Games: Agency as Art
30 Oct 2021 - 28 Nov 2022
- C Thi Nguyen, Games: Agency as Art book
This happened last year. Outcome: I gave in on this point, but got my revenge by adding a new triple-weird finale featuring the yoga stuff, and they published it. pic.twitter.com/Ijafxspbze
— C Thi Nguyen (@add_hawk) July 4, 2020- "games are yoga for your agency"
- https://philarchive.org/archive/NGUGAT-2
what could possibly be the point of taking on these arbitrary rules and goals? ... The answer, I will suggest, is that the rules and goals of games are not arbitrary at all. They are actually a way of specifying particular modes of agency for the player to adopt. This is what makes games a distinctive art form. Designers of such games do not simply create the gaming environments and obstacles. They designate goals and abilities for the player; they shape the agential skeleton which the player will inhabit during the game. Game designers work in the medium of agency.
- Sculpted agency
- Achievement player vs Striving play (sounds a lot like Finite and Infinite Games
An achievement player plays to win; a striving player temporarily acquires an interest in winning for the sake of the struggle.
- A stupid game is one where the fun part is failing (Twister, Telephone) – failure is funny, but it has to be genuine, that is, you have to be trying to win
- "Games let us record forms of agency" (like novels record narrative, paintings encode visual media)
- yoga forces you out of your postural habits
- games force you out of your agential habit
- Games:
- Spyfall (party game) (sounds sort of like Mafia)
- Imperial (sort of Risk-like, but you play the bankers)
- Root
- Apocalypse World