abandoned philosophical system can find itself newly relevant. Perhaps what it required all along was the right object: not God's physical world, but the continual creation of the virtual.
Erick Verran
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Continual creation: Idealism, metaphor and the representation of spatio-temporality, Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, May 2023, Intellect,
DOI: 10.1386/jgvw_00073_1.
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