Agency as Art

Games are a distinctive art form. A game isn’t merely a designed environment. A game tells its players what abilities to use and what goals to pursue. A game, in other words, specifies a form of agency. This chapter proposes that games are the art form that works in the medium of agency. And to play a game, players temporarily submerge themselves in an alternate agency. This chapter focuses on what we learn, from the fact that we play games, about our motivational capacities. In many kinds of game playing, we are not playing to win. We are, instead, taking on a temporary interest in winning, for the sake of the struggle. Game playing is a motivational inversion of ordinary practical life. And we are beings that can invert our motivations, and take on temporary and disposable ends, for the sake of having a valuable struggle.

The Possibility of Striving Play

There are two sorts of play. In achievement play, we play for the sake of winning. In striving play we take up a temporary interest in winning for the sake of the activity of the pursuit. Striving play is a motivational inversion of ordinary practical life. In striving play, we take on disposable ends—temporary ends that guide our actions for a time, and then are discarded. But a skeptic might doubt the possibility of striving play. This chapter addresses the skeptic and argues for the possibility of striving play, using Bernard Suits’s insights into the motivational structure of game playing. The chapter considers a wide variety of game-playing phenomena, including silly party games, long-term game-playing relationships among friends and family, and the joys of comic failure in games. We learn that we can inhabit our agency with considerably more nimbleness and fluidity than we might have thought.

Framed Agency

In this chapter, we examine games as works—that is, as authored, intentional artifacts. The chapter centers on one key features of works: that there are prescriptions for adequately encountering one. Just as you must look at a painting from the front to encounter it, you must play a game by following rules and pursuing the goals. Such prescriptions offer an attentional frame for audience members, directing their attention in a shared way. These frames, and the prescriptions that establish them, are crucial for establishing communicative stability between artist and audience, and between different audience members. The chapter concludes with a taxonomy of game types, each with its own distinctive prescriptions, which arise from the variable requirements for a player skill. Some games—party games—prescribe low-skill play. Other games—heavy strategy games—prescribe that their players become highly skilled, before they can adequately encounter and appreciate the game. Still other games—community evolution games—prescribe that players participate in an ongoing communal conversation about gaming strategy, to adequately encounter the game.

Games as Social Transformation

Games work not only in the medium of agency, but also in the medium of sociality. This chapter studies how games create new patterns of social relationships, and how this permits games to effect a special kind of moral transformation. In games, we can transform competition into cooperation. Games are a designed environment, where we can unleash our most competitive instincts, and be assured that they will be transformed by the gaming context into an interesting struggle for our opponents. The chapter shows, then, that games can give us experiences of alternate forms of society. They are a kind of social art; that is, they transfigure our social arrangements for artistic purposes. Most contemporary social art practices, however, avoid specifying rules and goals for audience participation, preferring to leave the audience free to do as they please. Games show us that using rules and goals can actually help further the transformational goals of social art.

Gamification and Value Capture

Games work in the medium of agency; this chapter explores the special dangers of that medium. Understanding the value of games will show us why the gamification of ordinary life is problematic. Games can offer us seductive experiences of value clarity. In games, values are clear, and our achievements are usually quantifiable and rankable. We know exactly what we are doing, and why. This is unproblematic, as long as it is confined to the gaming context. But it is quite dangerous to export the expectation for value clarity outside the game. Our larger values are subtle and complex. If we are seduced by a fantasy of value clarity, we will be drawn to oversimplify our values. When we oversimplify our values in ordinary life to induce game-like experiences, we may amplify our motivation, but we will also change the target. And when we expect game-like value clarity in ordinary life, we may be too drawn to institutions and systems that present oversimplified versions of values. This chapter introduces the notion of “value capture.” Value capture occurs when our natural values are subtle, but institutions present us with simplified versions of those values, and then we internalize them. Value capture threatens to undermine our autonomy. But if we don’t manage our experience of games properly, they can make us more vulnerable to value capture. And the attempts to actively gamify ordinary life increase the threat of value capture.

The Value of Striving

This chapters shows how aesthetic striving play may provide some protection against value capture. In aesthetic striving play, we alternate between two very different states of mind. First, we take on the narrowed, practical, focused mode of the in-game agency. Second, we need to step back, to evaluate the experience of narrowed agency in aesthetic terms. Crucially, aesthetic judgment involves a widened and unfocused mode of attention. And aesthetic judgment involves sensitive and free judgment, unbound by explicit rules us inference. When we switch between the narrowed mode and the aesthetic mode, we take a step back from value clarity, to ask questions of value from a subtler perspective. Aesthetic striving play helps us to practice wearing our agency lightly.

Layers of Agency

In striving play, we not only take up disposable ends, but we take them up as if they were final. To become absorbed in games, we need to create an alternate agency and submerge ourselves within it. We need to put out of our minds, for the moment, our larger purposes, and give ourselves up to a temporary and narrowed form of agency. Otherwise, it would be impossible to achieve the sorts of wholehearted play that so many of us desire. This is a familiar technique that agents use for pursuing self-effacing ends. Games simply formalize it. This picture help us to explain why we put ourselves at risk of failure in games. For the striving player, failure in a game isn’t really a lasting failure. Rather, it is only a failure of the temporary constructed agent.

Games and Autonomy

This chapter shows how games can help us to develop our agency and autonomy. They do so by allowing us to record different modes of agency. We, as limited beings, need to cycle between different modes of agency in order to cope with the difficulties of the world. In this chapter, we discover that games can serve as a communication vessel for those modes of agency. We can inscribe modes of agency into a game, and explore different modes of agency by playing a variety of games. Thus, games constitute a library of agencies. This library can help us to develop our autonomy, by increasing our inventory of agential modes, and helping us to recognize and deploy the appropriate agential mode for the appropriate circumstance. By offering us short-term restrictions on how to act, games force us into new postures of agency. This can help us become more fluid with our agency in the long term. Games are yoga for our agency.

The Aesthetics of Agency

This chapter focuses on the aesthetics of agency, in which we can appreciate the aesthetic qualities of our own actions. These include aesthetic qualities in our own moving, deciding, analyzing, reacting, and doing. We can have aesthetic experiences of our own agency in everyday life. The chapter explores how ames concentrate and crystallize the aesthetics of agency. With games, we can sculpt activities for the sake of aesthetic experience of acting itself. And aesthetic experiences of one’s own actions can create a sense of practical harmony—of a beautiful fit between an agent and their practical world. It can also create a sense of aesthetic disharmony. There can be a game aesthetics of horror and clumsiness. Finally, the chapter squares the aesthetics of agencywith various theoretical demands—such as the demand for disinterest, and the demand for a nonpractical attitude—through the layered nature of agency in games.

The Distance in the Game

Games offer an aesthetics of self-reflection, where players appreciate the aesthetic qualities in their own activities. They are part of what we can call the process arts, where the audience is supposed to appreciate the aesthetic qualities of their own activity, in response to an artifact. This chapter provides an account of the process arts in general, and situates games inside them. The process arts are contrasted with the more familiar object arts, where the audience is supposed to appreciate the aesthetic qualities of the artifact itself. The process arts offer a greater distance between artist and effect. Thus, the medium of games can be understood by thinking about the unique challenges it presents to the artist. The chapter focuses on the characteristic challenge of the medium of agency: the game designer must cope with agential distance. Game designers must achieve their aesthetic effects through the agent of the player, making room for the player’s choices, creativity, and variable skill. But game designers have a special tool for coping with that agential distance. They can designate the basic shape of the player’s agency in the game.