Games: Agency as Art (Review 1)

Games: Agency as Art is a book about what makes games special. It’s rigorous, readable, and really quite good. Unfortunately, being as it is a work of analytical philosophy, it is also occasionally a victim of its own rigour. Its author - University of Utah philosophy professor, C. Thi Nguyen - notes in an interview that he was (at least partially) compelled to begin writing the book “out of annoyance” with other philosophers - and, yeah, one can tell.

But what it loses through long passages preemptively addressing critics (and are these ‘philosophers of sport’ in the room with us right now?, I kept wondering), it more than makes up for through the originality of its ideas and the accessibility of its prose (at least, by academic standards).

Now, it’s a little unfair of me to read a book primarily created for an academic audience and then criticise it for its academic tendencies - a bit like showing up at a maths conference and taking issue with all the numbers being thrown around. But it seems like a shame to me that Games hasn’t been adapted into a shallower and more focused book for popular consumption, as I sense a lot of the concepts it contains would be of great interest to a general audience, were they easier to swallow.

So, this is me trying to work out if that’s true. In what follows, I distil what I think are Nguyen’s most interesting ideas and share how they’ve helped me understand my own behaviour. I’ll set aside the ideas and framings I found less persuasive until the end.

The Value of Games

Games, says Nguyen, are a “unique social technology”, because of how they affect their players’ agency. The way that games use agency to produce unique experiences is central to his account of why games are special. Before we can unpack why that is, though, it will be useful to hone in on what we mean by a “game”.

Nguyen restricts his analysis to what he calls “Suitsian games” (after philosopher Bernard Suits), which are games that entail the “voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” - where an obstacle is something that gets in the way of a goal.

To be more precise, a Suitsian game has three elements: a “prelusory goal” (the objective of the game), “constitutive rules” (which define and constrain the scope of possible actions one can take in the game), and a “lusory attitude”, which is the mindset a player adopts in consenting to pursue the prelusory goal while being bound by the constitutive rules. Take soccer as an example: the prelusory goal is to put the ball in the net, the constitutive rules include things like “except for the goalkeeper, players cannot use their hands”, and the lusory attitude demands that a player score a goal while operating within the rules. Indeed, the concept of a goal only has meaning within the framework of its constitutive rules - if a player picks up the ball and throws it into the goal, no points are awarded.

It is an open debate whether all games are Suitsian games, and not one we need to touch here. It is sufficient to note that a wide variety of games do fall under this definition, from chess, to most video games and boardgames, to sports.

The next interesting distinction comes from what Nguyen calls “striving play”, in contrast to “achievement play”. Achievement play is playing to win. A professional poker player, for example, is an achievement player. Striving play, on the other hand, is playing for the sake of engaging in the struggle. This should be understood alongside the distinction between “intrinsic” and “extrinsic” goals. Combining these four terms, we can cache out the various reasons that people play games to begin with. This looks like:

Intrinsic achievement play: playing for the sake of winning in itself
Extrinsic achievement play: playing as a means to whatever winning brings (e.g. prize money, status)
Intrinsic striving play: playing for the intrinsic value of engaging in the game
Extrinsic striving play: playing for the sake of whatever engagement brings (e.g. running a race to improve one’s mental health)

These categories are not exclusive, and one can play a game for reasons that touch upon them all. But they are useful to keep in mind, because they offer us “two very different dimensions by which we may locate where a player finds value in a game”.

So, what’s all of this got to do with agency? Everything, really. If games are defined by pursuing clearly-specified goals while adhering to certain rules and using certain abilities, then to play a game is to exercise one’s agency. While Nguyen declines to provide a comprehensive definition of agency, just understanding that it involves “intentional action, or action for a reason”, is sufficient to get to grips with his framework.

We are now well-placed to see what Nguyen means when he says (to paraphrase) that the thing that makes games special is that they operate in the medium of agency. Game designers use goals, abilities, and environments to sculpt experiences for players; scenarios where they are able to exercise their agency, and in so doing, experience a crystallised form of the pleasure that one might feel from exercising their agency in everyday life.

Nguyen brings this idea into focus in two ways. First, he locates games as part of the ancient human practice of recording things - paintings record sights, music records sounds, stories record narratives, and games record agencies. Second, he draws on philosopher John Dewey’s idea that many of the arts are crystallisations of everyday experiences, to argue that “fiction is the crystallisation of telling people about what happened; visual arts are the crystallisation of looking around and seeing; music is the crystallisation of listening, [and] games…are the crystallisation of practicality.”

Why care about recording agencies or crystallising agentic experiences? Nguyen gives three reasons. First, because games can produce aesthetically rewarding experiences - and indeed, Nguyen thinks the pursuit of these experiences is a crucial reason that people engage in striving play at all. Second, because exposure to the wide range of agential modes that different games offer can develop both our real-life agency and our relationships with others. And third, because the simplified state of affairs and sense of control that games provide can act as an “existential balm” to the complexity and chaos of the wider world. Let’s talk a bit more about each.

Aesthetics

At the core of the idea that games can be aesthetically rewarding is Nguyen’s notion of “harmony” - “the lovely fit between challenge and solution”. As he notes, “aesthetic experiences of action are natural and occur outside of games all the time. Fixing a broken car engine, figuring out a math proof, managing a corporation, even getting into a bar fight— each can have its own particular interest and beauty. These include the satisfaction of finding an elegant solution to an administrative problem, of dodging perfectly around an unexpected obstacle.” The problem is that such experiences are incredibly rare.

The best games, however, bring about heightened versions of these experiences by design. Think of the satisfaction one feels at making an elegant move in chess, defeating a difficult boss in a game like Dark Souls, or perfectly passing a ball to a teammate, setting them up to score.

Nguyen breaks this notion down further by distinguishing between three types of practical harmony. “Harmony of solution” is when there is a fit between the problem and the solution - as in the chess example. Any knowledgeable spectator can appreciate such harmony. “Harmony of action” goes further - this is when you feel your own actions bridge the gap between the problem and the solution. This can only be experienced by whoever is playing the game in question - it is an embodied experience. Finally, “harmony of capacity” - the rarest harmony to encounter in the wild - is when one is pushed to their very limits, and still manages to achieve their goal. Maxing out one’s abilities while attempting to complete a difficult bouldering route is a paradigmatic example of this.

Adjacent to this analysis is the insight that the aesthetic pleasures available from games vary depending on whether one is a player, a spectator, or a designer of the game. And it’s worth noting that, of course, games can have many other aesthetic pleasures beyond those begot by agency. Videogames can have beautiful visuals, stirring soundtracks, and so on. Board games can be beautiful objects in and of themselves. But this has never been in dispute - indeed, the problem that Nguyen is responding to is that those looking to justify the value of games usually focus on these commonalities with other forms of art, and gloss over the features that make games unique.

Agency

To explain how games can develop one’s agency, it’s useful to lay out the “motivational two-step” that Nguyen thinks is necessary to engage in striving play. His basic argument is that when we play a game, we submerge ourselves in a temporary (or interior) agency which is focused on achieving the goals of the game, while continuing to inhabit our exterior agency, which understands the broader reasons why we might be playing. Thus, I am able to play chess against a loved one and devote myself to defeating them, even while I continue to love and wish only the best for them outside of our game. In this way, agency can be layered.

Another way to see this is through the concept of what Nguyen calls “self-effacing ends” - ends that can’t be achieved through direct pursuit, but only through the pursuit of some other end. For example, you can’t enter a meditative state by pursuing it directly - you have to do things like focus on your breath, or a chant. If I host a games night, and my goal is for my friends to have a good time, I have to play the games as if I want to win - without striving, there’s no fun.

By taking up a temporary agency, we are able to narrow our focus and immerse ourselves in whatever games we might be playing. We can think of this temporary agency as an “agential mode”, which includes both the goals of the game, and the mentality, strategies, and skills necessary to play it. Nguyen’s great insight is that different games model different modes of agency. The skills required to be good at chess are quite different to those required to be good at soccer. Taken together, the wealth of games available for one to play constitutes a “library of agencies”. We can spend time with different games, and in so doing, develop our agentic capabilities.

Is this true? Does playing chess make one a more strategic thinker outside of chess? I’m not sure - the evidence seems mixed, and untangling the correlation and causation involved is a game for another day. Even so, it does seem clear that games can develop our skills, and our ability to embody agents that wield those skills. I think the overlap between people who are really good at games like Starcraft II, Civilisation V, and Factorio, and people who are good at coordinating complex projects, must mean something.

Of course, modes of agency can be found everywhere in life. We switch between these agentic modes all the time, sometimes while in pursuit of a single goal. To write this, I must embody the mode of a writing agent. When I chat with my colleagues, I am embodying a social agent. And so on.

Ultimately, Nguyen’s claim here is rather modest. He is not saying that playing a game once will magically imbue you with the best traits associated with being good at it. Nor is he saying that games cannot harm us - indeed, as he argues later in the book, games can also hinder one’s agentic development. Instead, his claim is that, in the same way that legendary philosopher Martha Nusbaumm has argued that “a lifetime of consuming a wide variety of emotionally rich narratives can gradually support one’s emotional development”, playing “a broad variety of striving games, over a long span of time, can help one’s agential development”.

So, playing striving games requires one to take on rigid and temporary agencies - to be bound by constitutive rules and adopt lusory attitudes - and, doing this often, such that we learn to adopt an array of agencies, can enhance our ability to swap between and make use of different agential modes - making us fluid.

Another interesting insight of Nguyen’s: in designing games - where pleasure is experienced through the player’s interactions with a constructed world (and sometimes, with other players) - there is a distance between the object the designers create and the thing the player experiences. In this way, says Nguyen, designers are more like urban planners or governments, attempting to sculpt people’s agentic experiences, than they are like traditional artists.

Finally, it’s worth noting that games not only work in the medium of agency, but, in the case of multiplayer games at least, also in the medium of sociality. The idea here is that games temporarily transfigure our relationships with other people. Playing a board game at a party can turn strangers to teammates, united under a common goal. Nguyen suggests this can be socially and morally transformative, by providing us with “quick sketches” of different social structures. He thus argues that, in the same way that games can provide a “library of agencies” as described above, they can also offer a “library of socialities” - different and otherwise inaccessible means of relating to other people.

Existential Balm

The last reason that Nguyen suggests for why games are valuable is that they can offer an “existential balm” from the complexities of life. This follows from everything we’ve seen thus far. As Nguyen puts it, “in games, the problems can be right- sized for our capacities; our in-game selves can be right-sized for the problems; and the arrangement of self and world can make solving the problems pleasurable, satisfying, interesting, and beautiful”. He calls this “the fantasy of value clarity”.

This is a simple and powerful explanation for why people are drawn to games. They reduce the incommensurability of the world, where it’s trade-offs all the way down, into something manageable and joyous. Interestingly, however, for exactly these reasons, Nguyen is cautious of “gamification” - of trying to make real life more like a game. He thinks that when we do this, we reduce subtle and rich values to more simplistic and quantifiable ones - allowing our values to be captured. This can lead us to lose track of why we care about the things we care about to begin with - to Goodhart ourselves, if you will.

This is true whether the gamification is intentional - as in the case of a fitness watch which one buys with the goal of improving their health, only to find that goal replaced by the goal of maximising their step count, which may or may not actually improve their health - or if is accidental, as in the case of [gestures at the state of tertiary education]. On this latter point, the argument is essentially the same one that James Scott makes in Seeing Like a State: bureaucracies require quantification to govern effectively, and so individuals are made to conform to criteria (like achieving perfect grades on standardised tests) that are legible to institutions but suboptimal for themselves. A high grade is only a rough proxy for a good education; and tireless pursuit of high grades can in fact undermine one’s overall education.

In response to these concerns, Nguyen argues that engaging in aesthetic striving play can help us guard against value capture, for the reasons related to agential fluidity described above. While I did not find these arguments particularly convincing (and perhaps I misunderstood them), I think his points on the dangers of gamification are excellently-made, such that I’m happy to gloss over the inadequacies of his proposed solution (which, as I understand it, is not expected to be taken as a definitive fix in any case).

II.

So that’s what I got out of the book. To craft the above narrative, I’ve cleaved away lots of Nguyen’s analysis that I found less interesting. In particular, I’ve ignored his discussion of how it can be that we are able to take on temporary agencies (and “disposable ends”) in the first place; his analysis of whether aesthetic experiences require a particular state of mind; and much of his arguments of what makes a game a “work”, or a “work or art”.

These arguments are well-made, and his book is richer for including them, but to the lay reader, they only get in the way. While the full-time philosophers have loved much of what I’m downweighting, I have found that mentioning the more technical aspects of the book to everyday people only causes eyes to glaze. Despite this, if any of what I’ve glossed over sounds interesting to you, you should definitely dive deeper. The book itself is also worth reading for the numerous examples of relatively niche games (like Spyfall) that Nguyen shares.

The Games I Play

Finishing this book, I’m left asking myself what games I play. Certainly, I love to play board games and video games in a self-effacing manner. I break out Overcooked not because I want to improve my reflexes, but because sharing a virtual kitchen with a friend turns out to be a fantastic way to bond - and it really is astonishing to me, every time I do this, how little time it takes for whoever I’m playing with to become totally submerged in the task at hand (producing quick meals while embodying a racoon in a chef’s hat). I play single player strategy games like XCom for the aesthetic satisfaction that executing a well-planned strategy brings me. And I play more arcade-like games with simple addictive loops (like Spelunky and Hades) for the thrill of being in motion, and to test my reflexes.

As a kid, my favourite series was Ratchet and Clank. The above account of agency helps me to understand why I was drawn to it - the combination of its bright and cartoonish art style, its excellent soundtrack, and its tight platforming and gunplay all coalesced to allow me to embody my favourite hero. Not just observe, as with a TV show, but actually to embody - to take on Ratchet’s ends as my own, and to find I had just the skills necessary to reach them. Similarly, playing the much-acclaimed Breath of the Wild, I felt as if I was living out an elemental fantasy (wander plains, acquire flaming sword, fight big monster). This is a profound experience, unavailable to children of eras past, and I continue to wonder what effect it will have on us; that modern people have potentially grown up spending more time in libraries of agencies than of narrative. Of course, libraries of agencies have been available to children for as long as games have; but it seems clear that the number of games the average person has access to has exploded in the last hundred years.

Nguyen’s account captures something I haven't previously been able to articulate - why I love games, and why I believe they are due more respect than they usually get. I have had a range of aesthetically meaningful experiences as a result of exercising my agency - from the feeling of satisfaction at completing a 50 hour JRPG to the begrudging awe I’ve felt when an opponent dribbles my whole team and scores a flawless goal in FIFA. My experience with games like bouldering and swimming have heightened my reflexes and reshaped how I move through the world; which is something like agentic development. And I still frequently retreat to colourful platformers (shoutout A Hat in Time) as an existential balm.

Nguyen’s framework also helps me understand how my relationship with games has evolved over time. I no longer find most RPGs nearly as compelling as I used to; perhaps because I am bored of occupying the agentic modes on offer. In recent years, I have found myself hamstrung by what difficulty setting to play games on, because the existence of such settings muddy the aesthetic harmony that I expect games to offer me. And often, as a recently-employed adult with more disposable income than I had as a kid, I find I spend more time scrolling through video game stores, weighing up which agents I might want to embody, or on Youtube watching other people play, then I do actually playing games myself.

Finally, Nguyen’s account of why gamification is problematic elucidates an intuition I have long held - that certain parts of one’s life should not be quantified, lest we lose sight of the qualitative experiences underneath. I have long resisted fitness watches, and, thanks to this framework, now I can account for why that is. This is not to say that I’m right in my resistance; only that I take comfort in better understanding my own behaviour. One frequently hears core facets of life described in gamified language - consider the “dating game”, or the “rat race”. Thinking about Nguyen’s framework helps me to understand why this is (because the obstacles we seek to overcome are often in some sense unnecessary); what is and is not a game; and which games I actually want to be playing.

These are provisional conclusions. I’m eager to let Nguyen’s insights percolate through my mind in coming months and to see what other benefits they might bring. I come away from his book with the sense that I ought to be more mindful of what games I play and for what reasons I play them; that I ought to invest in some better board games; and that I’m going to be talking to whoever will listen about Nguyen’s ideas for some time.

4/5 would recommend.