Games as media cultivate attention by demanding us to think, perceive, and feel according to them. In my phenomenological approach inspired by Merleau-Ponty, attention consists of two intertwined acts, intuitive perception and more rational acts of deliberation. Chess serves as a good case study because it tasks its players to become familiar with an insurmountable magnitude of complexity. Chess players learn how to become attentive by training their perceptual and rational capacities so that they understand the problems of a position (...) intuitively, as a state of positional imbalance created through the uneven distribution of pieces on the board. Following the Latin etymology of the word ‘medium’ as ‘in-between’ phenomenon, I assert that games, as processes of play, exist in the very intermediary relation between players and playthings, expressed by this field of strengths and weaknesses, and thus come to shape the thinking, perceiving, and feeling of the player. (shrink)

Michael Hickson as argued for the provocative thesis that chess is not a game – his “Illusory Checkmates: Why Chess is Not a Game.” More specifically, he (a) argues that chess is not a game in the sense provided by Bernard Suits’ highly influential work in the philosophy of games, and (b) responds to what he considers some of the most important objections to this thesis. In this paper I argue that Hickson is wrong, and that chess is, in fact, (...) a game. The dialectic teaches us something important about the nuances of Suits’ rightly influential definition of ‘play a game’. (shrink)

Do we perceive or do we imagine virtual entities in virtual reality games? There are, to date, two mainstream answers in the literature to this question: the answer of the fictionalists, which is that we must imagine virtual entities for they are fictional, and the answer of the realists, which is that we directly perceive virtual entities since they are digital. In this article, I put another option on the table, and argue that following a particular embodied and enactive take (...) oni magination (what I will call EEI), imagination can play a specific role in our experience of virtual entities. Specifically, imagination is involved in anticipating virtual affordances (or in-game actions possibilities), and in allowing one to be creative within the game context. The view ultimately endorses a relational instead of a representational view of imagination: instead of representing unreal fictional entities, it showcases that imagination is a context-dependent process shaped by the interactions found within the virtual games. (shrink)