On ludic beauty : Kant, Schiller, and the aesthetics of gameplay

Abstract

To frame an aesthetic approach to games, this chapter begins by unpacking the articulation of ‘play’ as a central concept in the discussion of beauty in the aesthetic philosophy of Kant and Schiller, focusing on the idea of beauty as a bringing‑together of the two disparate sides of human being in the shape of ‘formed matter.’ On this basis, the chapter then makes a case for understanding the ‘matter’ of games as being the player’s first‑person experience of taking action in the game, and the ‘form’ as the comportment shaped for the player by the rules of the game. This leads to a proposal for a category of ‘ludic beauty’ – judgement of beauty that pertains to a game’s status and qualities as a game, that is, to the way it plays, in distinction from other kinds of beauty (pictorial, etc.) that might equally pertain to games. To understand the significance of ludic beauty, the chapter then examines the relation of play and aesthetic experience to freedom in Kant and Schiller. This leads to the claim that ludic beauty – in allowing us to willingly adopt comportments and ways of being in the world that diverge from those we might generally inhabit and to engage with these ways of being aesthetically – can give us direct aesthetic experience of dimensions and possibilities of our own being.