Christopher Bartel is Professor of Philosophy at Appalachian State University and Adjunct Research Fellow with the Practical and Public Ethics Research Group at Charles Sturt University. His work lies at the intersection of aesthetics and ethics, with a particular focus on video games, music, and technology. He is the author of Video Games, Violence, and the Ethics of Fantasy: Killing Time (Bloomsbury, 2020) and, most recently, Aesthetics and Video Games (Bloomsbury, 2025). In this interview, Bartel discusses what makes video games aesthetically valuable, introduces his concept of “dollhouse play,” and reflects on how interactive digital worlds create new forms of imaginative freeplay that challenge traditional philosophical frameworks.
What is your work about?
My book, Aesthetics and Video Games, is about what makes video games aesthetically enjoyable. My aim was to provide a philosophical framework for thinking about all the various ways that players find aesthetic value in games. The aesthetics of video games has been the subject of scrutiny for quite a while, but largely among scholars working in other fields—like literature, film studies, media studies, and the fledgling field of game studies.
Video games are interesting because they are both games and works of fiction. To think about the aesthetic value of video games, we can look for inspiration in two places: the philosophy of sport and games, and also the philosophy of fiction. Both of these areas offer important insights for thinking about video games. But they also have their limitations. Philosophy of games tends to focus on the rule-based nature of games and the goal-seeking orientation of game playing, while philosophy of fiction tends to focus on the nature of fictional truth in interactive narratives. Both of these approaches have important things to say about the aesthetics of video games.
However, some games aren’t really about goal-seeking play or interactive fiction. For instance, when players customize their avatars, they aren’t trying to win anything, nor are they engaging with the game’s narrative. Sometimes players customize their avatars just because they like the way that they look. I think this is a fundamentally different and important part of the aesthetics of video games, one that is very common, too. It is a way of engaging with a video game that I call “dollhouse play,” which is when the player treats a video game like it is a toy. Customizing an avatar is a key example: this is a kind of play that is really no different from how a child plays with a doll. In this form of play, the video game becomes like a digital dollhouse, and the player engages in imaginative games of dress-up and make-believe with their dolls.
The aesthetics of video games isn’t just about the value of winning the game or the value of interactive fiction. There is this third aspect, which is the value of imaginative freeplay, where the player gets to make their own meaning in the game.
Why did you feel the need to write this work?
Video games are a major cultural force, but they haven’t attracted much philosophical interest. When compared to other art forms—like music, painting, literature, or film—philosophers have barely scratched the surface of video games, even among those in aesthetics.
Outside of philosophy departments, scholars have been writing about video games for a few decades. (There are too many good theorists to name here.) Early philosophical work on video games largely focused on the ethics of violence. In fact, my own early work on video games focused on this too. Starting in the early 2000’s, a lot of philosophically informed work on video games began appearing. Jesper Juul’s book, Half-Real (2004), offers an ontology of video games. Ian Bogost’s Persuasive Games (2007) examines the rhetorical potential of these games. In aesthetics, the first major work from a philosopher was Grant Tavinor’s book, The Art of Videogames (2009). More recently, C. Thi Nguyen’s book, Games: Agency as Art (2020), has had an enormous impact on understanding the value of games. Today, many more philosophers are publishing new essays on video games every month.
I wanted to write this book now because I feel that work on the aesthetics of video games is mature enough to say something substantial, but it is still new enough to benefit from rethinking our basic framework.
Is there anything you didn’t include that you wanted to? Why did you leave it out?
One thing that I barely mention in the book, which some might find surprising, is that I never really offer a definition of “video games.” To some, this will appear either lazy, short-sighted, or downright heretical. “How can you talk about the aesthetics of ‘video games’ without identifying what counts as a ‘video game’?”
I left this out largely for methodological reasons. Within gaming culture, disagreements about what counts as a “real game” are common (Consalvo and Paul’s book Real Games offers an excellent discussion). It is a conversation that often turns really toxic. To take a somewhat (but not entirely) strawman example, imagine that you believe that video games are about winning. So, for something to be a video game, it needs to have a final “win state”—that is, a final outcome that determines whether the game was won or lost. If that is your view, then when you look for the aesthetically enjoyable features of video games, only certain kinds will seem aesthetically relevant to you. Effectively, you have decided what is aesthetically relevant at the point of defining the category. You might be missing out on features that are aesthetically relevant, but that have nothing to do with winning.
For instance, if you put too much stock in winning as a defining feature of video games, then games like Animal Crossing: New Horizons don’t look like video games. In Animal Crossing, the player is given a vacation island to explore. You do things like go fishing, catch butterflies, and plant flowers. You can buy new clothes for your avatar, upgrade your house, and decorate your island. The game never ends. There is no such thing as “winning” in Animal Crossing. And yet, the game is wildly popular, with millions of players worldwide who seem to derive aesthetic value from it.
I’m happy to accept an ostensive definition, where “video games” are just the things that we play on screens. Defining the category more rigidly doesn’t interest me. I’m more interested in thinking about what sort of aesthetic value players find in things like Animal Crossing. (Spoiler alert: It’s a dollhouse game!) And interestingly, the features of Animal Crossing that make it aesthetically valuable can also be found in games like Red Dead Redemption, Ghost of Yotei, and Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. So, instead of worrying about what makes all of these things “video games,” I would rather think about how the same aesthetically relevant features are used in different games.
Do you see any connections between your professional work and personal life?
My philosophical thinking about video games was fundamentally changed by my daughter. One dirty secret about my research is that I don’t have the time to play every game that I want to talk about. Instead, I sometimes watch other people play. During the period when I was researching this book, my daughter and I were stuck at home because of COVID. So, I spent a lot of time watching her play games like Animal Crossing and Little Dragon’s Café. I have no interest in playing these games. In fact, I thought of them as fairly boring. But my daughter was enthralled by them. She clearly derived significant aesthetic value from playing these games. It was while I watched her play that I came to realize that my framework for thinking of the aesthetics of video games only had space for two categories: goal-seeking games and narrative games. But dollhouse games like these offer a different kind of value, one that wasn’t captured by my framework. I ended up completely rewriting four chapters of the book, all because of my daughter’s addiction to Stardew Valley.
What’s next for you?
One of my long-term projects concerns the relationship between a player’s actions in a video game and their real-world values. I am currently working on two papers on this topic. The first paper is an experimental paper examining relationships between players’ political views and the games they play. We want to see if there are any interesting correlations between these. For instance, it is common in discussions among gamers to think that Call of Duty is a politically conservative game while Undertale is a politically liberal game. We wanted to know if this expectation is reflected in the player demographics. Do conservatives play Call of Duty more than liberals?
The second paper introduces the notion that some video games are designed to prompt players to reflect on their in-game actions. These games are interesting because, while the player and the game designer know that the game is fictional, there are some cases where it is justifiable to expect that the player’s actions reflect their real-world values. This paper aims to work out when it is reasonable to hold this expectation.
Christopher Bartel
Christopher Bartel is a Professor of Philosophy at Appalachian State University and an Adjunct Research Fellow in the Practical and Public Ethics Research group at Charles Sturt University. His research interests primarily lie within aesthetics and ethics, with a special focus on video games, music, and technology. He is the author of Video Games, Violence, and the Ethics of Fantasy: Killing Time (Bloomsbury 2020) and Aesthetics and Video Games (Bloomsbury 2025).
Richard B. Gibson is Editor of the Current Events in Philosophy and the Bioethics series. He is a bioethicist with research interests in human enhancement, emergent technologies, novel beings, disability theory, and body modification.
