Aesthetic form, authorship, and discrimination: can video games be classist?

Contributing to the burgeoning philosophical aesthetics of video games, especially the ontology of video games, this paper argues that the medium is capable of a unique form of class-based discrimination. Building on C. Thi Nguyen’s framework of agential aesthetics, a central element of video game art is the scenario for practical reasoning set up by the goals, abilities, and obstacles presented to the player. However, when ‘microtransactions’—the opportunity to use real-world money to effect in-game conditions—are included, the real-world properties of the player—i.e. one’s access to financial resources—determine the kind of practical scenario one is presented with. The poor and the rich ‘see’ different artworks, and in ways not easily circumvented because this discrimination is intrinsic to the artwork itself, rather than due to social context. It is demonstrated that this lack of circumvention makes this discrimination unlike the kinds of classist discrimination seen in traditional artforms like painting, theater, or film, which are either reducible to some kind of propositional claim about class made by the artwork, or discriminating constraints on the accessibility of the artwork attributable to social organization rather than the artwork itself. The paper concludes by showing how this account further satisfies more demanding definitions of classist aesthetic objects, since the choice to include microtransactions expresses an affirmation of classist discrimination and potentially induces aesthetic cultivation which inclines the players to accept hierarchized political economic relations and dull, unsatisfying, and ‘grindy’ labor.

Duke Scholars

Author Emerson Robert Bodde DKU Faculty