Games Studies reveals the performative nature of playing a character in a virtual-game-world (Nitsche 2008, p.205; Pearce 2006, p.1; Taylor 2002, p.48). Tbe Player/Character relationship is typically understood in terms of the player’s in-game “presence” (Boellstorff 2008, p.89; Schroeder 2002, p.6). This gives the appearance that living-into a game-world is an all-or- nothing affair: either the player is “present” in the game-world, or they are not. I argue that, in fact, a constitutive phenomenology reveals the Player/Character relationship to be a (...) multi-dimensional matter of empathy. I advance a broadly Schutzian framework, drawing on his 1932 discussions of “face-to-face encounters” and ”historical predecessors,” showing how at- tention to empathy reveals a variety of “presences” that different kinds of Player/Character relationships afford. The central determinants of empathetic affordances which I focus on here are (i) how much players know about a character (especially the character’s past) and (ii) how players learn this information.The purpose of this discussion will be to show that a phenomenological analysis reveals that the relationship between a player and their character is complex, highly variable, and inherently social. Furthermore, it will add to the growing body of scholarship that demonstrates that video games are rich social objects deserving of study. (shrink)

What are the matters of philosophy? How do they shape how philosophy is practiced, what kinds of knowledge it produces, and who counts as a philosopher? The dominant matters of Western philosophy, or its epistemic companions, are books and journal articles even when dialogic and oral traditions are acknowledged or referenced. In this paper, we argue that alternatives would be necessary if philosophy were to be a more capacious and welcoming discipline. We introduce Feminist Philosophical Toys as one such alternative (...) that challenges what counts as serious philosophy by being seriously playful. The toys foreground the oral and the dialogic while reflecting on and committing to engaging materiality, record-keeping, and record-making. In doing so, the toys challenge the dominant form of philosophy and its mechanics of knowledge-making as they offer an alternative way of doing philosophy that can be transformative for the next generation of feminist scholarship. The dialogic, embodied, and communal interaction with paper, with theory, and with others is meant as a practice of live theorization, opening philosophy to a new groundedness and accessibility, centered in the ethos of feminist epistemology, while at the same time pushing against fetishization of matter. (shrink)