• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Some philosophers say that in looking at paintings, and other art objects, we play a game of make-believe, much as a child plays games of make-believe. In a child’s game of “Pirate” a flagpole might become a ship’s mast. It’s in some sense a rule of “Pirate” that the flagpole be a mast, the stick in the child’s hand be a sword, a piece of cardboard be a shield, and so forth. Appealing to rules and the fact that such games create a world separate from the real one, these philosophers find striking similarities between games and art.

Kendall Walton discusses the resemblance between looking at pictures and looking at things.48 When we look at things in the world we pick out certain visual features. Some things are harder to recognize than others and, therefore, require more time and patience. When I look outside my window, I see the doors of other apartments, but to see whether or not the doors have panels, door-bells, or eyeholes, I will have to look closely.

Similarly, when we look at a painting we pick out certain features, and others take more time. With a van Gogh, for instance, I might at first see a hat and a bottle, but only by looking closely do I see the red of the label on the bottle, or the black band around the hat. We look in a particular way when we look at a painting. We play a visual game of make-believe. We willingly enter a fictional world and this world changes depending on the sort of painting we are viewing.

In looking a particular way, and in picking out the relevant features, we play by rules—a similar principle is in operation when a child’s hand becomes a gun due to the fact that he’s playing “cops and robbers.” Depending on what style of painting we’re looking at, there are rules that determine the way we look at that painting. Styles can thus be understood as the rules or instructions for playing a particular art-game, and different kinds of rules go with different kinds of paintings. We would never look at a Realist painting the same way we look at a Cubist painting. If we assessed a Cubist painting with Realist rules, Cubism would have failed as a style since, in Cubism, a table simply doesn’t look like a real table. This is the sense in which we play a game of make-believe when we view a certain style of painting; we play by the rules of that style.

It isn’t that there are rules in the painting. There are two worlds. There’s the world in the work (what is actually happening in the painting), and there’s the everyday human world we all live in, from which we formulate the rules of the game we play in relation to the painting. Once you recognize the rules of the game (that is, that you are dealing with a Cubist painting) you start playing.

Games and Zelda

When we play any of the games of the Legend of Zelda franchise, we’re clearly playing a game. But does this playing relate to a game of make-believe? Is there a similarity between the way we look at paintings and the way we look at Zelda? Are there rules that tell the gamer how to look at a Zelda game?

There is a similarity if we modify the word “look,” if we take “look” to refer to a mindset or perspective that the gamer allows to govern his playing of Zelda. Isn’t it true that there is a way of playing Zelda games that’s distinct from playing, say, sports games, or fighting games? A brief story will show why I am inclined to say yes.

A friend of mine with minimal gaming experience recently started playing videogames. The other day he happened to be playing A Link to the Past on my old Super Nintendo (SNES), and he couldn’t figure out where certain things (like the heart pieces) were. What he didn’t understand was that to play a role playing game such as A Link to the Past, you need to explore and try out newly acquired items everywhere you can.

For example, if you just got the hookshot in a dungeon—and you know that its primary function is to pull Link across a hole he would otherwise fall into—once outside the dungeon you should explore different areas of the game with the hookshot. When you come across