March 28, 2024 | 3:30-5pm
in CTIHB 101

Description: Everyone knows that we play games for all sorts of reasons. We play to blow off steam, to have a little fun, to increase our ranking, and even to win. Sometimes we play alone, but often we play games together. And sometimes our goal is partly a “we” goal—we want to enjoy playing a game together. Philosophers of games, however, tend to treat our game play in overly individualistic terms. In this paper I defend an account of how to play games well in friendly contexts—what I’m calling a sociality first account which is co-developed with Dr. Shelby Moser—against a range of recent objections to it.

Bio: Stephanie Patridge is an emerita professor of philosophy at Otterbein University. She currently teaches at the University of Iowa in the department of philosophy and the program for human rights. She writes on issues at the intersection of aesthetics and sociality, and is working on projects on wit as a social virtue, snobbery as an aesthetic vice, and sociality and game play. She is the co-editor of Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts (Routledge, 2017), and has published numerous essays on ethics and games including (forth) “On Representations of Gender and Race in Videogames,” The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Games; (2021) “Games, Motives, and Virtue” Journal of Philosophy of Sport: Special Issue on C. Thi Nugyen’s Games: Agency as Art; “Gender in Videogames” The Aesthetics of Videogames; (2017) “Videogames and Imaginative Identification” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism; and (2013) “Pornography, Ethics, and the Gamer’s Dilemma,” and (2011) “The Incorrigible Social Meaning of Video Game Imagery: Making Ethical Sense of Single-Player Video Games,” in Ethics and Information Technology.