This collection of essays is devoted to the philosophical examination of the aesthetics of videogames. Videogames represent one of the most significant developments in the modern popular arts, and it is a topic that is attracting much attention among philosophers of art and aestheticians. As a burgeoning medium of artistic expression, videogames raise entirely new aesthetic concerns, particularly concerning their ontology, interactivity, and aesthetic value. The essays in this volume address a number of pressing theoretical issues related to these areas, including but not limited to: the nature of performance and identity in videogames; their status as an interactive form of art; the ethical problems raised by violence in videogames; and the representation of women in videogames and the gaming community. The Aesthetics of Videogames is an important contribution to analytic aesthetics that deals with an important and growing art form.
| Acknowledgments |
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vii | |
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1 | (8) |
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2 Ontology and Transmedial Games |
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9 | (15) |
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3 Videogames as Neither Video nor Games: A Negative Ontology |
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24 | (18) |
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4 Videogame Ontology, Constitutive Rules, and Algorithms |
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42 | (18) |
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5 Appreciating Videogames |
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60 | (18) |
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6 The Beautiful Gamer? On the Aesthetics of Videogame Performances |
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78 | (17) |
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7 Videogames and Creativity |
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95 | (17) |
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8 Interactivity, Fictionality, and Incompleteness |
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112 | (16) |
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9 Why Gamers Are Not Narrators |
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128 | (18) |
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10 Videogames and Virtual Media |
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146 | (15) |
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11 Videogames and Gendered Invisibility |
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161 | (20) |
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12 Games and the Moral Transformation of Violence |
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181 | (17) |
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13 Videogames and the "Theater of Love" |
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198 | (14) |
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14 Pornographic Videogames: A Feminist Examination |
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212 | (16) |
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| List of Contributors |
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228 | (3) |
| Index |
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231 | |
Jon Robson is a Teaching Associate at the University of Nottingham, UK. He is the co-editor of Aesthetics and the Sciences of the Mind and Co-author of A Critical Introduction to the Metaphysics of Time. He has contributed to the Routledge Companion to Comics.
Grant Tavinor is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Lincoln University, New Zealand. He is the author of The Art of Videogames and has contributed essays to The Routledge Companion to Games Studies and The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics.
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