What Counts as Perception in Synthetic Worlds?
What exactly do we perceive when playing games, and which properties are represented in our perceptual experience? Games are knowledge systems, where game mechanisms often are deliberately designed to shape perceptual content.
This talk engages with debates on rich perceptual content and cognitive penetration—whether perception can be directly influenced by theoretical knowledge and practical expertise (as explored by Susanna Siegel and others). Building on a McDowell-inspired view, I assume that perceptions are conceptual yet distinct from beliefs: they play a crucial role in grounding belief-based knowledge while maintaining their own epistemic status.
I introduce a causal-modal criterion for genuine perception, inspired by Nozick’s sensitivity and adherence conditions for knowledge: a perceptual state counts as genuine only if it would vary appropriately across possible changes in the environment while transferring its content to the corresponding perceptual belief. To account for he relationship between lower level and higher level perceptual properties, I introduce the notion of "perceptual closure".
Using this criterion, I argue that players can genuinely perceive not only functional kinds, rule-based properties, and in some select cases affordance-potentialities, but most prominently agential properties—a notion I developed in previous work (Agential Properties in Computer Games, The Ontological Status of Game Ontologies). Agential properties are those that support practical reasoning within a game environment and are projected into the player’s perceptual field.
For example, the causal-modal criterion allows that players may see where a tetromino will fit in Tetris (an affordance-potentiality) or see that their king is threatened in chess (a rule-based rational reasoning property). In such cases, perception integrates environmental information with the player’s mastery of the game’s ludic practices. Using the notion of perceptual epistemic closure I show how the heart of perception in games lies in the embodied epistemic virtues cultivated through skilled play, which allow players to perceive game environments in ways inaccessible to novices.