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

Such a player would have to maintain a perpetually anxious secondary consciousness, worrying not only about losing, but also about winning.

When games work, they can sometimes present us with the world as we wish it could be.

I can go on a hike to clear my head, and put my reasons for doing so out of mind. My ability to do this isn’t perfect; sometimes, the larger world of reasons breaks through. But often, I can get most of the way there. I can throw myself into the sheer physical effort of getting to the top and let all my other practical worries fall away. And that s

In ordinary practical life, we pursue the means for the sake of the ends. But in striving play, we pursue the ends for the sake of the means. We take up a goal for the sake of the activity of struggling for it.

A game tells us to take up a particular goal. It designates abilities for us to use in pursuing that goal. It packages all that up with a set of obstacles, crafted to fit those goals and abilities. A game uses all these elements to sculpt a form of activity. And when we play games, we take on an alternate form of agency. We take on new goals and ac

When we play games, we take on temporary agencies—temporary sets of abilities and constraints, along with temporary ends. We have a significant capacity for agential fluidity, and games make full use of that capacity.

Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. (Suits [1978] 2014, 43)

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.