Games: Agency as Art

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

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

A game’s goals tell us what to care about during the game. When we play a game, we simply take on the goals it indicates, and acquire the motivations that the game wishes us to acquire.