According to the causal-historical theory of reference, natural kind terms refer in virtue of complicated causal relations the speakers have to their environment. A common objection to the theory is that purely causal relations are insufficient to fix reference in a determinate fashion. The so-called hybrid view holds that what is also needed for successful fixing are true descriptions associated in the mind of the speaker with the referent. The main claim of this paper is that the objection fails: reference (...) fixing of natural kind terms can be purely causal. The main argument draws inspiration from recent theoretical advances made in metaphysics of kinds by Marion Godman, Antonella Mallozzi, and David Papineau. The main claim is that their notion of super-explanatory properties may explain how reference of many kind terms can be fixed purely causally. (shrink)

Researchers interested in player’s experience would assumedly, across disciplines, agree that the goal behind enquiries into player’s experience is to understand the how games’ features end up affecting the player’s experience. Much of the contemporary interdisciplinary research into player’s experience leans toward the empirical-scientific, in the forms psychology, sociology and cognitive science, to name a few. In such approaches, for example demonstrating correlation between physiological symptoms and an in-game event may amount to ‘understanding’. However, the experience of computer game play (...) is a viable topic also for computer game studies within the general tradition of humanities. In such context, the idea of ‘understanding an experience’ invites an approach focusing on the experienced significance of events and objects within computer game play. This focus, in turn, suggests turning to the principles associated with phenomenology, among which is the idea of describing things as they appear, or as they are given, in the experience, from the first-person perspective. From the first-person perspective the challenge lies not in the subjective experience’s inaccessibility but in the inherent personal richness of the experience’s content. Rather than trying to embrace the richness by engaging in direct introspection, it makes sense to focus the search on the conditions of the player’s experience. In this paper, I discuss the idea of “firstperson perspective” in the context of computer game studies. I propose that conditions for player’s experience could be sought from the materiality of the computer game artefact, rather than from the ‘processual’ or ‘ideal game’. I derive the notion of gameplay condition3 from the overlap of the player’s “lusory attitude” and the materiality of the single-player computer game artefact as it appears in the player’s experience. (shrink)