Games: Agency As Art

by C. Thi Nguyen

My core values are thick and recalcitrant. But game activity is different. We can change our in-game ends easily and fluidly. We can adopt new ends, which will guide our actions for the duration of the game, and then drop them in an instant.

Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.

An achievement player plays to win. A striving player acquires, temporarily, an interest in winning for the sake of the struggle.

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.

Consider, also, what we might call “stupid games.” Stupid games have the following characteristics: first, they are only fun if you try to win; and second, the fun part is when you fail.

When we design games, we can sculpt the shape of the activity to make beautiful action more likely. And games can intensify and refine those aesthetic qualities, just as a painting can intensify and refine the aesthetic qualities we find in the natural sights and sounds of 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 make solving the problems pleasurable, satisfying, interesting, and beautiful.

And this, I suspect, is both the great promise and the great threat of games. 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 just from graphically violent games, but from all games. 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.

Game designers must cope with a distinctive artistic difficulty: they must achieve their aesthetic effects through the agency of the player.

But why go through all this rigmarole of creating, sustaining, and submerging ourselves in temporary agencies? For many of us, the desirable experiences are ones of single-minded, wholehearted immersion. A significant part of the appeal of games is that we do not have to deal with the complex fluidity of the world and its shady, ambiguous, and pluralistic values.

It is easier to judge functional beauty in a game precisely because the relevant functional purposes are extremely well-defined.

For an aesthetic striving player, winning doesn’t matter if the experience was dull, uninteresting, or aesthetically insipid.

Adopting an alternate mode of agency, at a game’s behest, is a way of learning about new ways of being an agent. By surrendering, in the short-term, full creative control over the details of the agency which one will inhabit, one can learn about new forms of agency from the inside.

And it’s not just for my own actions; experiences of a wide variety of agencies might help me understand of how substantially different agents might go about their business. Anecdotal evidence: I have become much more capable of understanding and predicting sociopathic business behavior, and of understanding how vast profit-oriented corporations reason, after having spent much time playing the stock-trading and market manipulation game 1830. Thus, familiarity with destructive agencies—like the narcissistic agency of Monopoly—can be useful to a good-hearted agent for understanding the bad actors that they’ll have to contend with.

narratives offer compressed alternate chunks of other lives—experiences that we either cannot, or did not, happen to have. They can also offer us experiences that have been refined and shaped for particular effect. Games, I suggest, can function analogously, by offering shaped, precise, compressed, crystallized experiences of alternate agencies.

I will use the term art because it is the readiest at hand. Games, in my picture, are artifacts that have been intentionally constructed for the sake of, among other things, engendering aesthetic experiences in their audiences. “Art” seems to be best term that we have to talk about such things.

The standard view in contemporary analytic aesthetics is that a work is partially constituted by prescriptions about what its users must do in order to encounter that work. For example, says Davies, the practice of painting, at least in its traditional European form, prescribes that users look at, but not taste, the canvas. It also prescribes that they look at the front of it and not the back.

Just as a painter is framing a particular visual experience, isolating it and drawing attention to it, the game designer is framing a particular kind of practical activity by instructing the player to approach a particular practical environment from a particular motivational angle.

General Prescription for Aesthetic Striving Games: The appreciator will play the game, following the indicated rules and aiming at the indicated goal, and then appreciate the resulting activity.

In games, the player takes a crucial role in constructing the object of the appreciation.

Aesthetic experiences of agency, as I’ve described them, are essentially reflective. They are not experiences of the game as a designed object. Rather, the player appreciate the aesthetic qualities of their own activity.

The object arts are well-theorized. The process arts, on the other hand, are everywhere, but they are undertheorized and undervalued, especially by the art world establishment. I think the process arts likely include social dances, including group tango and square dancing; social eating rituals, such as fondues and hot pots; cooking; and perhaps urban planning. Note that these activities are usually not considered part of the fine arts. They are, at best, usually considered liminal candidates for art status.

The game designer, the urban planner, and the architect face a similar sort of agential distance. They are all trying to shape the sorts of activities that arise from autonomous agents encountering the systems of designed constraints while engaged in the practical pursuit of some goal.

During the game, my spouse and I are competing with each other. But even though, locally speaking, we are competing, in a more global sense, we are actually cooperating. We are helping each other to have the wonderful experience of struggle that we both desire.

More importantly, the social engineering is exactly that: engineering. It arises from regulated, structural aspects of game design. Game designers specify agencies, and through them shape the social structures of those agents. I am suggesting here that we move past a player-centric view of gaming. The pattern of social relationships in a game is not entirely attributable to the contribution of the players. Such patterns are often produced, or at least profoundly shaped, by game design.

Games, I am suggesting, are another form of experiment in living; they are quickest rough-sketch version. When we interact under an disposable end, we are exploring how social life will go under an alternative conception of the good.

We need to have built up some kind of reflexive habit of distancing, of pulling back from any sticky and seductive subagencies and stepping back from the world of value clarity.