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Toward an Ethics of Homo Ludens

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Abstract

This chapter introduces a novel perspective on the ethical agency of players, by extending Huizinga’s concept of Homo Ludens with Floridi’s concept of homo poieticus. This shift of perspective allows first for the ethical inquiry on the moral nature of the player; and second, to the inquiry on the ethics of games in the context of the economies of information and entertainment that dominate digital culture. This chapter suggests ethical questions around videogames that focus on the cultural and economic issues around games.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Floridi, The ethics of information (Oxford University Press, 2013).

  2. 2.

    Ibid., 161–179.

  3. 3.

    Floridi, Information ethics: On the philosophical foundation of computer ethics, Ethics and Information Technology (1999), 1(1), 37–56.

  4. 4.

    Sutton-Smith, The ambiguity of play (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

  5. 5.

    Huizinga, Homo ludens: A study of the play-element in culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992[1938]), 13.

  6. 6.

    Sicart, Playing the good life: Gamification and ethics, in The gameful world: Approaches, issues, applications (2014a), 225–244.

  7. 7.

    Ibid., 1.

  8. 8.

    Henricks, Play and the human condition (University of Illinois Press, 2016).

  9. 9.

    Caillois, Man, play and games (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001[1958]); Bogost, Play anything: The pleasure of limits, the uses of boredom, and the secret of games (New York: Basic Books, 2016).

  10. 10.

    Henricks, Play and the human condition, 1451–1453.

  11. 11.

    Floridi, The ethics of Information, 6.

  12. 12.

    Cantwell Smith, On the origin of objects (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).

  13. 13.

    Agre, Computation and human experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 38.

  14. 14.

    Bynum, Flourishing ethics, Ethics and Information Technology (2006), 8(4), 157–173. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-006-9107-1; Volkman, Why information ethics must begin with virtue ethics. Metaphilosophy (2010), 41(3), 380-401; Volkman, Being a good computer professional: The advantages of virtue ethics in computing, Professionalism in the Information and Communication Technology Industry (2013), 3, 109.

  15. 15.

    Floridi, The method of levels of abstraction, Minds and Machines (2008), 18(3), 303–329. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-008-9113-7.

  16. 16.

    Floridi, The ethics of information, 178–179.

  17. 17.

    Ibid., 168.

  18. 18.

    Ibid., 175.

  19. 19.

    Huizinga, Homo ludens: A study of the play-element in culture, 6.

  20. 20.

    Schiller, Dover Books on Western Philosophy: On the aesthetic education of man (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1794 [2012]).

  21. 21.

    Ibid., 79.

  22. 22.

    Kant, The Cambridge edition of the works of Immanuel Kant: Critique of judgement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1790 [2001]); see also Laxton, From judgement to process: The modern ludic field, in D. J. Getsy (Ed.), Refiguring modernism: From diversion to subversion, games, play, and twentieth-century art (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), 3–24.

  23. 23.

    Goffman, Encounters, two studies in the sociology of interaction (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961); Henricks, Play and the human condition.

  24. 24.

    Sicart, The ethics of computer games.

  25. 25.

    Ibid.

  26. 26.

    De Landa, A new philosophy of society: Assemblage theory and social complexity (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006); Taylor, The assemblage of play, Games and Culture (2009), 4(4), 331–339.

  27. 27.

    Goffman, Encounters, two studies in the sociology of interaction (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961), 31.

  28. 28.

    McCormick, Is it wrong to play violent video games? Ethics and Information Technology (2001), 3, 277–287; Coeckelbergh, Violent computer games, empathy, and cosmopolitanism, Ethics and Information Technology (2007), 9, 219–231; Waddington, Locating the wrongness in ultra-violent video games, Ethics and Information Technology (2007), 9, 121–128; Wonderly, A Humean approach to assessing the moral significance of ultra-violent video games, Ethics and Information Technology (2008), 10, 1–10.

  29. 29.

    Srincek, Platform capitalism (London: Wiley, 2016).

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  1. University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Miguel Sicart

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  1. Classical Studies, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

    Vassiliki Rapti

  2. Visual and Media Arts, Emerson College, Boston, MA, USA

    Eric Gordon

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Sicart, M. (2021). Toward an Ethics of Homo Ludens. In: Rapti, V., Gordon, E. (eds) Ludics. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7435-1_2

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