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T nwen is a philosopher at the university of who's thought a lot about games. He has developed this understanding to study things like echo chambers and cult leaders. A cult is in many ways like an echo chamber. In both cases, it's not just a filter bubble where you prevent in ation you don't want from getting in,. It's like a strategy for preemptively undermining claims from outsiders that the cult leader doesn't want you to believe in. You give people ways to discount outside information. This engages our brains for interesting evolutionary reasons. And that feature of human psychology can be gamed, if you like, by the leaders of cults or echo chambers or whatever. Th

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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