What Makes Games Unique?

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Games are circumscribed spaces where the actions on space have been often like leamd down and clarified, so your actions can fit persance. Like te yor you're told, here are the possible actions, and then you can take them an time. It's a little bit its way cleaner than the real world, in which the set of actions is dauntingly infinitethat that'. That is exactly i mean, sir john dewey, one of the great american philosophers, of art says that what art is is taking life experiences and accentuating them. I think this is exactly right.

Games are everywhere, but why exactly do we play them? It seems counterintuitive, to artificially invent goals and obstacles just so we can struggle to achieve them. (And in some games, like Twister, the fun is in losing, even though you’re supposed to try to win.) C. Thi Nguyen is a philosopher who has developed a theory of games as an art form whose medium is agency. Within each game, we have defined goals, powers, and choices, and by playing different games we can experiment with different forms of agency. A dark side of this idea is to be found in “gamification” — turning ordinary-life activities into a game. Games give us clarity of values, and that clarity can be seductive but misleading, leading people to turn to conspiracy theories about the real world.

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C. Thi Nguyen received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California, Los Angeles. He is currently associate professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah. He has written public philosophy for venues such as Aeon and The New York Times, and is an editor of the aesthetics blog Aesthetics for Birds. He was the recipient of the 2020 Article Prize from the American Philosophical Association. His recent book is Games: Agency as Art.

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