The Guardian ran a story today about videogames and cognition, which covers the usual assumption that games are popular/good/whatever because they tap into some innate cognitive drive, whether it be for learning or obsession. Good games, the article concludes, are the ones that do what we want, but that we don't know we want. This, it turns out, amounts to "fulfilling intrinsic human needs." You know, like "The basic skill of...being able to aim objects accurately."
Keith Stuart interviewed me for the story, and although I'm generally a fan of his work, I'm a little relieved I didn't make the cut this time. I suppose it will come as no surprise that my comments regarding cognition and games amounted to suspicion. I'm very wary of the current trend to try to understand everything people do and think via reductionist explanations of depth, among them brain science. Apart from the troubles with reducing complex human behavior and contexts to simple explanations, these approaches also risk instrumentalizing games (and everything else)—a trend that has already proved popular via social games and what I've more recently called exploitationware.
As it happens, I've also been reading philosopher Iain Thomson's new book Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity. The book discusses Martin Heidegger's famous and confusing position in favor of art and against aesthetics. This morning I also happened upon an excerpt in the book about just the same topic, art and cognition. I'll reproduce it here:
For, once aesthetics reduces art to intense subjective experience, such experiences can be studied objectively through the use of EEGs, fMRIs, MEGs, and PET scans (and the like), and in fact aesthetic experiences are increasingly being studied in this way.
Indeed, the humanistic obsession with brain science is only spreading, as psychological and cognitive scientific methods appear increasingly appealing to fields who have failed find their own way to make their work resonate beyond the cloisters of their own programs.
As it happens, Thomson observes exactly this critique in Heidegger's writing itself, as early as 1937:
Aesthetics becomes a psychology that proceeds in the manner of the natural sciences; that is, states of feeling become self-evident facts to be subjected to experiments, observation, and measurement.
As Thomson's book makes clear, Heidegger's solution is to reject aesthetics itself, a practice whose creation and experience only further plunges us into the logic of enframing, the modern worldview that treats everything as resources to be optimized, art included.
Instead, for Heidegger, we can admit the incommensurable withdrawal of things, and see art as a means to neutralize our preconceptions toward them. From the perspective of object-oriented ontology, we can add to this precept the reminder that we ourselves, we humans, are but one of innumerable partners in innumerable pairs, each with its own preconceptions worthy of resistance and revelation.
For a glimpse at one way to begin thinking in such a way about games-as-art, watch Frank Lantz's GDC 2011 talk Life, Death, and Middle Pair: Go, Poker, and the Sublime. While not yet a perfect match, Lantz begins to show us what it might feel like to see games as primordial objects, beings uncaged, rather than coops of potential action awaiting release as avian projectiles.