Tall Tales

Games and Agency

Thi Nguyen's Games: Agency as Art made me want to make and play more games.

This post gives my takes and thoughts inspired by the book, especially how games relate to agency and morality.

Agency

"We have a significant capacity for agential fluidity, and games make full use of that capacity."

Games are packaged up temporary agencies. You take on an agency for the duration of the game and then set it aside.

Just as pictures, cinema and other forms of art capture aspects of the human experience, so do games. They capture the experience of agency itself, of striving for a particular goal in a particular situation. The game is an artefact of human agency. This give you the experience of thinking in a different way, of trying to achieve things you wouldn't otherwise do, of relating to the person next to you in a very different way to normal.

One thing that makes games satisfying is the feeling of one's abilities being perfectly challenged by the world. It's not so hard that it's hopeless and not so easy that it's boring. This is unlike so much of the world, where things are often almost impossibly hard (curing cancer) or far too easy to be interesting (taking the trash out). A game creates a box in which your skill are delightfully tested, are right on the edge of your abilities.

It suggests that games can give you senses of agency you didn't have before, allowing you to hone specific skills, e.g.: forms of social deduction. I'm not sure how much this generalises to the real world, but maybe a bit! The jury is still out on how well my hundreds of games of Risk have developed my ability to machinate.

Because games are interactive, they can be good simulations of economic, political and other complex systems. And a commentary on them, depending on how they are constructed, the rules they follow, the characters which occupy them and what they are trying to achieve.

And some games you aren't even trying to win. The author calls these stupid games, and tend to show up at parties. Twister is an example, though I think you trying to win at least a little bit in Twister, even if the point isn't really to win.

And why do we choose to take on these agencies? Primarily for fun: the situation constructed by a good game and the players is a fertile environment for it. In ordinary practical life, we usually take the means for the sake of the ends. But in games, we can take up an end for the sake of the means. Playing games can be a motivational inversion of ordinary life.

Games and addiction

Games can be addictive, from the intentionally addictive variable expected reward mechanism of lootboxes, to Candy Crush, to just wasting away time.

But games can be art too, including those on screens. Beautiful moments which touch the heart, bring people together, and all that. As a rule of thumb, I think one is less likely to encounter the sublime in gaming on an iPhone, but it's not impossible. And the thrill of dodging bullets, headshotting three terrorists and saving the President is also a valuable experience.

Deciding what counts as addiction in the digital realm seems a greyer area than chemical substances.

The author doesn't give many words to the issue of game addiction. This book is no moral crusade.

Morality

Games have simple moralities - normally points - whereas real world tends to have messier morals.

More than increasingly violence, the author says playing a lot of games can predispose one to desiring simpler morals in real life. Games threaten us with a fantasy of moral clarity. Wall Street is simple game with simple score but also pointless in many ways.

Another way the author puts it: Consider a phenomenon, which I’ll call value capture. Value capture occurs when: 1. Our values are, at first, rich and subtle. 2. We encounter simplified (often quantified) versions of those values. 3. Those simplified versions take the place of our richer values in our reasoning and motivation. 4. Our lives get worse.

I'd be interested in examples of these, or a study or something.

To speculate for a hot minute, this reminds me of Sam Bankman-Fried, who may well have been doing exactly this: trying to maximise a score of goodness and missing a lot around the edges. I do observe that utilitarianism seem more popular among people who like games, including myself. Perhaps just a correlation though.

The most important question

What is my favourite game ever? Risk. Just the right mix of strategy, chance and social manipulation.

Games I want to make and play

What games do I want to make?

The book talks about various games in detail. Which am I excited to try and why?