Book Review: Games: Agency as Art

Here's a quick review of Games: Agency as Art by C. Thi Nguyen. It's an interesting discussion of the philosophy of gaming (all types of games—sports, board games, etc.). I wanted to read it because I'm interested (both as someone who plays games myself and as a coach) in why we should care about games.

The biggest idea, if I may simplify it (maybe too much), is that games are good practice for real life skills. They expose us to different situations, where we temporarily have different goals, and being able to adopt these temporary personas expands our capabilities as humans. As he puts it: "We are learning to be more light-footed with our way of being in the practical world."

Nguyen uses the term "agency" to represent what I just called "temporary personas". He repeatedly compares games to novels and other types of narration—just like we can read a book and learn what it was like to be a farm girl in the early 1900s, we can play a game and learn what it's like to be a robber-baron: "Just as novels let us experiences lives we have not lived, games let us experience forms of agency we might not have discovered on our own."

But where novels achieve immersion by being incredibly detailed, games make up for their relative lack of detail by literally putting us in the action—we are the robber-baron. You need to read a second novel to learn a second viewpoint, but to learn about the difference between success and failure as a robber-baron, you just need to play Monopoly again.

And different games teach different skills—we learn how to carefully plan many steps in advance playing chess; we learn how to be comfortable in chaos through sessions of 4-player Super Smash Bros.; we learn to detect bullshit playing games like Chameleon and One Night Ultimate Werewolf.

So through playing different games we learn two things. First, from each game we develop those unique ways of thinking that I just mentioned. But playing this game and then that game also gives us practice putting on and taking off those different agencies. And when we're able to change ourselves like that, and take on new ways of thinking, we can be both more effective and more free in the real world: "bringing about some change in my values, or their motivational force, is simply a way of improving myself. It is not a barrier to my autonomy. Rather, such self-remaking is a core expression of autonomy."

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Games are built for human problem solving

I enjoyed Nguyen's discussion of how games are able to satisfy us by hitting that sweet spot where the problems are hard enough to be interesting but easy enough to be actually solvable. Real life is not always so nice to us—folding laundry is too easy to entertain us, curing cancer is too hard to give us the satisfaction of succeeding. Those aha moments really can feel great. Whether we figure out how to fix our bike or come up with a really great idea at work, a moment of inspiration can be highly enjoyable. Games are purposely made to generate that experience:

There is a natural aesthetic pleasure to working through a difficult math proof; chess seems designed, at least in part, to concentrate and refine that pleasure for its own sake. In ordinary practical life, we catch momentary glimpses, when we are lucky, of harmony between our abilities and our tasks. But often, there is no such harmony. Our abilities fall far short of the tasks; or, the tasks are horribly dull.

But we can design games for the sake of this harmony of practical fit...The worlds of games are harmonious and interesting worlds, where even our worst impulses are transformed into the pleasure of others.

Nguyen calls this the "harmony of capacity", "the experience of your abilities, worked at their maximum, just barely making it...the sense that one’s total capacities fit precisely with the demands of the world."

(This same aspect of games also has drawbacks which he discusses. Interacting with games may give us the false sense that life as a whole has clear goals and clear trade-offs between different types of success (Two towns is equal to one city in Settlers of Catan). Real life is much more complex and messier, and we should avoid expecting the clarity of gaming goals to be present in the path of our lives.)

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Implicit rules for engaging with art; games are for winning

Another interesting idea is that any work (roughly, a work is equivalent to a piece of art) comes with unspoken rules on how we experience and interact with the work:

To experience a painting, you have to look at it from the front. Looking at it only from the back, or only smelling it, doesn’t count. The rule that we have to look at a painting from the front reveals something deep about what a painting is—which is something more than just the material stuff of paint on canvas. The fact that such rules are public, and held in common in a social practice, makes a certain kind of communal experience possible. Games are also works of this sort, with one foot in the material and one foot in a social practice. To experience a game, you have to follow the rules and aim at the given goals...

If I read all the words of Moby Dick in a random order, I wouldn’t have read Moby Dick. This shows that the work isn’t just a physical object. The work is some physical material, as encountered according to a certain set of prescriptions. The prescriptions help to delineate what the work is.

This feels incredibly obvious in some ways but incredibly interesting in others. The point he makes is that games are built for us to try to win. To truly engage with all a game has to offer, you have to temporarily try your hardest to win (fairly). You can't fully experience a game without trying your hardest to win—just like you can't fully experience the Mona Lisa if all you do is lick the paint on its canvas and never look at it.

Unless you’re a dog, I guess.

Some people have mixed feelings about trying hard in games, since most games that have winners also have losers, which seems bad. But Nguyen sees games as a technology that allows all the players to have positive experiences when they try their hardest:

...we can think of games as morally transformative technologies. They take an action that is normally negatively valenced—brutal competition—and turn it into something good. We can all get what we truly want out of playing a game, if we are striving players...

Such submersion in wholly competitive agencies is morally permissible when we know that it will yield desirable experiences for all involved. Thus, we can psychically offload our interest in cooperation to the game itself and to the gaming environment.

In other words, those same things that make games great for us are also making games great for our opponents, regardless of who wins or loses. The challenge from our opponents allows us to experience that "harmony of capability"—and the way we challenge our opponents gives them the opportunity to experience it, as well. Our opponents are learning how to use those different types of agency at the same time we are.

Of course, all this relies on one key comment: the idea that we are "striving players". This is the phrase he uses to describe people who compete their hardest, not because they care about whether they win or lose as an end goal, but for the sake of the experience of trying. They take up the temporary goal of winning for the fun of engaging in the game itself.

To put it another way, striving play is impractical practicality. It is practical reasoning and practical action engaged in, not for the outcome, but for the sake of the engagement in the practical activity itself.

(The book Finite and Infinite Games also has similar ideas about the meta-level of playing games. But its a weird book and much harder to understand than Nguyen's book is, so I'm not sure I'd actually recommend it.)

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Accepting constraints makes things interesting

A final idea I enjoyed is that constraining our actions allows us to have certain freedoms that might be otherwise impossible.

I've seen this idea before. In The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck, Mark Manson uses the example of finding a steady romantic partner vs. dating around. There are certain life experiences, certain deep emotional connections, that you'll only be able to access by restricting yourself in certain ways—making promises to someone instead of never promising anything to anyone. This general idea has influenced my thinking in the years since I first read it.

Nguyen points out that games are the same. We can only fully experience a game by constraining ourselves to follow its rules. The goal of basketball is to put the ball in the hoop, but to actually play basketball you have to accept its constraints and not just its goals—carrying the ball around without dribbling and tackling your opponents isn't basketball. Games involve intentionally making it hard on ourselves to achieve these goals.

To experience different "agencies", we also need to impose these constraints on ourselves temporarily. In order to learn what the game designer is trying to share with us, we have to accept the norms and constraints they're imposing on us:

Communication involves shared norms. The more I reject shared norms, the more freely I can play, but the less I can receive communication. And the more I wish to communicate, the more I must bind myself, for the moment, to a set of shared norms.

In other words, you don't learn the skills that chess can teach just by grabbing some chess pieces and doing whatever you feel like with them. You have to actually follow the rules of chess to learn the careful advance planning skills that chess can teach. Constraints are what makes the game fun. And in playing games we practice achieving different goals under different constraints, and that practice gives us more ways to interact with the world: temporary constraints make us freer.