Conor Spence

In his recent response to my article, Andrew Kissel presented a thought-provoking critique of my emergentist ontology of video game weapons. In that article, I argued that guns in the looter-shooter game Destiny 2 are emergent entities borne out of an underlying assemblage. They are, therefore, entities that exist because of the computational infrastructures that produce them, but are ontologically parallel, rather than ontologically equivalent to them. In this response I will address three core concerns raised by Kissel (2025). First, that possessing causal powers is the basis for my claim that video game weapons ought to be treated as entities in their own right. Second, that the causal powers of weapons are overdetermined by the technical structure of the assemblage. Third, that the relationship between the gun and the assemblage remains ambiguous.

The objects we encounter in platformised video games like Destiny 2 pose a challenge to philosophical theorisations of the object. For platformised video game objects, their phenomenological position is not spatio-temporally contiguous with the underlying systems leading to their emergence on-screen. While philosophers and media theorists tend to view such objects as simulations, fictions, or data objects that appear within game spaces, comparatively little thought has been given to the ontology of such objects. In this paper I develop an emergentist approach that emphasises the embeddedness of these objects within platform-architectures. I argue that these objects should be viewed as emergent objects that are ontologically contingent on the interrelations occurring between different components of the platform-assemblage yet separate to them.

The objects we encounter in platformised video games like Destiny 2 pose a challenge to philosophical theorisations of the object. For platformised video game objects, their phenomenological position is not spatio-temporally contiguous with the underlying systems leading to their emergence on-screen. While philosophers and media theorists tend to view such objects as simulations, fictions, or data objects that appear within game spaces, comparatively little thought has been given to the ontology of such objects. In this paper I develop an emergentist approach that emphasises the embeddedness of these objects within platform-architectures. I argue that these objects should be viewed as emergent objects that are ontologically contingent on the interrelations occurring between different components of the platform-assemblage yet separate to them.