A Philosophy of Games That Is Really a Philosophy of Life

EZRA KLEIN: [C. Thi Nguyen] believes games are a unique kind of not just art form, but just form, medium, because what they manipulate is our agency. You can think of visual arts, like painting, as manipulating what we see. You could think of music as manipulating what we hear. But games— games manipulate what we do, how we do it, why we do i

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C. THI NGUYEN: But I think the most important thing about games is the way they manipulate our agency. The way we enter into this alternate self. And that’s I think where you can see the greatest power of games and their greatest danger. The greatest power of games is that you can explore this landscape of different agencies. The greatest danger of... See more

EZRA KLEIN: What might be true is if you spend all your time in point-scoring environments, you will become used to life being about scoring points. And you will begin to adopt that approach and begin to adopt those values without even realizing it. You’ll become habituated. The game will change you. That is a second principle I want to put ou... See more

C. THI NGUYEN: The structure of games is not that the points are valuable, but that the attempt to get those points, the attempts to win the game and the game’s terms sculpt some kind of interesting or beautiful activity.