Digitally Interactive Works and Video Games: A Philosophical Exploration

This dissertation explores the philosophy of digitally interactive works and video games. There are two central questions to this thesis, namely, what is distinctive about computer art, and more specifically, what is distinctive about the interactivity that these kinds of works afford? The latter question is a response to the former, but, as I will articulate in the chapters that follow, this distinctive type of interactivity is not restricted to works that are comprised of digital media. As it turns out, games (especially video games) are paradigmatic examples and so both analytic aesthetics and game theory are relevant to a discussion of interactivity.

In what follows, I address topics that pertain to interactivity such as art categories, prescriptions, appreciation, and ontology. This thesis will show that interactive works consist of unique displays and prescriptions and are, therefore, a distinctive category of art. I conclude that interactive works do not belong in a performance ontology, that the prescriptions of interactive art bear player engagement, and, importantly, the distinctive features of digitally interactive works hinge on an algorithmic ontology.