Games
Metadata
Highlights
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In ordinary practical life, we usually take the means for the sake of the ends. But in games, we can take up an end for the sake of the means. Playing games can be a motivational inversion of ordinary life. (Location 55)
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Games, then, are a unique social technology. They are a method for inscribing forms of agency into artifactual vessels: for recording them, preserving them, and passing them around. And we possess a special ability: we can be fluid with our agency; we can submerge ourselves in alternate agencies designed by another. In other words, we can use games to communicate forms of agency. (Location 62)
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When we play games, we take on temporary agenciesâtemporary 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. (Location 125)
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Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. (Location 129)
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We must distinguish carefully here between the goals of a game and our purpose in playing a game. The goal of a game is the target we aim at during the game: getting to the finish line first, making more baskets, maximizing points. Our purpose with a game, on the other hand, is our reason for playing the game in the first place. Our purpose in playing a game might be to have some fun, to get some exercise, to de-stress, to develop our skills, to vanquish our opponents, to achieve some difficult task, or even to experience the beauty of our own skilled action. (Location 141)
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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. (Location 197)
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When your abilities are pushed to their maximum, when your mind or body is just barely able to do whatâs required, when your abilities are just barely enough to cope with the situation at handâthat is an experience of harmony available primarily to the players themselves. It is a harmony between self and challenge, between the practical self and the obstacles of its world. It is a harmony of a practical fit between your whole self and the world. (Location 272)
- John Dewey suggested that many of the arts are crystallizations of ordinary human experience (Dewey [1934] 2005). Fiction is the crystallization of telling people about what happened; visual arts are the crystallization of looking around and seeing; music is the crystallization of listening. Games, I claim, are the crystallization of practicality. (Location 282)
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What the Suitsian analysis suggests is that games are structures of practical reason, practical action, and practical possibility, conjoined with a particular world in which that practicality will operate. A game designer designates this as the goal of the game player, and those as the permitted abilities, and that as the landscape of obstacles. The designer creates, not only the world in which players will act, but the skeleton of the playersâ practical agency within that world. The designer designates playersâ abilities and goals in the game. The designerâs control over the nature of the playersâ agency is part of how the game designer sculpts the gameâs activity. Games can offer us more finely tuned practical harmonies because the designers have control over both world and agent. (Location 359)
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The common artistic medium of aesthetic striving gamesâthe technical resources by which the game designer sculpts practical experienceâare the goals, the rules, and the environment that these various parts animate into a system of constraints. The game designer crafts for players a very particular form of struggle, and does so by crafting both a temporary practical agency for us to inhabit and a practical environment for us to struggle against. In other words, the medium of the game designer is agency. If you want a slogan, try this one: games are the art of agency. (Location 365)
- Outside of games, much of the pain and difficulty of social life with others arises from the dizzying plurality of values. Each of us cares about different things; trying to mesh the plurality of disparate values into livable communities is incredibly difficult. (Location 425)
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This is the danger of exporting back to the world a false expectation: that values should be clear, well-delineated, and uniform in all circumstances. Games threaten us with a fantasy of moral clarity. (Location 438)
- Game designers must cope with a distinctive artistic difficulty: they must achieve their aesthetic effects through the agency of the player. (Location 468)
- In Homo Ludensâa foundational text in the academic study of gamesâJohan Huizinga says that play is irrational. But, says Huizinga, the fact that we play games shows, not that we are defective, but that we are capable of transcending rationality. Play, not rationality, is the characteristic activity of humans. (Location 685)
- The paradigmatic experience of game playing isnât one of being at some sort of intellectual remove; it is one of becoming utterly absorbed in trying hard, of trying to get something you really want. In fact, a certain kind of person doesnât seem to be able to care about winning in any form at all; such a person typically complains that games are silly and that points are just arbitrary. Such a person can never really become absorbed in game play at all. For games to provide any sort of engagement, for their challenges to have any grip on us, it must be that we can come to care, in some way, about winning. But how deep and lasting is our interest in winning? (Location 710)
- The academic literature on games has rarely discussed stupid games and their ilk. Academicsâespecially philosophersâtend to devote their theoretical energies to the serious side of human, and tend to ignore the humorous, the playful, and the ridiculous. There is, for example, a great inequity between the rather great amount of philosophy that has been written on tragedy, and the paltry bit of work on comedy. (Location 830)
- But notice that these observations also weigh in favor of the story about agential fluidity and disposable ends. Suppose we desire game experiences of single-mindedness and wholehearted immersion. We surely do find these sorts of experiences in games. But the very fact that game playing does, in fact, seems to us to be motivationally clearer than ordinary life shows something crucial. It shows that, in the transition into game playing, we have actually changed our motivational structure to some significant degree. If we didnât accept the possibility of some degree of agential layering and immersion in alternative agencies, we would have a hard time explaining the psychological shift between the motivationally scattered experience of ordinary lifeâfull of its thousand competing purposesâand the pleasing single-minded motivational clarity of game life. That change is well-explained by ascribing to ourselves an ability to set up an alternative agency and temporarily submerging ourselves within it. The experience of single-mindedness in games is a reason to believe in agential fluidity. (Location 929)
- If one values the experience of single-minded absorption in a practical task, one cannot pursue that experience directly. Rather, one must submerge oneself in the pursuit of some other end. This is a relative of what Henry Sidgwick called the paradox of hedonismâthat one cannot achieve pleasure by pursuing it directly, but only by devoting oneself to some other end (Sidgwick 1907, 136â137). For example, the pleasures of being a devoted parent arenât available to the selfish hedonist; it is only available to parents who are genuinely and wholeheartedly devoted to their child. Moral theories with this quality have been called âself-effacingâ (Pettigrove 2011, 192â193).1 Loosely following Sidgwickâs formulation, letâs call something a self-effacing end if it is an end that cannot be achieved through direct pursuit, but only through pursuit of some other end. As Sidgwick says, the rational method of attaining such an end requires that âwe should to some extent put it out of sight and not directly aim at it.â (Location 1054)
- There are, then, several ways in which the striving player might err in their attempt at psychological self-manipulation. The first is by being what we might call the diffident player, who canât bring themselves to actually care about the game. âWhatâs the point? Itâs just a game,â they say. The second is by getting stuck in the game agency. Such a player, once they take up the goal of winning, is incapable of putting it away again afterwards. Such a player is often called âexcessively competitiveâ in contexts where the attitude of striving play would be more appropriate, for losses hurt them terribly, and wins give them great pride. Having set up a temporary agency to pursue some self-effacing purpose, and absorbed themselves in the temporary goal, they neglect, after the game is through to dispose of that temporary agency, and restore to their sight their larger purpose. But the successful striving player can both submerge themselves in an alternative agency and pull themselves back from it. (Location 1111)
- I think we are also starting to see why thinking about games and play might be important for other parts of philosophy. Various philosophical accounts of agency have tended to think, in various ways, that unity is an ideal for all agents. And the way they have presumed this involves assuming that a unified agent is always motivated by all of their ends. Millgram, for example, puts it this way: an agentâs ends are subject to a unity constraint. What makes a value, end, or other consideration belong to a particular agent is that it can weigh with or against other such considerations in any other chain of practical reasoning by that same agent. What it is to be unified as an agent is for all your ends to be live for you, and present themselves whenever relevant. And to the degree that your ends arenât unified in this way, you are an agential failureâyou are absentminded or unable to bring a relevant consideration to mind, or something else along those lines (Millgram 1997, 50â56). (Location 1202)
- Letâs put all the pieces together. I am attributing to game players the power to take up disposable ends. Disposable ends are the animating center of the temporary agencies we take up in games. Our agential structure becomes crucially nested. The disposable ends of striving play arenât integrated into our usual network of ends. They are justified in a backward-looking, rather than an intrinsic or forward-looking, manner. The disposable ends of game play are justified, not by their intrinsic value, or by the value of what what will follow from them, but by the form of activity their pursuit inspires. But to achieve full absorption in game play, we must forget this justification, at least from the perspective of our practical consciousness. We must submerge ourselves within an alternative agency, making it, for the moment, phenomenally like our standard agency. That is the only way we can have experiences of practical absorption in the pursuit of a disposable end. (Location 1217)
- In the previous chapter, I argued that it was possible to take on the motivationally inverted state of striving play. Now, we have a fuller picture of what that motivational state looks like for us, and the kinds of motivational inversion weâre capable of. We have the capacity to submerge ourselves in a temporary agency. We conduct that submersion via a complex motivational structure, whereby we set up a temporary inner layer that will dominate our practical activity, and our awareness of that activity. But that inner layer is held within an enduring outer layer, that must be held at phenomenal armâs length, but which also must have the capacity to step in and cancel our absorption in the inner layer. (Location 1424)
- The rejection of structured games seems to arise from a common, but overly simplistic view of autonomy: that the fewer the rules and restrictions, the greater the autonomy. Call this the rules-free view of autonomy. This is an entirely negative view of autonomy, in which we support the autonomy of others by leaving them alone. (Location 1507)
- But thereâs even more to say. Presume, for the moment, the simple view that we can support an agentâs freedom by offering them more options. Restrictions can, then, increase your freedom when they help give you a greater range of options. Hereâs a simple example. Imagine that I am standing alone in an empty field. My range of movement is relatively unrestricted. Imagine that we add some walls, a door, and a roof. Now thereâs a house in the middle of the field. In a very simple sense, my movement has been restricted. There are walls now; certain paths of movement are now impeded. But those simple restrictions themselves also help constitute a set of richer, more substantively different options. Now I can be inside or outside, sheltered or exposed. Restrictions can constitute new options, and these new options can be more richly meaningful than whatever options were lost. (Location 1516)
- We are finite beings, with limited lives. This is where narratives come in. Narrativesâboth fictional and nonfictionalâcan offer emotionally rich experiences from far beyond the borders of our own narrow lives. I myself could never know directly what itâs like to work as a woman in corporate America in the 1950s, but I can get a glimmer of that experience through a narrativeâand get some of the emotional attunement, too. And narratives donât offer that knowledge in the dry abstract. Narratives experientially immerse me in an alternate life. They bring me to actually feel those emotions, which makes them more available to me in the rest of my life (Location 1576)
- Indeed, being stuck in a single such mode would certainly be destructive to autonomy. I will explore this possibility at length in Chapter 9. But, I suggest, those narrowed frames can be useful they are properly managed, and if we can move between them. Narrowed frames can be useful, if we are not stuck in one, but if we are capable of deploying the right one from our broad inventory when the circumstances call for it. By appropriately employing a series of narrowed attentional frames, one can, in the long run, increase oneâs exposure to relevant reasons. Each frame digs narrowly, but deeply. So an appropriate succession of narrowed attentional frames can, in the long run, dig more. (Location 1730)
- What we need here is not a single correct focused agential mode, but the capacity to cycle through a variety of them. Agential modes, then, are a tool for the cognitively limited beings to handle a fluctuating series of demands from a world too complex for us to grasp all at once. We cognitively limited beings need to become something like Swiss Army knives of agencies. (Location 1740)
- To summarize: Iâve argued that we are more autonomous when we can choose the appropriate agential mode for the task at hand. We will be more likely to do so if we are experientially aware of a wider variety of agential modesâweâll have more agencies in our inventory. Since games can expose us to a wider degree of agential modes, they can make an appropriate choice more likely. And each agential mode will also be easier for us to inhabit once we are experientially familiar with it. And we will be more likely to be able to fluidly switch between agential modes and to select the right one if we have practiced such changing through a wide variety of agencies in games. Just as various forms of writing and speech communicate ideas for us to consider, games communicate modes of agency for us to try on. All these forms of communication enhance our autonomy in different, but mutually supportive, ways. (Location 1752)
- The following exercise is an excellent curative: do a lot of easy climbs, but without ever bending your elbows. The exercise forces you to discover a thousand different subtle ways to inflect your hips and rotate your trunk to maneuver through space. And, after enough practice, you internalize the movement patterns, they become part of your natural and intuitive vocabulary of movement. The temporary restrictions create short sessions of intense practical focus, which result in a long-term increase in your freedom of movement. (Location 1865)
- In general, the sweep of much recent philosophy has been to question this fantasy of radical individuality and autonomy. On the epistemic front, philosophers have pushed away from radical Cartesian intellectual autonomism, toward a view of a network of epistemic interdependencies (Burge 1993, 2007; Hardwig 1985, 1991; Millgram 2015; Jones 1999). My own views on the matter can be found in Nguyen (2010, 2011, 2017, 2018b, 2018a, 2018c). On the practical and political scale, consider also recent work in the nature of joint commitment, group agency, and collective intelligence (Gilbert 2013; List and Pettit 2011; Bird 2014; Bratman 2014). (Location 1946)