Grant Tavinor

Grant Tavinor (1973 – August 13, 2025) was a New Zealand academic and philosopher of art. Tavinor wrote about the aesthetics, philosophy, and ethics of digital technology, videogames and virtual reality. His book The Art of Videogames is considered a foundational work in the field. Tavinor was a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Lincoln University where he taught from 2003-2025, and an Erskine Fellow at the University of Canterbury in 2022.

Early life and education Tavinor was born in Whangarei. In it he argued that video games are a new form of representational art, providing "an active exploratory aesthetics" involving "the representation of the player, their agency, and their aesthetic experiences, within a fictional world." He addressed the philosophical questions of "What is a game?" and "What is art?", considering videogames in terms of fiction, narrative, emotion, and morality. Giving videogames a conceptual foundation, Tavinor defined them disjunctively: quote|“X is a videogame if it is an artifact in a visual digital medium, is intended as an object of entertainment, and is intended to provide such entertainment through the employment of one or both of the following modes of engagement: rule and objective gameplay or interactive fiction.” He also wrote The Aesthetics of Virtual Reality (2021).