Games

Agency As Art

C. Thi Nguyen

Thinking Art

Integrates an understanding of game aesthetics with work on practical reasoning, agency, and autonomy to articulate a unifed theory of games
Written in an accessible and engaging style
Argues that humans can invert their rationality, departing from many traditional philosophical theories of agency and rationality

Games

Agency As Art

C. Thi Nguyen

Description

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.

Games

Agency As Art

C. Thi Nguyen

Thinking Art

Chapter 1: Agency as art

PART I: GAMES AND AGENCY
Chapter 2: The possibility of striving play
Chapter 3: Layers of agency
Chapter 4: Games and autonomy

PART II: AGENCY AND ART
Chapter 5: The aesthetics of agency
Chapter 6: Framed agency
Chapter 7: The distance in the game

PART III: SOCIAL AND MORAL TRANSFORMATIONS
Chapter 8: Games as social transformation
Chapter 9: Gamification and value capture
Chapter 10: The value of striving

Games

Agency As Art

C. Thi Nguyen

Thinking Art

Author Information

C. Thi Nguyen as of July 2020 is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah. His research focuses on how social structures and technology can shape our rationality and our agency. He has published on trust, expertise, group agency, community art, cultural appropriation, aesthetic value, echo chambers, moral outrage porn, and games. He received his PhD from UCLA. Once, he was a food writer for the Los Angeles Times. He tweets at @add hawk.

Games

Agency As Art

C. Thi Nguyen

Thinking Art

Reviews and Awards

Winner, 2021 Book Prize, American Philosophical Association

"This book is a total joy to read. Thi Nguyen's energy radiates from every page -- the prose is truly delightful, with all sorts of poetic turns of phrase enlivening the arguments and a whole world of games vibrantly described in rich detail. Indeed, if you're sceptical that games could be art, it may be because your game playing is limited to the likes of chess and gin rummy, and you are totally unaware, as I was until reading this book, of the incredible richness of the world of games." -- Gwen Bradford, Mind Association

"Nguyen's stunning book is philosophically deep, playful and incredibly readable. It changed how I think about games and art and (ultimately) life." -- Aaron Meskin, Professor and Head of Philosophy, University of Georgia

"Nguyen's book is simultaneously a field-defining treatment of the aesthetics of games, a deep (and very cool) move in ethics and theory of agency, and the strongest, mostexciting work I've seen on practical reasoning since the mid-2000s" -- Elijah Millgram, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, University of Utah

"Nguyen (philosophy, Univ. of Utah) analyzes games as aesthetic creations engaging the "art of agency," whose ultimate higher-order goals include the development of a "library of agencies"—the discovery (or creation) and practice of modes of achieving goals in general. Despite the obvious (and acknowledged) debt to Bernard Suits's The Grasshopper (1978), this is no mere echo or defense of Suits's view of play, but rather a sophisticated and updated elaboration thereof, with many carefully chosen examples to support a variety of nuanced theses. ... This work significantly advances the philosophy of games, and will be a rewarding read for anyone interested in the other fields mentioned above, regardless of their level of experience." -- S. E. Forschler, CHOICE