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. 

 C. THI NGUYEN: So the basic thing that I keep thinking about is that point systems are really narrow, and really clear, and really simple. And in games— in real games— when the point systems aren’t attached to— I don’t know— the political life of our nation, that’s great. It’s beautiful. And we can talk about why that enables all these kinds ... See more

C. THI NGUYEN: If the wonder of real games is the possibility of flexing through this wide landscape of possibility, then the gamification of activities in the world is doing two things to us. One, it’s funneling our values down one particular pre-established path for a real world activity, for something that’s connected out to politics and the wor... See more

C. THI NGUYEN: So the essential insight that I got from Suits is that in so many games, the target isn’t the point. The point is this rich experience along the way. And I think a lot of the mistakes we make with games is we get into these things and we forget about these larger purposes. The fact that they can be fun. The fact that they can be beau... See more