ABSTRACT
The two distinct levels of representation in gaming – the game-world and the mechanics – bring into focus the role of audience attention. To engage in deep and rich experiences of direct representations, players must be seduced into the represented world, but that seduction will always to some extent be doing battle with the player’s immersion in system-solving, even in cases without any ludonarrative dissonance. The corollary is that for a game to inspire imitation (including violent imitation) it must be able to engage the player in the represented world as well as the game mechanics – the reason being that when the player is not so engaged, they are effectively interacting with an abstract system rather than acting in the represented world. The ethical ramification of this is that violent games, if we are primarily engaged in their mechanics and not their worlds, are unlikely to inspire imitation. We demonstrate throughout the chapter how opportunities for deep reasoning are effectively diminished when game mechanics “take over”, and what conditions need to obtain for games to become subjects of moral thought for their players.
