The purpose of this lesson is to examine the relationship of two concepts, “Games” (which we talk about last week) and “Art.” By the end of our session we should be able to all about how we can define Art in both a descriptive (thin) sense and normative (thick) sense, work out how to compare and contrast two different types of thing and ask whether such comparisons are important.

To do this we need to work out how to first work out how to describe one type of thing and then we need to compare that type of thing with another.

Step One: Make a list of examples of things you think belong to the first type (say, find examples of things you think are “Art”).

Step Two: Work out what features are shared by all the things on your list?

Step Three: See if you can think of examples of things of that type which lack those features (or have very different features).

Step Four: Try to come up with a definition of the thing you are interested in.

Step Five: Compare the other thing you are interested in (in this case, “Games”) with the first kind of thing and ask “Are they the same kind of thing?”

Some further questions for us to consider:

1. Is it a problem if games out not to be art?

2. If games can be art, does that tell us that some games are art?

3. Is it important (in some sense or the other) that games be art?

4. Why do we value art?