A philosophy of play (II): virtues and capabilities

I have defended play and games as central elements for the good life. Defending games as anything else than that (because they make billions, can be used in education, or have therapeutic uses) seems to me to be detrimental: if we use them in that instrumental fashion, they could be replaced at any time by better, more eficient instruments to achieve the same ends. But we do not look for substitutes for games. We want to play them and to be playful, and we intuit there is something vital in them. Since play is life, play cannot be excised from our lives. “Intrinsically valuing play means valuing it as a meaningful activity in a player’s life, not in relation to societal goals”, writes Tom Apperley. Play is a form of value, and value begets dignity and needs virtue.

Play is a central human capability. But what is a capability? The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy defines it as the “real opportunities [people have] to do and be what they have reason to value”. The capability approach (pioneered by Amartya Sen and Nussbaum) is interested in human autonomy and dignity. It “purports that freedom to achieve well-being is a matter of what people are able to do and to be, and thus the kind of life they are effectively able to lead”. And play is part of that freedom of life. This is the view of philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who, in Creating Capabilities: The Human Develoment Approach, argues:

Considering the various areas of human life in which people move and act, this approach to social justice asks, What does a life worthy of human dignity require? At a bare minimum, an ample threshold level of ten Central Capabilities is required. Given a widely shared undestanding of the task of government (namely, that government has the job of making people able to pursue a dignified and minimally flourishing life), it follows that a decent political order must secure to all citizens at least a thresold level of these ten Central Capabilities: [1) life; 2) bodily health; 3) bodily integrity; 4) senses, imagination and thought; 5) emotions; 6) practical reason; 7) affiliation; 8) other species; 9) play; 10) and control over one’s environment].

While most of these capabilities are explored and developed extensively by Nussbaum in her book, play is almost limited to a brief definition:

Play. Being able to laugh, to play, to enjoy recreational activities.

However brief this definition, there is a lot to unpack in there.

• First, and this is something that needs further exploring in another text, play is somehow related to laughter, to humour. (I do agree with this, but it is not a widely accepted view: Huizinga sees play and laughter as having different relations to the serious, and Noel Carroll doesn’t give too much credit to the “play theory” of humour.)
• Second, play is recreational, that is, related to leisure, enjoyment, and opposed to work. This seems obvious, but it needs constant reminding, lest we forget the Victorian idea of “rational recreation” (still present as an undercurrent in many forms of gamification).
• Third, as with any other capability, they cannot be imposed but need to be protected. As a liberal framework, the capabilities approach is closer to the understanding of “freedom as navigability” proposed by Cass Sunstein. A right to play is not an obligation to play (again, I think rational recreation is resurfacing under the guise of a gamification of culture that paves the way for a ludic totalitarianism — see, for instance, Alfie Bown’s Enjoying It). Tom Apperley has looked into this right to play, especially in its use to protect children, and how digital play is closely linked to digital citizenship:

“The same infrastructures that support digital play are widely believed to provide future opportunities for economic and social development.” The right to play according to the Convention on the Rights of the Child [1959] is “equal opportunity”, and this “is not a right to play in a general sense, but rather it is a right for all children to have equal access to the same repertoire of play activities”.

• Fourth, and derived from the previous point, play is a central capability for every person, not only for children. Adults too need to play to have a life worthy of human dignity and should have a right to play. An ample threshold level of play should be accessible and navigable to adults, separated from work and from political obligation.
• Lastly, capabilities are individual but they are favoured by society and society, in turn, benefits from them. Play is as much individual as it is social. Even solo play requires a shared context that enables it.

Let’s bring this approach to the digital space. Two caveats: First, I am becoming increasingly convinced that videogames should not be understood as games, but as hybrid virtual spaces born in the family of play where play and game activities can take place. Second, I am more interested in social meaning-making debates than in laws and regulations.

That said, seeing play as a central capability (vital to children as well as to adults, that should be socially protected by a right to play understood as liberal navigability) does not mean we have the right to get free videogames. Equal access to “the same repertoire of play activities” does not put videogames in the same category as education or healthcare. In our capitalists economies, videogames are consumer products first (a fact we don’t need to approve of). But it does mean that they should be minimally regulated up to that “ample threshold” and socially measured to the standards of the capabilities approach. This brings me to the last idea I want to explore here: how do we assess the contribution of videogames (in general) and of a videogame (in particular) to the human capability of play?

This is where I believe Chris Bateman’s idea of cybervirtue can come in handy. In his The Virtuous Cyborg, one of my favourite recent books, Bateman analyses our cybernetical relation to technology from the perspective of virtue ethics (which are not, and should not be confused with, moralism). Going back to classical Greek and Chinese philosophy, among other sources, Bateman defines virtues as “qualities that acquire their meaning from practices that people pursue together, since only in a shared context do qualitative judgements possess a common ground”. Accordingly, cybervirtue is defined as:

those desirable qualities that a cyborg might possess, and what I mean by cyborg is any combination of beings and things that acts with a greater range of possibilities than either can achieve alone.

Bateman lists courage, justice, honesty, tact, tenacity, fidelity, and deep-sightedness as universal virtues and, hence, desirable cybervirtues. These cybervirtues can be personal and social:

So if virtues are the desirable habits of humans and other beings, cybervirtues are the equivalent properties humans possess as cyborgs. There are at least two senses that we can identify such qualities […] Firstly, the personal side of cybervirtue concerns the relationship between a robot and its human; the way your smart phone is designed (both in terms of its hardware and its software) governs its moral relationship with you. […] On the other hand, social cybervirtues concern how the human-robot cyborg relates to other cyborgs, the external sense of the term.

When we use technology in any form, our capacity to act changes (see Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory). Playing a videogame turns us, temporarily, into a cyborg that combines us with that game, its platform, and its affordances. Play becomes cyberplay, players become cyberplayers. The addition of technology is never neutral, and the videogame machine can encourage or discourage virtue as much as any other machine.

Through the concept of cybervirtue I seek to draw attention both to the meaning of traditional virtues when considered against the backdrop of our vast networks of technology, and also to suggest ways in which the design of our robot’s hardware and software could be made to encourage virtue.

Again, this is not a defence of a moralistic control of videogames, nor of their educational uses, nor of censorship. The mess and chaos of life and games cannot and should not be put under monolithic moral views. But it is reasonable to argue that virtue (the desirable qualities of a person) is needed to protect capabilities (including play), which in turn allows one’s life to flourish with dignity. Our moral compasses can be playfully explored and bent in games, but no one wants to play with vicious players, not even themselves. A moralistic videogame unwillingly incites players to break it through black humour, dark play, and transgression, while a virtous videogame (one that is created in just conditions, that favours deep-sightedness in their players, that do not exploit them, that nurtures honest and tactful communities) nudges players into being virtuous cyborgs that protect and enjoy the capability of play — that protect and enjoy life.