Defining the Question

Jordan Magnuson's picture

Easier said than done. It is fine and well to decide to give video games a second chance, but what does that actually mean? As Lui notes, the debate over whether or not games are art stems partly (if not mostly) from the difficulty in defining art. My proposal is that, instead of limiting ourselves to one definition which might happen to suit our fancy, we look back over history and see how video games measure up across the board, from the mimetic theory of art to Formalism, from Romanticism and Expressionism to Anti-Essentialism and the Art World view. What would David Hume say about video games? Or Kant? Or Plato, or Tolstoy, or Danto, or Weitz?

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