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Games: Agency As Art (Thinking Art)

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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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"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

About the Author

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.

Review:

4.8 out of 5

96.67% of customers are satisfied

5.0 out of 5 stars Should be on every game designer's bookshelf

D.F. · May 24, 2024

This is a landmark work and a necessary addition to your library if you think about games a lot and want to think about them more interestingly.To the author: thank you for writing this! Genuinely so stoked for the next 10 years of books in this space, because they'll all be better for having to build on, respond to, or otherwise position themselves around the extremely high quality of this work. You've done a serious service to game design and games research here.

5.0 out of 5 stars Thick and academic, but insightful

B.C. · October 30, 2023

I read this book on the recommendation of a conference speaker. It wasn’t what I expected it to be, and is very academic, but it’s also very thorough and insightful. I particularly liked the detail about gamification near the end of the book.

5.0 out of 5 stars Thoughtful look at games and life

G. · May 23, 2021

This is a book about games in which the point of the game is not achievement but striving. The writing is somewhat academic, but very clear, and he uses a lot of examples. I find this book much more helpful than some of the more popular books on trying to gamify one's life - it is certainly more intelligent. This is not a self-help book, but I feel it could be very useful in changing one's behavior.

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book!

M.M. · July 28, 2022

Highly recommend to all game lovers and potential game sales persons.

5.0 out of 5 stars See the world through a different lens

I. · February 7, 2023

I’ve always loved games, and this book did two wonderful things for me:1. It gave me a much deeper understanding of the purposes games can serve, and how they stand as their own unique art form. For me, this gave a tangible language to the feelings I’ve often had about games, and connected those feelings to other genres of games I hadn’t yet tried.2. It connects games to much larger ideas. While there is discussion of all kinds of games just for the sake of exploring all corners of this art form — which is very enjoyable in itself — the book ends with some profound connections to how humans function more generally, and what causes us to be happy.

Warum Spiele Kunst sind und was sie besonders machen

P.S. · February 24, 2023

Der Autor ist Philosophieproffesor und dieses Buch ist eine philosophische Abhandlung auf relativ hohem Niveau. Es hat vielleicht nicht Lehrbuchcharakter ist aber eben auch nichts, was man schnell wegliest, weil es ja "um Spiele geht". Dafür steckt einiges in dem Buch drin - am besten hält man Papier und Stift für Notizen bereit.Die Kernthese des Autoren ist, dass Spiele sich dahingehend von anderen Künsten unterscheiden, dass es die "Agency" ist, die ein Spiel zur Kunst erhebt: Man hat Einflussmöglichkeiten, die je nach Spiel angesprochen werden. Dabei liegt es insbesondere in den Spielenden sich innerhalb des Spielkontextes Ziele zu suchen udn Hürden zu akzeptieren, um diese Einflussmöglichkeoitrn zu nutzen, um das Ziel zu erreichen. Das ist natürlich sehr verkürzt dargestellt, aber im Großen und Ganzen stimme ich dem Autoren in seiner Argumentation zu. Gelegentlich geh er lange Wege, aber das ist vermutlich im philosophischen Diskurs so.Viel zu dem Thema gibt es nicht, die meisten Spiele-Bü+cher befassen sich entweder mit Gamedesign oder stellen einzelne Spiele vor (historisch oder Empfehlungen), eine philsophiosche Abhandlung zu spielen, muss man abseits von reiner Fcahliteratur schon lange suchen.

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Games: Agency As Art (Thinking Art)

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