The Department of Philosophy hosted “Philosophy + Games”, part of Dawg Daze, UW’s annual tradition of welcoming first-year and returning students to campus. Professor Ian Schnee and graduate student Tim Brown took the opportunity to introduce new students to philosophy through the lens of video games. They set up several video games for students to play Limbo (Xbox), Grand Theft Auto V (Xbox), Braid (Steam), Monument Valley (iPad) and Leo’s Fortune (iPad)and various games on the PlayStation VR platform, providing jumping off points for discussing philosophical questions such as:
Can video games be art?
What makes something art?
Can video games be immoral?
Is it wrong to do something in a video game if no one is actually harmed?
What makes virtual reality games immersive?
Does virtual reality have a special sort of existence or is it just a vivid hallucination?
Can video games make an existentialist argument?
Can video games be philosophy?
Watch Professor Ian Schnee and graduate student Tim Brown introduce Philosophy + Games and discuss philosophy, video games and how they are impacting Tim’s work at the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering.
We hope Philosophy + Games encouraged many new Husky students to discover philosophy and enroll in a class!