Alex Fisher

The aesthetics of video games has as much to do with the player as it has to do with the game itself. The aesthetic values that players find in video games depends on the kind of attitude that the player takes toward playing the game. There are three distinct attitudes that players take when they play video games. I call these the goal-seeking attitude, the narrative attitude, and the dollhouse attitude. Each of these attitudes has a distinctive impact on the player’s aesthetic experience. There are certain qualities of games that appeal to one attitude or another, while there are other qualities that can be aesthetically transformed when players take different attitudes toward their play. The aesthetics of video games must account for how the game is crafted alongside the player’s attitude toward their play (2024: 3-4).

In this paper, I provide a new solution to the “gamer’s dilemma” (Luck in Ethics Inf Technol 11(1):31–36, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-008-9168-4, 2009) which is an open problem at the intersection of ethics and aesthetics: the problem consists in reconciling two widespread moral intuitions about virtual actions, i.e. that virtual murder is morally permissible whereas virtual paedophilia is not. To solve the problem, I apply a well-known notion coming from the philosophy of fiction, viz. imaginative resistance, which I adapt as ludic resistance. Connecting the two bodies of literature (the philosophy of fiction and the philosophy of video games) is original and, I argue, helpful: first, it solves the problem under discussion; second, it provides a way of looking back at imaginative resistance in an interesting new light. In (video) games, as opposed to traditional, non-ludic fictions, ”resistance” is interpreted against an implicit notion of agency.