Two Ways through the Looking Glass. Game Design as an Expression of Philosophy of Action

Actions performed in digital games tend to be contingent upon a digital agent that stands in for the player, if those actions are anthropomorphized and experientially situated in a gameworld. The situated kind of agency given to players in these scenarios have been conceptualized differently. The paper argues that two of the foundational concepts, Janet Murray’s and Doug Church’s, are roughly equivalent to, respectively, consequentialist (Goldman 1970, Davidson 1980) and intentionalist (Anscombe 2000, Wilson 1989, Ginet 1990) positions in the philosophy of action. The paper demonstrates that the subtle difference between Murray’s and Church’s understanding of actions in computer games is paralleled in two ‘schools’ of game design that developed in the 1990s in the (long defunct) American game development studio Looking Glass.