Rachel Shu

Crypto people have this saying: "cryptocurrencies are macroeconomics' playground." The idea is that blockchains let you cheaply spin up toy economies to test mechanisms that would be impossibly expensive or unethical to try in the real world. Want to see what happens with a 200% marginal tax rate? Launch a token with those rules and watch what happens. (Spoiler: probably nothing good, but at least you didn't have to topple a government to find out.) I think video games, especially multiplayer online games, are doing the same thing for metaphysics. Except video games are actually fun and don't require you to follow Elon Musk's Twitter shenanigans to augur the future state of your finances. (I'm sort of kidding. Crypto can be fun. But you have to admit the barrier to entry is higher than "press A to jump.") The serious version of this claim: video games let us experimentally vary fundamental features of reality—time, space, causality, ontology—and then live inside those variations long enough to build strong intuitions about them. Philosophy has historically had to make do with thought experiments and armchair reasoning about these questions. Games let you run the experiments for real, or at least as "real" as anything happening on a screen can be. So far, philosophy of video games has mostly focused on ethics (is it bad to kill NPCs?) and aesthetics (are games art?). These are fine questions, I guess, but they're missing the really interesting stuff. Games are teaching us to navigate metaphysically alien worlds with the same ease that previous generations navigated their single, boring reality, and we're barely even noticing. I. Space Start with the obvious example: spatial representation. Imagine trying to explain The Sims to your great-grandmother. "Well, you see, you're looking down at this house from above, and the roof isn't there even though the roof exists, and you can see all the rooms at once, and you move your little person around by clicking where y