Games: Agency As Art (Thinking Art)

In order to be absorbed in a game, we must behave as if winning were a final end. That end must phenomenally engulf us, if we are to be gripped by the game and if its thrills and threats are to have emotional punch for us. We must pursue the goals of the game wholeheartedly, putting our larger purpose out of mind. In other words, we must submerge o

In game playing, we try to achieve some specified end under certain specified inefficiencies.

Games turn out to be a way of writing down forms of agency, of inscribing them in an artifact.

In games, we are given the right kinds of abilities, but just barely enough of them—which creates drama and interest.

we can use games to communicate forms of agency.

We do not fit this world comfortably. The obstacles in our path are often intractable, exhausting, or miserable. Games can be an existential balm for our practical unease with the world. 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 mak

Games can offer us a clarifying balm against the vast, complicated, ever-shifting social world of pluralistic values, and an existential balm against our internal sense that our values are slippery and unclear. In games, values are clear, well-delineated, and typically uniform among all agents. But this also creates a significant moral danger—not j

In the rest of life, we are used to justifying our goals by looking at the value of the goals themselves or by looking forward, to what follows from those goals. But with the goals of games, we often need to look backward. We need to look at the value of the activity of pursuing those goals.

Games, then, are a unique social technology. They are a method for inscribing forms of agency into artifactual vessels: