When we play games, we take on temporary agencies—temporary sets of abilities and constraints, along with temporary ends. We have a significant capacity for agential fluidity, and games make full use of that capacity.

In order to be absorbed in a game, we must behave as if winning were a final end. That end must phenomenally engulf us, if we are to be gripped by the game and if its thrills and threats are to have emotional punch for us. We must pursue the goals of the game wholeheartedly, putting our larger purpose out of mind. In other words, we must submerge o

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.

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.

Games, then, are a unique social technology. They are a method for inscribing forms of agency into artifactual vessels:

But games also offer one more promise. They can function as a refuge from the inhospitality of ordinary life.

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

In game playing, we try to achieve some specified end under certain specified inefficiencies.