The Art of Games

The Art of Games: The Philosophy of Games and Game
Design.
Games look to be the dominant art form of the 21st
century. From an economic perspective, the video
game industry is now larger than both films and
music combined, and there is a large segment of
the population for whom such games are their
primary pastime. But beyond video games, there has
been an explosion of interest in tabletop gaming,
from pen and paper roleplaying games inspired by
Dungeons and Dragons, to wargames and boardgames
that experiment with a vast range of themes and
mechanics. However, though games have achieved a
sort of cultural hegemony, they remain
under-explored by philosophers and art theorists,
who prefer to use the vocabulary of 'play' to
describe more perennial practices and mediums.

The purpose of this course is correct this
oversight: first by engaging with the
philosophical problem of defining what games are;
and second by exploring the wider aesthetic
possibilities of what games can be. On the one
hand, we will trace the history of the problem of
defining the concept of game, from Huizinga to the
present day, and on the other, we will examine
several important developments in game design,
focusing on technical and artistic aspects of
tabletop games. However, we can only learn so much
about games by talking about them, so we will also
play tabletop games throughout the course, and
eventually work in groups to design some.