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Games: Agency As Art
Games are a unique art form. Games work in the medium of agency. Game designers tell us who to be and what to care about during the game. Game designers sculpt alternate agencies, and game players submerge themselves in those alternate agencies. Thus, the fact that we play games demonstrates the fluidity of our own agency. We can throw ourselves, for a little while, into a different and temporary motivations.
This volume presents a new theory of games which insists on their unique value. C. Thi Nguyen argues that games are an integral part our systems of communication and our art. Games sculpt our practical activities, allowing us to experience the beauty of our own actions and reasoning. Bridging aesthetics and practical reasoning, he gives an account of the special motivational structure involved in playing games. When we play games, we can pursue a goal, not for its own value, but for the value of the struggle. Thus, playing games involves a motivational inversion from normal life. We adopt an interest in winning temporarily, so we can experience the beauty of the struggle. Games offer us a temporary experience of life under utterly clear values, in a world engineered to fit to our abilities and goals.
Games also let us to experience forms of agency we might never have developed on our own. Games, it turns out, are a special technique for communication. They are a technology that lets us record and transmit forms of agency. Our games form a "library of agency" and we can explore that library to develop our autonomy. Games use temporary restrictions to force us into new postures of agency.
This volume presents a new theory of games which insists on their unique value. C. Thi Nguyen argues that games are an integral part our systems of communication and our art. Games sculpt our practical activities, allowing us to experience the beauty of our own actions and reasoning. Bridging aesthetics and practical reasoning, he gives an account of the special motivational structure involved in playing games. When we play games, we can pursue a goal, not for its own value, but for the value of the struggle. Thus, playing games involves a motivational inversion from normal life. We adopt an interest in winning temporarily, so we can experience the beauty of the struggle. Games offer us a temporary experience of life under utterly clear values, in a world engineered to fit to our abilities and goals.
Games also let us to experience forms of agency we might never have developed on our own. Games, it turns out, are a special technique for communication. They are a technology that lets us record and transmit forms of agency. Our games form a "library of agency" and we can explore that library to develop our autonomy. Games use temporary restrictions to force us into new postures of agency.
256 pages, Hardcover
Published April 23, 2020
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December 29, 2022
This book took the glasses I use to look at the world, slapped them off my face, stomped on them until every piece of glass was a grain of sand, then gave me a new pair of glasses that I much prefer and have been unable to remove ever since. It’s a book about the following ideas: games, agency, goals, certainty, values, and, uh, the meaning of life. It’s really really freaking good. It also has a ton of typos, but that’s beside the point.
I would summarize the arguments I took away from Games in one paragraph like this: when we play games, we get to try on new ways of thinking, acting, and being—in other words, new agential modes. We do this by immersing ourselves in environments consciously crafted by game designers. Playing a game is an amazing cognitive dance: we temporarily adopt goals within the construct of the game, and genuinely strive to reach those goals, even though the goals (like “move this piece to this square” or “climb this short wall”) are meaningless in our actual lives. Here’s the magic: oftentimes, the true purpose of gameplay is something totally outside the actual goals of the game. The goal of multiplayer board games is human connection; the goal of Twister is riotous chaos. But we don’t get connection and chaos by going after those things directly; we get those things by seriously pursuing the goals of the game. The clear-cut rules and constraints of games are also enormously satisfying because they are a reprieve from real life, with its plurality of conflicting values and goals. This value clarity is why it’s dangerous to over-gamify our lives: we strip our life of its rich and subtle values (e.g. “I want to feel fit and healthy”) and replace them with a shallow metric (“gotta get my steps in”).
Let me expand on some of these ideas. First, I want to talk about self-effacing ends, the idea that some things are best achieved by not striving for them directly. As soon as I was introduced to this idea, it spun my head around. If you want to make a lot of money, don’t focus on making money, focus on building a product or service that people like. If you want people to like you, don’t focus on getting people to like you, focus on expressing interest in others. If you want to be happy, don’t focus on being happy, focus on making meaningful relationships and pursuing fulfilling projects. If you want to change someone’s mind, don’t focus on changing their mind, focus on making them feel listened to.
The more I think about this, the more I am astounded by the fact that some of the things we most cherish and value in life cannot be pursued directly. It’s incredible that our brains can operate on multiple levels like this. Like, if I want to be good at business, I cannot come to you looking like a businessman. I need to be friendly, warm, charismatic, and approachable. The last thing you want to think when engaging with me is “this guy’s trying to sell me something.” And yet, the way for me to sell you something is precisely to act like I’m not trying to sell you anything.
Not to belabor the point, but when I teach a liberal arts class—history, literature, philosophy or something like that—I have to engage with these multiple levels. The point of studying the liberal arts is something like “self-actualization” or “developing a worldview”. Studying these subjects will probably make you better at reasoning about complex large-scale issues, developing close-knit relationships, and empathizing with more kinds of people. But we never explicitly pursue any of those things. We sit around a table and talk about books that we read. If we sat around talking about “developing a self” (like one might do at, say, a leadership conference), it would be absolutely fruitless.
Am I adequately expressing how crazy I find this?? Like, you’re telling me that if you wanna bond with your family, you shouldn’t pursue the goal of “bonding with your family”, you should pursue the goal of “winning at Monopoly”??? Come ON!!
Ok, that’s enough examples. I promise that if you start looking around for self-effacing ends, you’ll find them everywhere.
The second concept I really want to dig into more is this idea of gamification and value capture. The idea is this: games are wonderful because they give us clear rules and constraints. When we play a game, we immerse ourselves in an artificial world, with pre-defined winning conditions and usually a scoring system. This is immensely pleasurable, because it’s so different from real life. One of the great difficulties of real life is that it’s very hard to know when we’re doing the right thing. There are no rules. There are infinitely many paths to take. Our attention and goals are constantly in competition: we want to spend time with loved ones, but we also want career success, and we also want leisure time, and we also want to be ethical, but we also have selfish motives, etc. etc. Our values are rich and complex and sometimes contradictory. Even if you believe in an omnipotent deity keeping track of whether you’re making the “right” decisions, you’ll never actually know where you stand on God’s moral abacus. (Part of the fun and absurdity of the show The Good Place was that they asked the question “what if you actually could see your ranking on some omnipotent moral scoreboard?”)
So what happens when we gamify our real lives? Well, sometimes it’s fine. Sometimes we create little games for ourselves at the gym and they motivate us to exercise more. No problem. But sometimes it’s pernicious. I joined Strava to track my bike rides earlier this year, and quickly found the platform messing with how I conceived of my rides. I felt like if a ride wasn’t tracked on Strava, it somehow didn’t count. I was now riding in order to have success on Strava, rather than using Strava to support my riding. I could tell similar stories about Instagram, Twitter, and Hinge.
Nguyen calls this phenomenon “value capture”. He describes it like this:
#1) Our values are, at first, rich and subtle.
#2) We encounter simplified (often quantified) versions of those values.
#3) Those simplified versions take the place of our richer values in our reasoning and motivations.
#4) Our lives get worse.
When I read this, I immediately thought “oh damn, this is exactly what it feels like to become an effective altruist.” Effective altruism is a philosophy and community that advocates using evidence and reason to determine how people can do the most good with their money and careers. Implicit in this definition is a key idea: it is possible to use reason and evidence to measure how much good we are doing. Doing good, then, is, at its core, an actuarial problem: find the things we can do that help the most people or save the most lives, and focus on doing those. In theory, this feels like an amazing idea! In principle, we should be able to take the rich tapestry of moral values and replace it with a numbers game.
But in practice, what we get is steps #3 and #4 outlined above. “Doing good” is not a game. It’s a continuous battle over competing values and interests. It might mean different things to different people. It resists easy measurement. And yet, effective altruism—and indeed any worldview rooted in utilitarianism—gamifies the idea of doing good. Tradeoffs and nuance might disappear in the interest of value clarity: you get the most points by donating to malarial bednets, or becoming vegetarian, or working to prevent existential risks. In adopting this worldview, one runs the risk of instrumentalizing oneself—viewing our lives as being about the achievement of some game-like goal—which in my view can be psychologically damaging and is not the path to a rich and fulfilling life.
(Of course, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t donate money or be vegetarian or care about existential risks. It just means you shouldn’t turn your conception of morality into a numbers game. Life is not FitBit for hedons.)
This brings me to a rather, uh, repugnant conclusion I’ve reached while writing this review: it’s unlikely that I’m going to be able to write full reviews for every book I’ve read this year within the next three days. I have two options here. I can accept the Goodreads game on its own terms and write short, pithy reviews of the 15 books I have left to fulfill my goal of reading 50 books in 2022. Or I can reject this gamification entirely. I can remember that my goals are actually subtle and rich: I want to read books deeply and intentionally, and write reviews that capture my full thoughts and feelings at the time of reading. My goal in using Goodreads isn’t to hit some arbitrary target; it’s to take reading seriously and celebrate books with my friends. The target is of course a useful guide, but I need to remember that the target isn’t itself the thing I value. For that reason, I likely won’t hit my Goodreads reading goal for 2022, even though I’ve actually read far more than 50 books this year.
Final thing about Games: Agency as Art before I’m done. I read this book in a book club with 9 other people and it was absolutely perfect. My experience of reading this book is inseparable from the month’s worth of conversations we had about it. We met over Zoom four times and mainly talked about how the ideas in the book were resonating with our own lives. I cannot recommend this book highly enough for a book club. It also helps to have other people supporting you when reading a work of philosophy like this, since the content can be a little slow at times.
What a great read. Reflecting on it now for this review is kinda making me emotional. It’s a beautiful thing when a book can shape your view of the world so deeply. What a gift.
I would summarize the arguments I took away from Games in one paragraph like this: when we play games, we get to try on new ways of thinking, acting, and being—in other words, new agential modes. We do this by immersing ourselves in environments consciously crafted by game designers. Playing a game is an amazing cognitive dance: we temporarily adopt goals within the construct of the game, and genuinely strive to reach those goals, even though the goals (like “move this piece to this square” or “climb this short wall”) are meaningless in our actual lives. Here’s the magic: oftentimes, the true purpose of gameplay is something totally outside the actual goals of the game. The goal of multiplayer board games is human connection; the goal of Twister is riotous chaos. But we don’t get connection and chaos by going after those things directly; we get those things by seriously pursuing the goals of the game. The clear-cut rules and constraints of games are also enormously satisfying because they are a reprieve from real life, with its plurality of conflicting values and goals. This value clarity is why it’s dangerous to over-gamify our lives: we strip our life of its rich and subtle values (e.g. “I want to feel fit and healthy”) and replace them with a shallow metric (“gotta get my steps in”).
Let me expand on some of these ideas. First, I want to talk about self-effacing ends, the idea that some things are best achieved by not striving for them directly. As soon as I was introduced to this idea, it spun my head around. If you want to make a lot of money, don’t focus on making money, focus on building a product or service that people like. If you want people to like you, don’t focus on getting people to like you, focus on expressing interest in others. If you want to be happy, don’t focus on being happy, focus on making meaningful relationships and pursuing fulfilling projects. If you want to change someone’s mind, don’t focus on changing their mind, focus on making them feel listened to.
The more I think about this, the more I am astounded by the fact that some of the things we most cherish and value in life cannot be pursued directly. It’s incredible that our brains can operate on multiple levels like this. Like, if I want to be good at business, I cannot come to you looking like a businessman. I need to be friendly, warm, charismatic, and approachable. The last thing you want to think when engaging with me is “this guy’s trying to sell me something.” And yet, the way for me to sell you something is precisely to act like I’m not trying to sell you anything.
Not to belabor the point, but when I teach a liberal arts class—history, literature, philosophy or something like that—I have to engage with these multiple levels. The point of studying the liberal arts is something like “self-actualization” or “developing a worldview”. Studying these subjects will probably make you better at reasoning about complex large-scale issues, developing close-knit relationships, and empathizing with more kinds of people. But we never explicitly pursue any of those things. We sit around a table and talk about books that we read. If we sat around talking about “developing a self” (like one might do at, say, a leadership conference), it would be absolutely fruitless.
Am I adequately expressing how crazy I find this?? Like, you’re telling me that if you wanna bond with your family, you shouldn’t pursue the goal of “bonding with your family”, you should pursue the goal of “winning at Monopoly”??? Come ON!!
Ok, that’s enough examples. I promise that if you start looking around for self-effacing ends, you’ll find them everywhere.
The second concept I really want to dig into more is this idea of gamification and value capture. The idea is this: games are wonderful because they give us clear rules and constraints. When we play a game, we immerse ourselves in an artificial world, with pre-defined winning conditions and usually a scoring system. This is immensely pleasurable, because it’s so different from real life. One of the great difficulties of real life is that it’s very hard to know when we’re doing the right thing. There are no rules. There are infinitely many paths to take. Our attention and goals are constantly in competition: we want to spend time with loved ones, but we also want career success, and we also want leisure time, and we also want to be ethical, but we also have selfish motives, etc. etc. Our values are rich and complex and sometimes contradictory. Even if you believe in an omnipotent deity keeping track of whether you’re making the “right” decisions, you’ll never actually know where you stand on God’s moral abacus. (Part of the fun and absurdity of the show The Good Place was that they asked the question “what if you actually could see your ranking on some omnipotent moral scoreboard?”)
So what happens when we gamify our real lives? Well, sometimes it’s fine. Sometimes we create little games for ourselves at the gym and they motivate us to exercise more. No problem. But sometimes it’s pernicious. I joined Strava to track my bike rides earlier this year, and quickly found the platform messing with how I conceived of my rides. I felt like if a ride wasn’t tracked on Strava, it somehow didn’t count. I was now riding in order to have success on Strava, rather than using Strava to support my riding. I could tell similar stories about Instagram, Twitter, and Hinge.
Nguyen calls this phenomenon “value capture”. He describes it like this:
#1) Our values are, at first, rich and subtle.
#2) We encounter simplified (often quantified) versions of those values.
#3) Those simplified versions take the place of our richer values in our reasoning and motivations.
#4) Our lives get worse.
When I read this, I immediately thought “oh damn, this is exactly what it feels like to become an effective altruist.” Effective altruism is a philosophy and community that advocates using evidence and reason to determine how people can do the most good with their money and careers. Implicit in this definition is a key idea: it is possible to use reason and evidence to measure how much good we are doing. Doing good, then, is, at its core, an actuarial problem: find the things we can do that help the most people or save the most lives, and focus on doing those. In theory, this feels like an amazing idea! In principle, we should be able to take the rich tapestry of moral values and replace it with a numbers game.
But in practice, what we get is steps #3 and #4 outlined above. “Doing good” is not a game. It’s a continuous battle over competing values and interests. It might mean different things to different people. It resists easy measurement. And yet, effective altruism—and indeed any worldview rooted in utilitarianism—gamifies the idea of doing good. Tradeoffs and nuance might disappear in the interest of value clarity: you get the most points by donating to malarial bednets, or becoming vegetarian, or working to prevent existential risks. In adopting this worldview, one runs the risk of instrumentalizing oneself—viewing our lives as being about the achievement of some game-like goal—which in my view can be psychologically damaging and is not the path to a rich and fulfilling life.
(Of course, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t donate money or be vegetarian or care about existential risks. It just means you shouldn’t turn your conception of morality into a numbers game. Life is not FitBit for hedons.)
This brings me to a rather, uh, repugnant conclusion I’ve reached while writing this review: it’s unlikely that I’m going to be able to write full reviews for every book I’ve read this year within the next three days. I have two options here. I can accept the Goodreads game on its own terms and write short, pithy reviews of the 15 books I have left to fulfill my goal of reading 50 books in 2022. Or I can reject this gamification entirely. I can remember that my goals are actually subtle and rich: I want to read books deeply and intentionally, and write reviews that capture my full thoughts and feelings at the time of reading. My goal in using Goodreads isn’t to hit some arbitrary target; it’s to take reading seriously and celebrate books with my friends. The target is of course a useful guide, but I need to remember that the target isn’t itself the thing I value. For that reason, I likely won’t hit my Goodreads reading goal for 2022, even though I’ve actually read far more than 50 books this year.
Final thing about Games: Agency as Art before I’m done. I read this book in a book club with 9 other people and it was absolutely perfect. My experience of reading this book is inseparable from the month’s worth of conversations we had about it. We met over Zoom four times and mainly talked about how the ideas in the book were resonating with our own lives. I cannot recommend this book highly enough for a book club. It also helps to have other people supporting you when reading a work of philosophy like this, since the content can be a little slow at times.
What a great read. Reflecting on it now for this review is kinda making me emotional. It’s a beautiful thing when a book can shape your view of the world so deeply. What a gift.
Read
April 22, 2022Edited review, a year after reading: I still think about concepts from this book almost every day. It gave me a whole new language for thinking about art, beauty, agency, autonomy, and motivation. I think it's one of the most insightful and thought-provoking books I've ever read.
Read
April 17, 2021I cannot say enough good things about this trenchant, humane, and wonderfully readable work. More than that, it’s renewed my faith in the value of analytic philosophy to say something useful about life as we live it - rather than only artificially simple things that are exhausted by our concepts of them.
For Nguyen, this tension between the artificial simplicity of games themselves and the richer physical and moral world we inhabit is a source of productive tension. Nguyen seems out to defend games from two broad dangers: first, from aesthetic sneering that seeks to dismiss games as frivolous or as artistically valuable only insofar as they adopt the techniques and values of other media, and two, from gamification mechanisms that would flatten the real world out into the value simplicity and clear instrumental rationality of games in search of greater productivity or pleasure.
If you were around in certain cultural spaces a few years ago, you may recall a few very unenlightening “can videogames be art?”-type discussions. One side essentially said most commercial videogames are not very artistically ambitious (an argument that could just as easily be applied to most commercial films), while the other listed various games with good writing, or political commentary, or plot structure, or voice acting, or whatever. This is an impoverished way of asking questions about games’ status as artworks, because (1) it’s really just another discussion of how much cultural status they should have, but more notably (2) it zeroes in exclusively on the features that games share with other artworks. Nguyen is not an enemy of political commentary or voice acting, but he wants to talk about a framework that allows for the artistic criticism of games as games. The fact that he is personally familiar with such a wide variety of them - from tabletop RPGs to eurogames to rock climbing to MtG to party games to chess - and is, just, like, a guy who clearly loves games helps him bring a wider lens to this topic, as well as infusing it with the kind of naive enthusiasm that makes it a joy to read. Eurogames, he points out, have no voice acting etc, but if you log onto boardgamegeek and read reviews you will see plenty of aesthetic evaluation - of whether games are elegant, or skill-testing, or simply fun.
What gives a game game-like qualities is its conferring upon players temporary agencies, and prescribed means to pursue them. When I play Magic: the Gathering I can focus single-mindedly on trying to get my opponent to zero life before she does the same to me, and the means I have are the means of the valid rules of the game, things like “tap a mountain to add one red mana to my pool” that are uttterly meaningless outside of a game context. After the game is won or lost I can step back from this temporary agency and aesthetically evaluate the experience: did it feel like an elegant battle of wits in which we were both challenged to the fullest, or were we just drawing cards until somebody drew their winning combo, or did I win or lose simply because one of us didn’t draw enough lands, and so on. If it felt like an elegant battle of wits, I’m happy, even (or especially) if I lost. (Although I should say the single funnest game of Magic I’ve ever played was a totally moronic burn deck mirror match, that was so funny precisely because it was so moronic, and Nguyen has something to say about these kinds of games too.) This ability to single-mindedly pursue an artificial goal, and to then step back and evaluate the experience of doing so, forms an important part of human nature. Games aren’t the only area of life where we take on context-specific goals - even within the relatively narrow confines of my professional life, I take on a different persona when I’m lecturing vs grading vs observing a student activity vs commuting, say - but they’re the part we have the most control over.
The comparative simplicity of means and ends found in games (even the literally byzantine Crusader Kings, say) contrasts with the overwhelming complexity of values and potential means of achieving them IRL, but it’s a cooperative contrast. On one hand, the relative clarity and focus of the one offers a respite from the existential anxiety of the latter, a respite that can be healthy as long as it is temporary. On the other hand, games and the temporary agencies we inhabit through them can increase the diversity of our experiences in life as a whole. Apples to Apples, Starcraft, and D&D are all games, but really different ones. And their diversity contributes to our complex IRL values not just instrumentally (juvenile animals are drawn to play as a form of skill development, humans are neotenous and extend this through their whole lifespan; Nguyen credits chess with teaching him the mental discipline to do analytic philosophy) but in the same ways that other art does.
The tragedy, then, would be if games served to *globally* narrow and flatten our IRL values, rather than temporarily doing so in service of the larger whole. (We can see this, for instance, with gambling addiction.) This is the danger Nguyen sees in gamification: games work because their value clarity enables focus, but “clarity” can be a euphemism for “lying” when the real things we care about are complex. (I once read a paper that argued that teachers should foster “political clarity” in students, meaning the teacher should make clear who the good and bad guys are at all times; this strikes me as authoritarian and dishonest even when I agreed with all her examples.) Conscious gamification schemes are an intentional way of producing this kind of harm (though charitably we can assume the harm itself is not intended); a form of “value capture” that mirrors what can happen with other quantified reward metrics like money, impact factors, grading, and Twitter likes. Maybe money is necessary to civilization - I’ve got my doubts but you can make the case - but I think Nguyen is right that although these things can in cases have edge utility, they are basically dangerous and are rapidly destroying (real, non-quantified) value all over the place. Like the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, legible reward systems are beautiful when kept inside their cages and ready to feast on your still-warm corpse otherwise.
Recommended for anybody who likes, or is on the fence about, both analytic philosophy and games.
For Nguyen, this tension between the artificial simplicity of games themselves and the richer physical and moral world we inhabit is a source of productive tension. Nguyen seems out to defend games from two broad dangers: first, from aesthetic sneering that seeks to dismiss games as frivolous or as artistically valuable only insofar as they adopt the techniques and values of other media, and two, from gamification mechanisms that would flatten the real world out into the value simplicity and clear instrumental rationality of games in search of greater productivity or pleasure.
If you were around in certain cultural spaces a few years ago, you may recall a few very unenlightening “can videogames be art?”-type discussions. One side essentially said most commercial videogames are not very artistically ambitious (an argument that could just as easily be applied to most commercial films), while the other listed various games with good writing, or political commentary, or plot structure, or voice acting, or whatever. This is an impoverished way of asking questions about games’ status as artworks, because (1) it’s really just another discussion of how much cultural status they should have, but more notably (2) it zeroes in exclusively on the features that games share with other artworks. Nguyen is not an enemy of political commentary or voice acting, but he wants to talk about a framework that allows for the artistic criticism of games as games. The fact that he is personally familiar with such a wide variety of them - from tabletop RPGs to eurogames to rock climbing to MtG to party games to chess - and is, just, like, a guy who clearly loves games helps him bring a wider lens to this topic, as well as infusing it with the kind of naive enthusiasm that makes it a joy to read. Eurogames, he points out, have no voice acting etc, but if you log onto boardgamegeek and read reviews you will see plenty of aesthetic evaluation - of whether games are elegant, or skill-testing, or simply fun.
What gives a game game-like qualities is its conferring upon players temporary agencies, and prescribed means to pursue them. When I play Magic: the Gathering I can focus single-mindedly on trying to get my opponent to zero life before she does the same to me, and the means I have are the means of the valid rules of the game, things like “tap a mountain to add one red mana to my pool” that are uttterly meaningless outside of a game context. After the game is won or lost I can step back from this temporary agency and aesthetically evaluate the experience: did it feel like an elegant battle of wits in which we were both challenged to the fullest, or were we just drawing cards until somebody drew their winning combo, or did I win or lose simply because one of us didn’t draw enough lands, and so on. If it felt like an elegant battle of wits, I’m happy, even (or especially) if I lost. (Although I should say the single funnest game of Magic I’ve ever played was a totally moronic burn deck mirror match, that was so funny precisely because it was so moronic, and Nguyen has something to say about these kinds of games too.) This ability to single-mindedly pursue an artificial goal, and to then step back and evaluate the experience of doing so, forms an important part of human nature. Games aren’t the only area of life where we take on context-specific goals - even within the relatively narrow confines of my professional life, I take on a different persona when I’m lecturing vs grading vs observing a student activity vs commuting, say - but they’re the part we have the most control over.
The comparative simplicity of means and ends found in games (even the literally byzantine Crusader Kings, say) contrasts with the overwhelming complexity of values and potential means of achieving them IRL, but it’s a cooperative contrast. On one hand, the relative clarity and focus of the one offers a respite from the existential anxiety of the latter, a respite that can be healthy as long as it is temporary. On the other hand, games and the temporary agencies we inhabit through them can increase the diversity of our experiences in life as a whole. Apples to Apples, Starcraft, and D&D are all games, but really different ones. And their diversity contributes to our complex IRL values not just instrumentally (juvenile animals are drawn to play as a form of skill development, humans are neotenous and extend this through their whole lifespan; Nguyen credits chess with teaching him the mental discipline to do analytic philosophy) but in the same ways that other art does.
The tragedy, then, would be if games served to *globally* narrow and flatten our IRL values, rather than temporarily doing so in service of the larger whole. (We can see this, for instance, with gambling addiction.) This is the danger Nguyen sees in gamification: games work because their value clarity enables focus, but “clarity” can be a euphemism for “lying” when the real things we care about are complex. (I once read a paper that argued that teachers should foster “political clarity” in students, meaning the teacher should make clear who the good and bad guys are at all times; this strikes me as authoritarian and dishonest even when I agreed with all her examples.) Conscious gamification schemes are an intentional way of producing this kind of harm (though charitably we can assume the harm itself is not intended); a form of “value capture” that mirrors what can happen with other quantified reward metrics like money, impact factors, grading, and Twitter likes. Maybe money is necessary to civilization - I’ve got my doubts but you can make the case - but I think Nguyen is right that although these things can in cases have edge utility, they are basically dangerous and are rapidly destroying (real, non-quantified) value all over the place. Like the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, legible reward systems are beautiful when kept inside their cages and ready to feast on your still-warm corpse otherwise.
Recommended for anybody who likes, or is on the fence about, both analytic philosophy and games.
February 6, 2024
this was a paradigm shift for how i see the role of games in my life — particularly a complex relationship to competitive debate in high school / college — but i also got most of the value from the introduction so 🤷🏻♀️
October 16, 2023
Heavy gaming is my primary hobby. I love intricate strategy games, boardgames with lots of little pieces, and improvised joy of a good RPG session. And while I was never primarily a games studies scholar, much of what I read (click the 'games' tag on this post) didn't land, missing what I found worthwhile in gaming.
Games: Agency As Art is the book which represent maturity of philosophy of games. Nguyen is an avid gamer, and he links gaming to the tradition of philosophy on aesthetics. Games are first and foremost activities of fun, and he identifies the specific form of fun as striving. Winning and the psychology of flow states are an adjunct to the primary pleasure of trying one's best. And certainly, while I enjoy winning, a well-played loss is more fun than a trivial victory. As an aesthetic object, games are inscriptions of agency, specific rules that tell you how to act and what to think about. You don't have to follow the rules, but if you don't you're playing a different game.
Having precisely identified the pleasure of games, and what makes for proper gaming, Nguyen turns his attention to the use of games. Other scholars have gotten caught up in the moral power of games, their ability to make us attuned to injustice in the world, which is a use of games, but saying that is like saying that the point of Cubism is to make us attentive to the horror of aerial bombing. It misses the forest for a single tree. Rather, the limited and narrow universe of the game serves as training ground for a specific type of agency, a set of values and skills, which we practice by playing. In real life, being able to shuffle among agencies is a useful skill: to decide whether to approach a problem as one of logistic optimization, geometric organization, or personal diplomacy. Rather than reducing the world down to a single limited set of ends, games help us pick appropriate ends.
My only caveat is that this is a work of analytical philosophy. Nguyen is in fact quite clear and readable for a philosopher, but that is faint praise, and getting through this book requires a level of comfort with arcane distinctions.
Games: Agency As Art is the book which represent maturity of philosophy of games. Nguyen is an avid gamer, and he links gaming to the tradition of philosophy on aesthetics. Games are first and foremost activities of fun, and he identifies the specific form of fun as striving. Winning and the psychology of flow states are an adjunct to the primary pleasure of trying one's best. And certainly, while I enjoy winning, a well-played loss is more fun than a trivial victory. As an aesthetic object, games are inscriptions of agency, specific rules that tell you how to act and what to think about. You don't have to follow the rules, but if you don't you're playing a different game.
Having precisely identified the pleasure of games, and what makes for proper gaming, Nguyen turns his attention to the use of games. Other scholars have gotten caught up in the moral power of games, their ability to make us attuned to injustice in the world, which is a use of games, but saying that is like saying that the point of Cubism is to make us attentive to the horror of aerial bombing. It misses the forest for a single tree. Rather, the limited and narrow universe of the game serves as training ground for a specific type of agency, a set of values and skills, which we practice by playing. In real life, being able to shuffle among agencies is a useful skill: to decide whether to approach a problem as one of logistic optimization, geometric organization, or personal diplomacy. Rather than reducing the world down to a single limited set of ends, games help us pick appropriate ends.
My only caveat is that this is a work of analytical philosophy. Nguyen is in fact quite clear and readable for a philosopher, but that is faint praise, and getting through this book requires a level of comfort with arcane distinctions.
January 17, 2024
Mistä peleissä on pohjimmiltaan kyse? Miksi niihin käytetään aikaa, vaikka pelien päämäärät ovat usein mielivaltaisia. C. Thi Nguyen on kuitenkin eri mieltä tästä mielivaltaisuudesta. Pelejä tarkastaltaessa pitää katse suunnata eri tavoin: kun päämäärää tavallisesti oikeutetaan tarkastelemalla sen omaa arvoa tai katsomalla, mitä siitä seuraa, pelien kohdalla pitää katsoa taaksepäin: pelissä on kyse motiivien inversiosta eli siitä, että päämäärä onkin valittu keinojen vuoksi.
Pelien ydin on, Nguyen väittää, toimijuudessa. Peli antaa meille tietyn päämäärän ja kykyjä, joita käyttää tämän päämäärän tavoittelussa. Mukana on esteitä, jotka sopivat näihin päämääriin ja kykyihin. Syntyy toimintaa, joka saa pelaajat omaksumaan tietynlaisen toimijuuden. Tässä on pelaamisen hienous: pelisuunnittelija on luonut päämäärät, kyvyt ja ympäristön, johon me pelaajat sovitamme oman toimijuutemme. “Pelit ovat siis ainutlaatuinen sosiaalinen teknologia. Ne ovat menetelmä kirjata toimijuuden muotoja keinotekoisiin välikappaleisiin: tallentaa, säilyttää ja siirtää niitä.”
Nguyen tarkastelee ensisijaisesti ponnistelupelaamista. Sen hän erottaa saavutuspelaamisesta: esimerkiksi pokeriammattilainen pelaa saadakseen rahaa ja ammattiurheiluja haluaa rahaa ja mainetta. Voittaminen on keino päästä tähän tavoitteeseen ja siksi aidosti tärkeää. Mutta entä kun minä pelaan kavereideni kanssa? Päämääränä on ehdottomasti voittaminen, mutta tavoitteena on kuitenkin hauskanpito. Jos en yrittäisi voittaa, pelaaminen ei olisi hauskaa, mutta voittamisella itsellään ei ole merkitystä. Päinvastoin, jos yritän voittaa liian kovasti, hauskanpito – pelaamisen varsinainen tavoite – kärsii. Saavutuspelaaja pelaa voittaakseen, ponnistelupelaaja ”omaksuu väliaikaisesti kiinnostuksen voittoon kamppailun tähden”.
Jotta tällainen ponnistelupelaaminen on ylipäänsä mahdollista – ja se selvästikin on, koska se kuvaa täydellisesti minun tapaani pelata pelejä – Nguyenin mukaan pelaajien on kyettävä herättämään itsessään väliaikainen kiinnostus voittamiseen ja omaksua kertakäyttöinen päämäärä, josta täytyy jälkikäteen päästä eroon. Tätä uppoutumista väliaikaisiin motivaatioihin Nguyen tarkastelee kirjassaan paljon.
Nguyenin mielestä pelien suuri arvo on siinä, että ne ovat muoto kirjata ylös erilaisia toimijuuden tapoja. Kun näin on tehty, pelejä pelaamalla voi kokeilla, millaiselta joku tietty toimijuuden muoto tuntuu. Tämä on järkeenkäypää: kun pelaa monipuolisesti erilaisia pelejä, tulee pelatessaan välittäneeksi hyvin monista eri asioista. Pelit ovat myös muoto, jossa toimijuutta voi tutkia yhteistyössä muiden kanssa. Kyse ei ole vain siitä, että pelit opettavat taitoja: “Väitän, että pelit voivat opettaa meille toimijuudellisen ajattelutavan noiden taitojen takana – yhdistää tietynlaiset kohdistuneet intressit tiettyyn kykyjoukkoon”, Nguyen kirjoittaa. Pelaaminen opettaa myös joustavuutta sen suhteen, miten näitä intressejä otetaan käyttöön ja pannaan hetkeksi sivuun.
Pelit toimivat myös pakopaikkana: niissä kykymme sopivat hyvin vastaan tuleviin haasteisiin. Saamme oikeat kyvyt, mutta vain juuri ja juuri riittävästi, mikä tekee asioista sopivasti vaikeita. Tosielämässä kykymme joskus riittävät, usein eivät, ja esteiden ylittäminen on ankeaa. Peleissä ongelmat ovat juuri oikean kokoisia ja niiden ratkaiseminen voi olla nautittavaa ja jopa kaunista. Arvot ovat yksinkertaisia ja jaettuja; peleissä olemme toimijoina yksinkertaistettuja. Se on Nguyenin mukaan sekä pelien suuri lupaus että suurin uhka. Pelimaailman yksinkertaisten ja selkeiden arvojen liukuminen tosimaailmaan on huono asia, sillä se luo vääriä odotuksia. Uhka ei siis ole siinä, että väkivaltaisen pelin pelaajasta tulee väkivaltainen, vaan siinä, että pelit tarjoavat moraalista selvyyttä ja arvojen yksinkertaistumista, joka ei todellisessa elämässä päde. Hyvin konkreettisella tasolla se voi vaikka tarkoittaa sitä, että kuntoilun pelillistäminen ohjaa huomion todellisesta kunnon kehittämisestä askelmäärän tai kalorilaskurin kaltaisen numeron tuijottamiseen.
Pelien filosofia on tällaisen vannoutuneen ponnistelupelaajan näkökulmasta vakuuttava kirja. Se nostaa pelien tarkasteluun sellaisia näkökulmia, joita en ole muualla kohdannut. Kokonaisuutena kirja on näin maallikkolukijan näkökulmasta varsin raskas – minulta meni pari viikkoa saada se kahlattua läpi, ja paikoin filosofinen käsitteiden veivaaminen oli hyvin puuduttavaa. Tavikset voivat suosiolla lukea vähän oikoen, filosofit ja pelitutkijat saavat sitten syventyä tarkemmin. Ilahduttavaa oli myös Nguyenin esimerkkipelien monipuolisuus: ainaisten videopelien sijasta Nguyen käytti esimerkkeinä lähinnä lautapelejä ja hyviä pelejä käyttikin. Moni peli oli tuttu, joka teki pointtien ymmärtämisestä helpompaa. Nguyen avaa keskeisimpien pelien toimintaa sen verran, että asian ymmärtänee, vaikka esimerkiksi Spyfall ei tuttu olisikaan.
Sen verran raskasta filosofista tekstiä Pelien filosofia on, etten sitä ihan varauksetta lähde kaikille peleistä kiinnostuneille suosittelemaan. Jos pelaamisen luonne kuitenkin kiinnostaa, Nguyen tarjoaa raikkaita näkökulmia pelaamisen analysointiin. Pelitutkijoille tämä lienee jo tuttu juttu, mutta pelien suunnittelemista kiinnostuneille suosittelen tutustumista kirjaan – tämä auttaa ymmärtämään uusin tavoin, mitä pelisuunnittelijat itse asiassa tekevät pelejä kehittäessään.
Pelien ydin on, Nguyen väittää, toimijuudessa. Peli antaa meille tietyn päämäärän ja kykyjä, joita käyttää tämän päämäärän tavoittelussa. Mukana on esteitä, jotka sopivat näihin päämääriin ja kykyihin. Syntyy toimintaa, joka saa pelaajat omaksumaan tietynlaisen toimijuuden. Tässä on pelaamisen hienous: pelisuunnittelija on luonut päämäärät, kyvyt ja ympäristön, johon me pelaajat sovitamme oman toimijuutemme. “Pelit ovat siis ainutlaatuinen sosiaalinen teknologia. Ne ovat menetelmä kirjata toimijuuden muotoja keinotekoisiin välikappaleisiin: tallentaa, säilyttää ja siirtää niitä.”
Nguyen tarkastelee ensisijaisesti ponnistelupelaamista. Sen hän erottaa saavutuspelaamisesta: esimerkiksi pokeriammattilainen pelaa saadakseen rahaa ja ammattiurheiluja haluaa rahaa ja mainetta. Voittaminen on keino päästä tähän tavoitteeseen ja siksi aidosti tärkeää. Mutta entä kun minä pelaan kavereideni kanssa? Päämääränä on ehdottomasti voittaminen, mutta tavoitteena on kuitenkin hauskanpito. Jos en yrittäisi voittaa, pelaaminen ei olisi hauskaa, mutta voittamisella itsellään ei ole merkitystä. Päinvastoin, jos yritän voittaa liian kovasti, hauskanpito – pelaamisen varsinainen tavoite – kärsii. Saavutuspelaaja pelaa voittaakseen, ponnistelupelaaja ”omaksuu väliaikaisesti kiinnostuksen voittoon kamppailun tähden”.
Jotta tällainen ponnistelupelaaminen on ylipäänsä mahdollista – ja se selvästikin on, koska se kuvaa täydellisesti minun tapaani pelata pelejä – Nguyenin mukaan pelaajien on kyettävä herättämään itsessään väliaikainen kiinnostus voittamiseen ja omaksua kertakäyttöinen päämäärä, josta täytyy jälkikäteen päästä eroon. Tätä uppoutumista väliaikaisiin motivaatioihin Nguyen tarkastelee kirjassaan paljon.
Nguyenin mielestä pelien suuri arvo on siinä, että ne ovat muoto kirjata ylös erilaisia toimijuuden tapoja. Kun näin on tehty, pelejä pelaamalla voi kokeilla, millaiselta joku tietty toimijuuden muoto tuntuu. Tämä on järkeenkäypää: kun pelaa monipuolisesti erilaisia pelejä, tulee pelatessaan välittäneeksi hyvin monista eri asioista. Pelit ovat myös muoto, jossa toimijuutta voi tutkia yhteistyössä muiden kanssa. Kyse ei ole vain siitä, että pelit opettavat taitoja: “Väitän, että pelit voivat opettaa meille toimijuudellisen ajattelutavan noiden taitojen takana – yhdistää tietynlaiset kohdistuneet intressit tiettyyn kykyjoukkoon”, Nguyen kirjoittaa. Pelaaminen opettaa myös joustavuutta sen suhteen, miten näitä intressejä otetaan käyttöön ja pannaan hetkeksi sivuun.
Pelit toimivat myös pakopaikkana: niissä kykymme sopivat hyvin vastaan tuleviin haasteisiin. Saamme oikeat kyvyt, mutta vain juuri ja juuri riittävästi, mikä tekee asioista sopivasti vaikeita. Tosielämässä kykymme joskus riittävät, usein eivät, ja esteiden ylittäminen on ankeaa. Peleissä ongelmat ovat juuri oikean kokoisia ja niiden ratkaiseminen voi olla nautittavaa ja jopa kaunista. Arvot ovat yksinkertaisia ja jaettuja; peleissä olemme toimijoina yksinkertaistettuja. Se on Nguyenin mukaan sekä pelien suuri lupaus että suurin uhka. Pelimaailman yksinkertaisten ja selkeiden arvojen liukuminen tosimaailmaan on huono asia, sillä se luo vääriä odotuksia. Uhka ei siis ole siinä, että väkivaltaisen pelin pelaajasta tulee väkivaltainen, vaan siinä, että pelit tarjoavat moraalista selvyyttä ja arvojen yksinkertaistumista, joka ei todellisessa elämässä päde. Hyvin konkreettisella tasolla se voi vaikka tarkoittaa sitä, että kuntoilun pelillistäminen ohjaa huomion todellisesta kunnon kehittämisestä askelmäärän tai kalorilaskurin kaltaisen numeron tuijottamiseen.
Pelien filosofia on tällaisen vannoutuneen ponnistelupelaajan näkökulmasta vakuuttava kirja. Se nostaa pelien tarkasteluun sellaisia näkökulmia, joita en ole muualla kohdannut. Kokonaisuutena kirja on näin maallikkolukijan näkökulmasta varsin raskas – minulta meni pari viikkoa saada se kahlattua läpi, ja paikoin filosofinen käsitteiden veivaaminen oli hyvin puuduttavaa. Tavikset voivat suosiolla lukea vähän oikoen, filosofit ja pelitutkijat saavat sitten syventyä tarkemmin. Ilahduttavaa oli myös Nguyenin esimerkkipelien monipuolisuus: ainaisten videopelien sijasta Nguyen käytti esimerkkeinä lähinnä lautapelejä ja hyviä pelejä käyttikin. Moni peli oli tuttu, joka teki pointtien ymmärtämisestä helpompaa. Nguyen avaa keskeisimpien pelien toimintaa sen verran, että asian ymmärtänee, vaikka esimerkiksi Spyfall ei tuttu olisikaan.
Sen verran raskasta filosofista tekstiä Pelien filosofia on, etten sitä ihan varauksetta lähde kaikille peleistä kiinnostuneille suosittelemaan. Jos pelaamisen luonne kuitenkin kiinnostaa, Nguyen tarjoaa raikkaita näkökulmia pelaamisen analysointiin. Pelitutkijoille tämä lienee jo tuttu juttu, mutta pelien suunnittelemista kiinnostuneille suosittelen tutustumista kirjaan – tämä auttaa ymmärtämään uusin tavoin, mitä pelisuunnittelijat itse asiassa tekevät pelejä kehittäessään.
March 1, 2023
Finally read this - lived up to the hype!
December 13, 2022
-like the idea of both game creator & game player as potentially artists
-still worried that gaming needs to be treated primarily as an historical form (philosophers, always not historical enough; historians, never philosophical enough)
-gaming in the present historical moment often (mostly?) corresponds not with agency but with a lack of agency
-like the idea of expanding both the category of gaming and the category of art
-going back now and rereading Dewey's Art as Experience, tend to be persuaded by the crystallization thesis (painting as the crystallization of artful looking, etc.)
-still inclined to think that the sense of agency art production produces is better than whatever quasi-agency game engagement produces
-shouldn't the idea be, let us have gaming that makes artists of gamers? the title of the book could be "gamers could be artists"
-maybe the problem is that gaming tends to lack the reflective moment; artists "strive" to produce art, but when the art is produced, there is a often a moment of reflection and appreciation for what has been produced
-in general, whatever produces aesthetic ("crystallized") memories is art; art is mostly, maybe always, the representation of, a gesturing toward, the infinite
-still worried that gaming needs to be treated primarily as an historical form (philosophers, always not historical enough; historians, never philosophical enough)
-gaming in the present historical moment often (mostly?) corresponds not with agency but with a lack of agency
-like the idea of expanding both the category of gaming and the category of art
-going back now and rereading Dewey's Art as Experience, tend to be persuaded by the crystallization thesis (painting as the crystallization of artful looking, etc.)
-still inclined to think that the sense of agency art production produces is better than whatever quasi-agency game engagement produces
-shouldn't the idea be, let us have gaming that makes artists of gamers? the title of the book could be "gamers could be artists"
-maybe the problem is that gaming tends to lack the reflective moment; artists "strive" to produce art, but when the art is produced, there is a often a moment of reflection and appreciation for what has been produced
-in general, whatever produces aesthetic ("crystallized") memories is art; art is mostly, maybe always, the representation of, a gesturing toward, the infinite
November 28, 2023
Gamification invades our lives and impoverishes our value systems. Yet consciously and intentionally played games, as the author argues, are a way of practicing alternative forms of agency and sociality, nurturing reflexivity and richer value systems. A well-written, if somewhat repetitive book about a timely and important topic.
August 26, 2022
I found this book dizzyingly intricate (as with most philosophy books). But I also found myself reflecting more on my own motivations, and on what I miss out on by not engaging more earnestly with alternative agencies. Since reading this book I’ve become more interested in games in general.
The basic argument is that most people play games (a goal limited by artificial constraints) for the joy of striving (rather than to accomplish the goal or to win). Thus our experience of gameplay straddles two agential modes - on one level, I take up the temporary agency of wanting to win the game; On a higher level, my aim remains to get a rich, enjoyable experience from the activity of play.
Games are therefore an art form for communicating an experience of agency, in the sense that within games we are given certain values and become (through our interactions with the game and other players) a new kind of agent during play. Post game, when we return to our aesthetic mode, we can reflect on the experience as it were add the game’s agential mode to our library (as fiction can provide us a library of experiences).
I was particularly taken in by Nguyen’s account in chapter 9 on gamification and value capture. “Value capture happens when I shape a heuristic in pursuit of reasons other than achieving the pleasures of games, but game-like pleasures insinuate themselves into my motivational system, and exert an untoward pull on the formation of my heuristics” (212). That is, when we crave the clarity of values games offer in other aspects of our lives, we can become more obsessed with achieving our gamified objective than with achieving the underlying value the gamification was meant to achieve (eg, pursuing a high GPA as opposed to knowledge).
The basic argument is that most people play games (a goal limited by artificial constraints) for the joy of striving (rather than to accomplish the goal or to win). Thus our experience of gameplay straddles two agential modes - on one level, I take up the temporary agency of wanting to win the game; On a higher level, my aim remains to get a rich, enjoyable experience from the activity of play.
Games are therefore an art form for communicating an experience of agency, in the sense that within games we are given certain values and become (through our interactions with the game and other players) a new kind of agent during play. Post game, when we return to our aesthetic mode, we can reflect on the experience as it were add the game’s agential mode to our library (as fiction can provide us a library of experiences).
I was particularly taken in by Nguyen’s account in chapter 9 on gamification and value capture. “Value capture happens when I shape a heuristic in pursuit of reasons other than achieving the pleasures of games, but game-like pleasures insinuate themselves into my motivational system, and exert an untoward pull on the formation of my heuristics” (212). That is, when we crave the clarity of values games offer in other aspects of our lives, we can become more obsessed with achieving our gamified objective than with achieving the underlying value the gamification was meant to achieve (eg, pursuing a high GPA as opposed to knowledge).
May 22, 2021
I thought that this book is an excellent corrective for the typical assumption that games are not art, or more weakly, that certain games are art and others are not. The thesis of the book is that all games involve the sculpting of player agency as their mode of creation. I find the central argument compelling. I do feel like that Nguyen's exploration of gaming addiction is cursory. It is certainly area that deserves further philosophical scrutiny. That being said, the book is already dense with interesting ideas that inspire reflection on a life of game-playing.
January 21, 2024
Gosh, I'm going to be annoying at next week's game night! A lot of interesting concepts were cogently explored in this book, but it was a little too dense, repetitive and full of academic jargon to be truly enjoyable casual reading outside of a college setting.
May 30, 2022
Games are art, says philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, and they are art of a particularly unique kind. Because games work in the medium of human agency and sociality, games cannot be subsumed under other kinds of art which work with visual or narrative media, even though some games might also be visually or narratively artistic.
The centerpiece of Nguyen's argument is an account of "aesthetic striving" as one under-appreciated mode of game play. An aesthetically striving game player does not take up the ends of a game for the purpose of winning per se. Rather, the "ends" of an in-game play session are actually the means of achieving an aesthetically pleasing experience, an experience that can only be achieved by temporarily immersing oneself in the rules and goals of a game and then discarding the in-game goals once the game is ended.
I found Nguyen's argument and viewpoint compelling and I will continue to think about it for a long time.
The centerpiece of Nguyen's argument is an account of "aesthetic striving" as one under-appreciated mode of game play. An aesthetically striving game player does not take up the ends of a game for the purpose of winning per se. Rather, the "ends" of an in-game play session are actually the means of achieving an aesthetically pleasing experience, an experience that can only be achieved by temporarily immersing oneself in the rules and goals of a game and then discarding the in-game goals once the game is ended.
I found Nguyen's argument and viewpoint compelling and I will continue to think about it for a long time.
August 9, 2022
Just read grasshopper, it goes further in less time. Don't have the patience for this stodgy appraisal of games after reading the Well Played Game
Want to read
February 6, 2023Interact group said it changed their life
February 26, 2024
what an insightful, engaging, accessibly written work of philosophy. wonderful!
February 7, 2023
Games: Agency as Art is an interesting look at how video and tabletop games have their own artistic value without trying it to the values of other art forms like movies and painting. Games should be praised as an art form BECAUSE of their unique ability to give a person a new set of values temporarily.
The middle chapters felt rather repetitive to convey these points. Otherwise, I would have given 5 stars.
The middle chapters felt rather repetitive to convey these points. Otherwise, I would have given 5 stars.
January 4, 2022
C. Thi Nguyen’s book,
Games: Agency as Art
, is getting a lot of attention. The current issue of the Journal of Philosophy of Sport has a symposium discussing it; and there was a session at the IAPS virtual conference this past year (both featured replies by Nguyen).
The attention and acclaim the book is getting is well-deserved.
First, Nguyen is an excellent writer. According to the book flap, he used to be a food writer for the LA Times. The writing is crisp and concise. He is funny and personable; bringing together amusing but relevant and insightful anecdotes and illustrations to help make his points. He doesn’t get bogged down in jargon or minutiae; but is still able to bring rigor and preciseness when appropriate.
Second, Nguyen faces a daunting challenge of balancing several disciplines: philosophy of art, philosophy of sport, game design, and game culture. Few have expertise in all of these fields, but Nguyen does a great job of explaining the relevant theories, ideas, and arguments in ways that allow the relative novice to follow along but without dumbing it down for the relative expert.
Lastly, Nguyen’s theories are novel and interesting; and they have had an immediate impact on my thinking about the nature of games. I can’t do justice in this brief review (I plan on writing up a long, more tradition book review soon), but the basic idea is that we can better understand games (and many sports as kinds of games) by seeing them as particular kind of art. If we think of art as capturing and stylizing different aspects of human experience: literature as capturing our narratives; music as recording our experience of sounds; dance as recording and stylizing our experience of human movement, etc., then we might approach games as recording and stylizing our practical agency. Within games of all kinds, we take on a temporary agency and play it out. We play with this agency through playing the game. This is comparable to how we might read Harry Potter and experience the world of wizardry. Playing Jedi: Fallen Order, though, allows to experience (at least in a stylized way) what it’s like to think and choose like a Jedi. The game allows us take on the practical reasoning and thought processes of the kind of character or agency that is created by the game structure. As part of taking on this agency, we get temporary goals and values that we pursue in the context of the game, allowing us to experience the striving and achieving of these goals.
This, argues Nguyen, gives us a better understanding of what games are and also what is so valuable and important about game-playing: both personally and also socially. He also discusses how there are some dangers to this – though I thought this is where the book was weakest (I'll get into this more in my longer review).
I learned a lot from this book. Nguyen’s ideas call for much more study (I‘ve already adjusted my philosophy of sport syllabus to include some of his work), and I am sure they will continue to influence my thinking. And his work will push the field forward his ideas are digested, criticized, and revised.
The attention and acclaim the book is getting is well-deserved.
First, Nguyen is an excellent writer. According to the book flap, he used to be a food writer for the LA Times. The writing is crisp and concise. He is funny and personable; bringing together amusing but relevant and insightful anecdotes and illustrations to help make his points. He doesn’t get bogged down in jargon or minutiae; but is still able to bring rigor and preciseness when appropriate.
Second, Nguyen faces a daunting challenge of balancing several disciplines: philosophy of art, philosophy of sport, game design, and game culture. Few have expertise in all of these fields, but Nguyen does a great job of explaining the relevant theories, ideas, and arguments in ways that allow the relative novice to follow along but without dumbing it down for the relative expert.
Lastly, Nguyen’s theories are novel and interesting; and they have had an immediate impact on my thinking about the nature of games. I can’t do justice in this brief review (I plan on writing up a long, more tradition book review soon), but the basic idea is that we can better understand games (and many sports as kinds of games) by seeing them as particular kind of art. If we think of art as capturing and stylizing different aspects of human experience: literature as capturing our narratives; music as recording our experience of sounds; dance as recording and stylizing our experience of human movement, etc., then we might approach games as recording and stylizing our practical agency. Within games of all kinds, we take on a temporary agency and play it out. We play with this agency through playing the game. This is comparable to how we might read Harry Potter and experience the world of wizardry. Playing Jedi: Fallen Order, though, allows to experience (at least in a stylized way) what it’s like to think and choose like a Jedi. The game allows us take on the practical reasoning and thought processes of the kind of character or agency that is created by the game structure. As part of taking on this agency, we get temporary goals and values that we pursue in the context of the game, allowing us to experience the striving and achieving of these goals.
This, argues Nguyen, gives us a better understanding of what games are and also what is so valuable and important about game-playing: both personally and also socially. He also discusses how there are some dangers to this – though I thought this is where the book was weakest (I'll get into this more in my longer review).
I learned a lot from this book. Nguyen’s ideas call for much more study (I‘ve already adjusted my philosophy of sport syllabus to include some of his work), and I am sure they will continue to influence my thinking. And his work will push the field forward his ideas are digested, criticized, and revised.
Read
December 10, 2022If music is the crystallization of hearing, visual arts of seeing, then games are the crystallization of practicality.
Professor Thi Nguyen gives a compelling case about the artistry of games aside from the commonly focused upon and obvious artistic aspects of games, the visuals, music, and story. It’s true that all of these elements are involved, but what makes games an art is their ability to play with the agency of the players. For just a short amount of time, you step into a “magic circle” where your values, concerns, and the continuity of reality are temporarily halted. Games allow us to experience multiple agencies.
Games give us the opportunity to appreciate the beauty that comes along with striving. Professor Nguyen, according to the Suites definition of gameplay, shows how one possible explanation for games’ existence is to provide us the joy that accompanies the struggle for a goal. When you are hit with the epiphany of a winning move in chess, when you torque your body into the perfect angle to complete a series of flips on a trampoline, or when you navigate a digital player on a platforming video game with precise moves to avoid death, the joy comes from the engagement in the struggle and not necessarily for the purpose of winning. Professor Nguyen gives many arguments and clarifications for distinguishing the different reasons for why people play games so I would urge you to check out those arguments before you decide to pass on this reading.
There is a danger that can accompany games, however. This would be the mechanism that simplifies values in games or redirects them in ways that betray the primary values that you hold. Take Fitbit for instance which measures health in terms of steps taken when in actuality the best course of action for you would be an entirely different set of exercises. Or social media whose purpose may have been to spread awareness about current events, but becomes a game for accumulating the maximum amount of likes and shares from outrageous posts. “When we gamify our ordinary lives, we will be tempted to shift and simplify our ends for the sake of the struggle — but then we are no longer aiming at the same target.”
You can definitely sense the Aristotelian value of ethics underlying Professor Nguyen’s arguments for the aesthetics of games. From what I’ve heard, Suites’ (Nguyen’s primary basis for his definition of games and play) theory of games is a marriage between Aristotelian and Kantian ethics. If games are the voluntary attempts to overcome unnecessary tasks for the sake of the struggle (I could be mistaken), then is this not a crossbreed between Aristotle’s instance of exercising reason for the exercise of virtue and Kant’s love of freedom? On a bleaker note, I feel like Suite’s conviction that games are the meaning of life could hastily be embraced by the pessimist community. What happens when humanity becomes a utopia? How will it occupy itself in an attempt to ignore its biological puppetry? Games seem like a logical answer…
Professor Thi Nguyen gives a compelling case about the artistry of games aside from the commonly focused upon and obvious artistic aspects of games, the visuals, music, and story. It’s true that all of these elements are involved, but what makes games an art is their ability to play with the agency of the players. For just a short amount of time, you step into a “magic circle” where your values, concerns, and the continuity of reality are temporarily halted. Games allow us to experience multiple agencies.
Games give us the opportunity to appreciate the beauty that comes along with striving. Professor Nguyen, according to the Suites definition of gameplay, shows how one possible explanation for games’ existence is to provide us the joy that accompanies the struggle for a goal. When you are hit with the epiphany of a winning move in chess, when you torque your body into the perfect angle to complete a series of flips on a trampoline, or when you navigate a digital player on a platforming video game with precise moves to avoid death, the joy comes from the engagement in the struggle and not necessarily for the purpose of winning. Professor Nguyen gives many arguments and clarifications for distinguishing the different reasons for why people play games so I would urge you to check out those arguments before you decide to pass on this reading.
There is a danger that can accompany games, however. This would be the mechanism that simplifies values in games or redirects them in ways that betray the primary values that you hold. Take Fitbit for instance which measures health in terms of steps taken when in actuality the best course of action for you would be an entirely different set of exercises. Or social media whose purpose may have been to spread awareness about current events, but becomes a game for accumulating the maximum amount of likes and shares from outrageous posts. “When we gamify our ordinary lives, we will be tempted to shift and simplify our ends for the sake of the struggle — but then we are no longer aiming at the same target.”
You can definitely sense the Aristotelian value of ethics underlying Professor Nguyen’s arguments for the aesthetics of games. From what I’ve heard, Suites’ (Nguyen’s primary basis for his definition of games and play) theory of games is a marriage between Aristotelian and Kantian ethics. If games are the voluntary attempts to overcome unnecessary tasks for the sake of the struggle (I could be mistaken), then is this not a crossbreed between Aristotle’s instance of exercising reason for the exercise of virtue and Kant’s love of freedom? On a bleaker note, I feel like Suite’s conviction that games are the meaning of life could hastily be embraced by the pessimist community. What happens when humanity becomes a utopia? How will it occupy itself in an attempt to ignore its biological puppetry? Games seem like a logical answer…
December 28, 2021
3.5 stars. This book was interesting because it wasn't something I had ever thought about. Playing a game can be defined as the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. Nguyen explicates how human agency is manipulated in the context of a game, and the ramifications it has on life outside of games. At its heart it is a philosophical book, but it is presented in a very fun and innovative way. Nguyen describes many different kinds of very interesting games and how they use our agencies in different ways. I came away with a nice list of games to go buy, ones that I had never heard of!
Some of the takeaways from the book are:
1. Games are very well defined, structured, and goal oriented pseudo-realities. This makes it possible for the game designer to create art in the medium of human agency. By defining what the players can and can't do, say, act, etc. the game designer is creating something artistic.
2. Different games require different modes of agency. Chess is very calculating. Other games rely on cooperation, or subterfuge. Thus, playing multiple games develop the ability for one to recognize, recall, and utilize different kinds of agency in real life. There can be a fluidity to agency when we recognize different environments that resemble ones experienced in games.
3. We tend to game-ify life. Gamification occurs when you simplify something in real life to the level of a game, in order to cope or excel. For example, using a Fitbit to track number of steps is the act of gamifying exercise for the sake of being healthier.
Humans love games because they provide clear answers to defined questions, and specific rules by which to obtain those answers. Life is messy and rarely follows a similar model. Thus, Nguyen cautions us to recognize and beware when we attempt to put boundaries around difficult problems, or simplify what is unknown or hard to know, down to following a well defined set of rules or instructions. Human nature is wired to do that, but it does not follow that life will yield the clear results that a game can promise. To illustrate, back to the Fitbit example, wearing a Fitbit can easily change your goal from being healthier to maximizing the number of steps, when in reality your program should include healthy eating, weight training, and walking a lot of steps. But because you have gamified the number of steps, your goal and therefore your plan, end up changing accordingly. The appeal of the easier game-like road can rob your agency.
Some of the takeaways from the book are:
1. Games are very well defined, structured, and goal oriented pseudo-realities. This makes it possible for the game designer to create art in the medium of human agency. By defining what the players can and can't do, say, act, etc. the game designer is creating something artistic.
2. Different games require different modes of agency. Chess is very calculating. Other games rely on cooperation, or subterfuge. Thus, playing multiple games develop the ability for one to recognize, recall, and utilize different kinds of agency in real life. There can be a fluidity to agency when we recognize different environments that resemble ones experienced in games.
3. We tend to game-ify life. Gamification occurs when you simplify something in real life to the level of a game, in order to cope or excel. For example, using a Fitbit to track number of steps is the act of gamifying exercise for the sake of being healthier.
Humans love games because they provide clear answers to defined questions, and specific rules by which to obtain those answers. Life is messy and rarely follows a similar model. Thus, Nguyen cautions us to recognize and beware when we attempt to put boundaries around difficult problems, or simplify what is unknown or hard to know, down to following a well defined set of rules or instructions. Human nature is wired to do that, but it does not follow that life will yield the clear results that a game can promise. To illustrate, back to the Fitbit example, wearing a Fitbit can easily change your goal from being healthier to maximizing the number of steps, when in reality your program should include healthy eating, weight training, and walking a lot of steps. But because you have gamified the number of steps, your goal and therefore your plan, end up changing accordingly. The appeal of the easier game-like road can rob your agency.
November 24, 2023
Very smart treatment of games and what makes them compelling. Strikes close to my own fascination with play/striving/struggle. I will admit to skimming through parts where the meticulous analytic-philosophical style just got to be too much of a grind, but overall I really think Nguyen captured something quite profound about how games can transform our agency.
In particular I loved the concept of "self-effacing ends" - goals that are difficult or impossible to achieve by aiming directly for them - and the framing of games as instruments that, by (re)structuring the player's agency, help in achieving said goals. A player invested in a game might experience excitement, self-satisfaction, flow, camaraderie, or any number of other things that would be borderline nonsensical to try to sit down and induce directly. In fact, it seems that a lot of the more sought-after things in life have this paradoxical quality, and that thinking deeply about play has implications reaching far beyond games as peripheral amusement.
In particular I loved the concept of "self-effacing ends" - goals that are difficult or impossible to achieve by aiming directly for them - and the framing of games as instruments that, by (re)structuring the player's agency, help in achieving said goals. A player invested in a game might experience excitement, self-satisfaction, flow, camaraderie, or any number of other things that would be borderline nonsensical to try to sit down and induce directly. In fact, it seems that a lot of the more sought-after things in life have this paradoxical quality, and that thinking deeply about play has implications reaching far beyond games as peripheral amusement.
April 30, 2023
I thoroughly enjoyed this. It's been years since I've read any philosophy, and even longer since I read any aesthetics (the branch of philosophy that deals with art). This book made me remember why my Honours thesis project in aethetics was such a delight. It occasionally felt like this was written specifically to cater to my personal, niche brand of curiosity.
The book prompted a lot of reflection on my own relationship to games and the role they play in my life. I feel richer for having read it, as it has added layers of enjoyment, understanding, and nuance to my own engagement with games.
The book prompted a lot of reflection on my own relationship to games and the role they play in my life. I feel richer for having read it, as it has added layers of enjoyment, understanding, and nuance to my own engagement with games.
March 12, 2023
Philosophical writing at its best: rigorous and clever, yet wholly accessible and relatable. In contrast to Ian Bogost, who writes about video games for a general audience, Nguyen's work is serious academic philosophy. Even so, while laying down foundational groundwork about the definitional nature of games, his arguments are delightfully crisp and lacking in pretension.
You can see how his past life as a food writer for the LA Times informs the philosopher he is today. Alongside asides on Kantian moral frameworks, he lets show his love for his wife and Civilization II. Whereas analytic philosophy often reads as cold and overly rational, this humanity and personal touch makes it more bearable to follow along.
There's a lot of groundwork going on in the first half of the time. Nguyen spends ample time laying out a taxonomy of games (achievement games vs. striving games and the various subtypes of each) and constructing his core argument: games convey different experiences and modes of agency. However, it was the last part of the book, in which he explores questions of gamification and how games shape our individual and societal values, that I found most compelling.
Life is messy and full of nuance. The simplified, practical mechanics and means found in games offer a seductive escape from the complexities of offline existence. However, like in the TRON movies, we must be careful to not become trapped within game life.
"Often associated with the notion of “play” are the qualities of lightness, unseriousness, and changeability. And there is a sense in which the suggestions I’ve made about striving play fit with that notion. When we are involved in striving play, especially aesthetic striving play, we are learning to wear our agency lightly. We are learning not to be too stuck in a certain practical frame of mind, not too attached to certain clear goals. We learning to dip in and out, to devote ourselves and then to pull back. We are learning to play around with our own practical attitudes. We are learning to be more light-footed with our way of being in the practical world."
You can see how his past life as a food writer for the LA Times informs the philosopher he is today. Alongside asides on Kantian moral frameworks, he lets show his love for his wife and Civilization II. Whereas analytic philosophy often reads as cold and overly rational, this humanity and personal touch makes it more bearable to follow along.
There's a lot of groundwork going on in the first half of the time. Nguyen spends ample time laying out a taxonomy of games (achievement games vs. striving games and the various subtypes of each) and constructing his core argument: games convey different experiences and modes of agency. However, it was the last part of the book, in which he explores questions of gamification and how games shape our individual and societal values, that I found most compelling.
Life is messy and full of nuance. The simplified, practical mechanics and means found in games offer a seductive escape from the complexities of offline existence. However, like in the TRON movies, we must be careful to not become trapped within game life.
"Often associated with the notion of “play” are the qualities of lightness, unseriousness, and changeability. And there is a sense in which the suggestions I’ve made about striving play fit with that notion. When we are involved in striving play, especially aesthetic striving play, we are learning to wear our agency lightly. We are learning not to be too stuck in a certain practical frame of mind, not too attached to certain clear goals. We learning to dip in and out, to devote ourselves and then to pull back. We are learning to play around with our own practical attitudes. We are learning to be more light-footed with our way of being in the practical world."
August 8, 2022
Games: Agency as Art by C. Thi Nguyen
Calling all game-lovers! This book is such a fun read. It’s technically philosophy, yes, and pretty situated in academic research, but the ideas in this book are compelling and original.
Here’s the gist: Nguyen’s main point is that the aesthetic medium of games is agency. In other words, games are an aesthetic category marked by how they manipulate players’ sense of agency. When we play a game, we adopt the goals, limits, rules, attitudes, and so forth that determine our motivations while playing the game. He argues in favor of “striving play” which is the idea that we temporarily adopt the desire to win for the sake of the struggle. Not everyone does this, of course. Some folks do care about winning more than anything else. But Nguyen’s point is that striving play is possible, and those who do it, only care about winning insofar as it makes the overall struggle and experience of playing the game fun.
Once a striving player is done playing, their temporary motivation from the game is lifted. The overarching theme of the book is how games can provide us with different agential modes—certain ways of approaching problems and striving to reach our goal. For instance, chess encourages a calculated, anticipatory approach to a solution, whereas charades encourages creative-thinking and expression. If we play games enough, we can adopt their modes from our library of agencies. This theory includes all games, too—party games, drinking games, board games, video games, you name it.
I really, really enjoyed this book. It’s well-written, unique, provides a ton of game recommendations, and is simply a joyful read. Near the end he addresses a worry regarding the gamification of our lives and how tricking our daily motivation by adopting a game approach (like Fitbit) is more concerning because it can warp our values than the more common worry of violence in video games.
So happy to have read this!
📖: (5/5) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Calling all game-lovers! This book is such a fun read. It’s technically philosophy, yes, and pretty situated in academic research, but the ideas in this book are compelling and original.
Here’s the gist: Nguyen’s main point is that the aesthetic medium of games is agency. In other words, games are an aesthetic category marked by how they manipulate players’ sense of agency. When we play a game, we adopt the goals, limits, rules, attitudes, and so forth that determine our motivations while playing the game. He argues in favor of “striving play” which is the idea that we temporarily adopt the desire to win for the sake of the struggle. Not everyone does this, of course. Some folks do care about winning more than anything else. But Nguyen’s point is that striving play is possible, and those who do it, only care about winning insofar as it makes the overall struggle and experience of playing the game fun.
Once a striving player is done playing, their temporary motivation from the game is lifted. The overarching theme of the book is how games can provide us with different agential modes—certain ways of approaching problems and striving to reach our goal. For instance, chess encourages a calculated, anticipatory approach to a solution, whereas charades encourages creative-thinking and expression. If we play games enough, we can adopt their modes from our library of agencies. This theory includes all games, too—party games, drinking games, board games, video games, you name it.
I really, really enjoyed this book. It’s well-written, unique, provides a ton of game recommendations, and is simply a joyful read. Near the end he addresses a worry regarding the gamification of our lives and how tricking our daily motivation by adopting a game approach (like Fitbit) is more concerning because it can warp our values than the more common worry of violence in video games.
So happy to have read this!
📖: (5/5) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Read
April 29, 2021I found Thi's explanation of what is distinctively satisfying about playing games pretty compelling, especially the way that games allow us to focus on specific aspects of our agency by giving us artificially clear goals, in contrast with the muddy, complicated, endlessly negotiated goals of non-game life. The chapter on the dangers of "gamification" and value capture is extremely illuminating (roughly: it's bad to replace our rich complicated goals that are incommensurable and hard to measure progress towards with the commensurable and measurable goals of the kind we find in games; like replacing the pursuit of knowledge with citation counts and publication in prestigious journals in academia, or the pursuit of a healthy lifestyle with competition over FitBit step counts, etc.).
Thi is doing more than probably anyone right now to improve the reputation of analytic philosophy by doing readable, enjoyable work on topics that people actually care about.
Thi is doing more than probably anyone right now to improve the reputation of analytic philosophy by doing readable, enjoyable work on topics that people actually care about.
May 23, 2022
Overall, I really like this book. Nguyen has enlightened my perspective about gaming (doing video games), even though this book does not only talk about game in terms of video games, which includes sports, board games and other funny or stupid games. Furthermore, The notion of agency, agency fluidity/flexibility, alternate agency, striving play, aesthetic experience, value capture, etc., have equipped me with analyical tools for analyizing gameplays. This book is more philosophical, however I suppose, for those who are studying anthropology and sociology this book would be beneficial. I also really like how he repeat his explanation from time to time to remind me about ideas that he has introduced so I rarely got lost in the process of reading. Moreover, his writing style is not that hard to follow, in general.
December 12, 2022
It's almost a truism at this point to say that the "gamification" of our lives, at work, on social media, is a problem. But Nguyen provides serious foundational work in this delightful read by starting not with diagnosing our modern malaise but with more basic questions like "what is a game" and "what do we actually do when we play a game". His basic thesis is that games are a vehicle for exploring different modes of agency and the rest of the book explores the personal, the aesthetic and briefly, the real-world implications of that, oftentimes by introducing and discussing a variety of games: board games, card games, party games, etc. A brief but enjoyable read that provided the infinite value of a new perspective and new language for how to understand the world (and many new games to try!)
November 3, 2023
Shelving this book after reading > half.
I think the book lacks momentum later on and repeats its main themes. Some ideas did stick out: games as moral transformations, consent + game matching player psychology as the ingredients which compile "competitive" games into enjoyable experiences, games as a framing of values.
One thought as I shelve this, is reading a sentence saying that games in which everyone insults each other are badly designed and accomplish no purpose. Reading this in the context of performance art in which the performer endures extreme duress or brutality seems to contradict the original statement. I guess the statement forgoes certain types of intensity or extremity.
I think the book lacks momentum later on and repeats its main themes. Some ideas did stick out: games as moral transformations, consent + game matching player psychology as the ingredients which compile "competitive" games into enjoyable experiences, games as a framing of values.
One thought as I shelve this, is reading a sentence saying that games in which everyone insults each other are badly designed and accomplish no purpose. Reading this in the context of performance art in which the performer endures extreme duress or brutality seems to contradict the original statement. I guess the statement forgoes certain types of intensity or extremity.
June 7, 2021
A fascinating, thought provoking look at games, whether they are art, what makes them "work," as well as their philosophical and moral opportunities and dangers. There's a lot to take in here, and a lot to consider, but if you're interested in aesthetics or philosophical arguments for and against both games as a concept and the present trend toward the "gamification" of real life, you should check this one out.
January 10, 2023
The opinions and ideas here are worth six stars. I would love to see a version of this written in a less academic way, because I'm obsessed with clarity and accessibility and I see academic writing as being in direct opposition to these things. Although, Nguyen is far more accessible than most.
But, quibbles aside, the ideas here about what games are and do and can be are genuinely transformational, and should be part of more discussions about art, about games, and about design.
But, quibbles aside, the ideas here about what games are and do and can be are genuinely transformational, and should be part of more discussions about art, about games, and about design.
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