In Games as in Epistemology

03 Sep, 2026

Meinberg has written a blogpost on how TTRPGs ought to be opinionated: If a game defers too much to the players, it's not clear after all why one should be playing this particular game at all.

I have a similar impulse when it comes to knowledge, an opinion on (social) epistemology, the discipline of philosophy concerned with what knowledge is and how it is generated. Here, I prefer when others just share the knowledge they can generate from their standpoint, rather than performing rituals invoking its limits. When someone says they can't possibly know about the effects of, say, transmisogyny, I will roll my eyes at least a little bit. Sure, don't speak out of turn on things you spent no effort in learning about – but recognize that you can put in that effort and learn about the thing. Knowledge is a social process and not some sort of private, incommunicable secret only ever accessible to those living within their specific subject-positions.

Now, of course, the archetypical philosopher, Socrates, is famous for claiming to know nothing. As the story goes, he thus had more claim to knowledge than his peers did, because they were convinced of holding knowledge which ultimately didn't live up to scrutiny. So, isn't the morals of this story to be more like this picture of Socrates, questioning instead of self-convinced? Yes and no. The Socratic method of interrogating other's beliefs and thus trying to get to the heart of the matter only works because there are others to interrogate, and they – often falsely – hold their opinions to be positive knowledge. If everyone in these dialogues was to simply wallow on about how they are clueless to begin with, the whole thing clearly wouldn't get anywhere, and we would have to search for knowledge somewhere else.

It is somewhat curious that the point I just sketched, which concerns knowledge and truth, resonates with Meinberg’s post, concerning games specifically, and perhaps art more generally. Games and art seem to not be primarily concerned with the truth-false distinction. I do believe, however, that they are an important medium for communicating and reflecting about important aspects of life, as a part of what Hegel would call absoluter Geist (absolute spirit; meaning a society's free self-reflection). But in any case, we expect a judgement to be made: The knower should judge their knowledge to be true, and the game designer should judge their game to be worthwhile to play for one reason or another. If they cannot, why would we grant them our attention?

However, we encounter a problem here. A well-documented form of epistemic injustice is undermining the self-confidence of people as knowers.¹ In a lot of the philosophy seminars I have attended, women were less likely to speak, and more likely to disclaim their contributions with markers of insecurity. Under such circumstances, preferring to listen to those who are already confident perpetuates the injustice against those whose confidence has been stunted systematically. The lesson I'd take away from this is that it's important to take people seriously as (potential) knowers, even if they themselves cannot. This doesn't mean uncritically affirming everything somebody has to say, because that too would be a form of not taking them seriously. What it does mean is actively and critically engaging with them in an encouraging way. Scrutinize what they have to say, but enable them as an interlocutor instead of shutting them down. This latter part is what many philosophy teachers at university fail at, revelling in their phantasy of pure discussion where the only distinction that matters is the one between truth and falsehood. From this, I conclude that confidence is a virtue of the speaker/knower, enabling them to be a better version of themselves; it should however not be an absolute criterion for a listener to decide who to engage with. This is not only because of the ethical aspect, as it would present an injustice to marginalized speakers, but also for epistemic reasons: You might miss a significant part of the picture if you only listen to those who already are self-assured (forgive the mixing of visual and auditory metaphors here).

Returning to TTRPGs, what do these considerations tell us? I'm not entirely sure, and feel a reluctance to translate the listener ethics into players ethics, which would seem awfully close to some sort of consumers ethics, telling people what to spend their money on. This fear might be hypocritical though – as if identity politics weren't also used and abused to convince or shame people into buying books or otherwise financially supporting select voices. In either case, I think the problem of the knower's or artist's subsistence is not one that can or should be addressed on the level of individual recipients preference for their product. Crucially, not every worthwhile contribution is available as a commodity. Additionally, flattening the problem into one of what to buy fails to meet the requirement of critical engagement. As I said above, knowledge is a social process, conversational in nature. Maybe this applies to game design and play too. Even if the game is a final product, entirely cut off from its author(s), it will benefit both from having something to say in its text and mechanics and having receptive, but critical players.

To illustrate this, let's look at another very interesting idea Meinberg's blogpost invokes. Thon argues that a game system shines exactly when "the players become limited, become bound, become servants to something outside of themselves. Their absolute freedom is stripped away and replaced with something more conditional, but in doing so the players are promised the bounty of the system". This resonates deeply with the Hegelian positive concept of alienation: Being brought outside of myself is not seen as an injury against my authentic self, but as enabling me to experience the non-identical, to learn, to become more than mere substance. Hegel sees this as the crucial aspect of Bildung, which roughly translates to education, but needs to be understood much more broadly, as development, as becoming. The challenge, of course, is not to simply be absorbed by the external force asserting itself. If one readily becomes identical with it, there can be no experience of Bildung, no real development. To prevent this, adversarial rules that provide friction can even be helpful (as long as we still want to enact them): precisely because we can experience them as alien and struggle against them. This, I think, is where we start touching with Jay Dragon's ideas in Rules are a Cage (and I'm a Puppygirl) and Expressionist Games Manifesto.