Games: Agency As Art (Thinking Art)

Games can offer us a clarifying balm against the vast, complicated, ever-shifting social world of pluralistic values, and an existential balm against our internal sense that our values are slippery and unclear. In games, values are clear, well-delineated, and typically uniform among all agents. But this also creates a significant moral danger—not j

Such a player would have to maintain a perpetually anxious secondary consciousness, worrying not only about losing, but also about winning.

I can go on a hike to clear my head, and put my reasons for doing so out of mind. My ability to do this isn’t perfect; sometimes, the larger world of reasons breaks through. But often, I can get most of the way there. I can throw myself into the sheer physical effort of getting to the top and let all my other practical worries fall away. And that s

Games are temporary structures of practical reasoning.

Rather, game playing is marked by the lusory attitude: we adopt the pre-lusory goal and the constitutive rules for the sake of the activity they make possible. We adopt unnecessary obstacles in order to make possible the activity of trying to overcome them.

The recalcitrant world and our inflexible values generate certain obstacles. These are not the obstacles we wanted to struggle against, but they are the ones we must overcome in order to get what we want. So we must try to sculpt ourselves and our abilities to fit the needs of the world.

A game’s goals tell us what to care about during the game. When we play a game, we simply take on the goals it indicates, and acquire the motivations that the game wishes us to acquire.

In ordinary practical life, we pursue the means for the sake of the ends. But in striving play, we pursue the ends for the sake of the means. We take up a goal for the sake of the activity of struggling for it.

We do not fit this world comfortably. The obstacles in our path are often intractable, exhausting, or miserable. Games can be an existential balm for our practical unease with the world. In games, the problems can be right-sized for our capacities; our in-game selves can be right-sized for the problems; and the arrangement of self and world can mak