Games: Agency As Art (Thinking Art)

"Striving play: pursuing winning for the sake of the struggle and the intrinsic act of playing the game itself.

Two clear parts:

In order to engage ourselves in striving play, I must be able to take on a disposable end that is treated as final. It builds the capacity to submerge ourselves in narrowed agential modes.

Being unable to do this leads to th... See more

C. THI NGYUEN:  What I ended up thinking is that what makes games special is not just that they create a world or an environment, but that the game designer tells you what abilities you have and what obstacles you’ll face, but most importantly, what goals you’ll have.  What the game designer is doing is creating an alternate self for you,... See more

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