C. Thi Nguyen, "Games: Agency as Art" (Oxford UP, 2020)

11 snips

Oct 4, 2022

C. Thi Nguyen, expert in games and agency as art, discusses the unique value of games as an art form. He explores the motivational structure of playing games and how they allow us to experience the beauty of struggle. Nguyen also highlights games as a technology for communicating and transmitting forms of agency. The podcast delves into the intersection of games and aesthetics, the role of framing in game design, and the tension between transparency and trust in expertise. It concludes with a discussion on the tension between metrics and expertise in personal and public life.

Ask episode

Chapters

Transcript

Episode notes

Introduction

00:00 • 6min

The Significance of Games as an Art Form

05:31 • 21min

Defining Art: Capturing Attention and Social Weight

26:16 • 5min

The Aesthetic Qualities of Games and the Importance of Actions

31:05 • 4min

Framing in Relation to Aesthetics

35:23 • 5min

Exploring the Benefits and Concerns of Alternate Point Systems

40:30 • 12min

The Conflict Between Transparency and Trust in Expertise and Standpoint Epistemology

52:21 • 2min

Tension Between Metrics and Expertise in Public and Personal Life

53:54 • 2min

Games are a unique art form. Games work in the medium of agency. Game designers tell us who to be and what to care about during the game. Game designers sculpt alternate agencies, and game players submerge themselves in those alternate agencies. Thus, the fact that we play games demonstrates the fluidity of our own agency. We can throw ourselves, for a little while, into a different and temporary motivations.

This volume presents a new theory of games which insists on their unique value. In Games: Agency as Art (Oxford UP, 2020), C. Thi Nguyen argues that games are an integral part our systems of communication and our art. Games sculpt our practical activities, allowing us to experience the beauty of our own actions and reasoning. Bridging aesthetics and practical reasoning, he gives an account of the special motivational structure involved in playing games. When we play games, we can pursue a goal, not for its own value, but for the value of the struggle. Thus, playing games involves a motivational inversion from normal life. We adopt an interest in winning temporarily, so we can experience the beauty of the struggle. Games offer us a temporary experience of life under utterly clear values, in a world engineered to fit to our abilities and goals.

Games also let us to experience forms of agency we might never have developed on our own. Games, it turns out, are a special technique for communication. They are a technology that lets us record and transmit forms of agency. Our games form a "library of agency" and we can explore that library to develop our autonomy. Games use temporary restrictions to force us into new postures of agency.

Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology