Two Levels of Agency in Games

Full episode transcript and all linked references available at https://dialectic.fm/c-thi-nguyen.

C. Thi Nguyen (Website, Philpeople.org, X) is a professor of philosophy at the University of Utah focused on values, games, agency, art, aesthetics, and data. His new book, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game is out now.

Thi is also the author of Games: Agency as Art, in which he explores how game designers work in the medium of agency, but sculpting a players abilities, goals, and obstacles to create "harmonious action." I first learned about Thi's work via his interview with Ezra Klein in 2022, which is one of my all-time favorite podcast episodes. In it, he discusses Agency as Art, How Twitter Gamifies Communication, Why Q-Anon is game-like, and more.

The Score is a marriage of his work on games and on data and metrics. He explores how scoring systems in games allow for playfulness and agentic exploration of our values, while scoring systems in real life produce what he calls value capture. In an effort to make the world more quantified, comprehensible, and trustless, metrics are flattening our values and sapping the meaning out of our lives. One way he describes his work is that James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State also applies to the human soul.

In this conversation, I aimed to cover the most compelling ideas in the book in two parts. First, we explore the local side: personal agency and values, attention and the difference between recognition and perception, process vs. outcome, and why playfulness and openness allow us to have richer lives. He also shares how games are a compelling template for this kind of exploration.

Second, we talk about the societal level: what we miss in a world of values dominated by what is easily measurable, how we can scale trust and enjoy the benefits of collaboration, science, and technology while not delegating our understanding to the wrong people, and why objectivity and truth are not always the same thing. Thi makes the case that technology is value-laden, not value-neutral, and that we must be more vigilant and nuanced in our approach to the ethical decisions that exist everywhere.

I hope this conversation is a prompt for you and I to think more deeply about what we truly care about, to "move lightly" between agentic and value-laden worlds, and bring a perceptive playfulness to our lives. Remember, we are all grasshoppers in disguise. If you enjoy the episode, please support Thi's work and check out The Score.

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Timestamps:

• 0:00: Opening Highlights
• 1:39: Introduction to C. Thi Nguyen
• 5:13: Thanks to Notion
• 6:31: Start: What Does it Mean to Be Playful?
• 13:41: Starting Local: Agency, Scoring Systems, and Games
• 23:36: Value Capture: Incentives, Values, and the Collapse of Meaning
• 36:28: What is the Shape of Good Values?
• 49:45: Attention, Recognition vs. Perception, and Aesthetic Openness
• 58:46: Process vs. Outcome, Striving Play vs. Achievement Play, Recipe vs. Dish
• 1:10:00: Aesthetic Value & Autotelic Pursuits in Life
• 1:16:59: Metrics, "Measure What Matters," and What We Miss
• 1:24:16: Quantitative vs. Qualitative Ways of Knowing and Different Conceptions of Rules
• 1:38:01: Scaling Trust, Data, Experts, and Legibility
• 1:54:37: Objectivity & Truth, Value-Laden Technology & Decisions, and "Objectivity Laundering"
• 2:07:57: Advice for Technologists: Ethics, Maps, Value-Neutrality, and Playfulness
• 2:18:52: Closing Thanks to Notion

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