Tom Brock - ‘Towards a Relational Ethics of Gameplay’

It is common within games research to explain the socialising effects of game rules in terms of their ‘simulation’ (Frasca) or ‘procedural’ rhetoric (Bogost). This perspective suggests that the rules of games are expressive devices that ‘persuade’ players to adopt the ethical values of the game’s designer. From this perspective, ideology is literally encoded into the games that we play through the manipulation of rules. This article offers an examination of personal and social reflexivity to challenge the claim that game rules penetrate player subjectivity this deeply. Indeed, it argues that players have the reflexive capacity to discern between their values as biographical subjects and the normative content of game rules. This distinction is crucial to explaining how gameplay shapes human agency; not through coercion, but by reference to the relational character of player-game interactions: to those common ‘goods’ (or ‘evils’) that ruled play generates. By way of example, this article considers the competitive and cooperative rules that typify popular analogue and digital games to show how relations of trust, caring and reciprocity (and their obverse) emerge through play. This has important ramifications for how we conceptualise the added social value of games in society, and the baring that contemporary forms of play have on social solidarity and integration in the future