Mind Games: Occult Phenomena and Folk Psychology in Tabletop Games (Event Roundup)
On Wednesday 20th March people gathered at O! Peste Destroyed in Manchester’s Northern Quarter for an evening of mind games. The evening was a collaboration between the MGC and the Dark Arts Research Kollective, who have just launched their latest zine presenting a selection of their arts-based research activities into occultural practices, fortean geographies and paranormal resonances.
MGC’s Chloé Germaine hosted the event, launching a new research project into the intersection between games and the occult phenomena of ‘mind’.
Since 2015, game designers have been enticing players to the table with board and card games that purport to simulate experiences of communing with other minds. These experiences include mind reading, as in The Mind (Warsch, 2018), séances, as in Phantom Ink (Flanagan and Seidman, 2022) and Mysterium (Nevskiy and Sidorenko, 2015), and ‘Turing tests’ designed to flush out philosophical ‘zombies’, as in the Bladerunner-inspired Inhuman Condition (Maranges and O'Brien, 2020), a game inspired by Bladerunner.
It is no surprise that the mind has become a theme for game design. Neither the philosophy of mind nor neuroscience have solved the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness. The mind remains a phenomenon ripe for dark imaginings. Mind games appeal not only to players’ abilities to manage and interpret social interactions, but to folk psychology, the shared ability to explain and predict the mental states of others, including animals, experienced in day-to-day life as an ability to mind-read. Folk Psychology is more than just a ‘quick and dirty’ heuristic humans use to navigate their world; it reveals a fundamental and radical idea of the mind as something that is shared with, and co-constituted by, the world. The acceptance of shared rules in tabletop games not only makes gameplay possible but aligns the minds of players in ways that other forms of cultural communication do not.
In her talk, Chloé proposed an isomorphism between minds and games, suggesting that they are similar in structure (rather than analogous) – and that the playing of games, and gameplay analysis, might furnish insights into the nature of mind and consciousness as a result. Some of the ways in which we might consider games as minds come from shared understandings of both from the philosophy of mind and from game studies. These include the idea that games are systems (a longstanding tenet of game studies) and that consciousness is a dynamical system. Both games and minds are open systems that depend on interactions with a context, or an environment outside themselves.
Other ways of considering the isomorphism between minds and games is the idea that games are events, or performances, which correspond to event or process ontologies in philosophy (such as William James’s notion of ‘pure experience’, or Russellian Monism, which posits consciousness as events). This is a view of games as existing not as cultural texts or products that we consume – but as phenomena that come into being through play.
Throughout the talk Chloé challenged eliminativist accounts of mind, which would reduce the phenomenon of consciousness to the function of the brain and the firing of neurons. She challenges these ideas through demonstrations and discussions of various tabletop games. These included a demonstration of the two-player game Inhuman Conditions, in which the audience considered the proposition of philosophical zombies and conscious AI, exploring how game rules simulate mind-like processes. Chloé also considered numerous word games, like Medium and Phantom Ink, working through the theory that the mind is nothing but a language game. Finally, she considered theories of the extended mind and animism, which locate mind not in the skull or the brain, but out in the world. This concluded with a demonstration of the card game, the Mind, in which players seek to ‘become one’, synchronising their minds without any form of verbal or non-verbal communication.