C. Thi Nguyen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah. He works in social epistemology, aesthetics, practical reasoning, and value theory, and he has written on games, trust, seductive clarity, and how transparency metrics undermine sensitivity. His book, Games: Agency as Art was the recipient of the American Philosophy Association 2021 Book Prize. In this Recently Published Book Spotlight, Nguyen discusses the non-academic origins of his aesthetic theory, the role of agency and motivation in games, and how stupid games prove the possibility of striving play.
What motivated you to write this book?
Philosophy was supposed to be a part-time gig for me, a backup to my real work, which was supposed to be creative writing. I was supposed to be a novelist. In my childhood, I was a teenage movie critic for the San Jose Mercury News. During graduate school, I split my time between philosophy work and being a food critic for the Los Angeles Times. And I was secretly working on a novel for my entire grad school career. Two of them, actually. When I got my first academic job, I had to choose between the food journalism career and the academic career. And when I made the painful choice to give up food writing professionally, I swore to myself that I’d let myself write about weird aesthetics.
Aesthetics was never supposed to be a legitimate career path. Most people in the profession will urge you away from it, because there aren’t supposed to be jobs in it, and a lot of the mainstream doesn’t take it seriously. But it’s always mattered intensely to me. I’ve always vibrated intensely to the aesthetic parts of life—everything from fancy arty film and obscure modernist novels to late night taco trucks and weird little craft projects. And it’s hard for me to imagine that a really complete philosophical account of, you know, the meaning of life, wouldn’t have a lot in it about beauty and elegance and grace and comedy.
Anyway: where did Games: Agency as Art come from? I’ve been a game player my whole life, everything from chess and Go and poker to obscure French party games to text adventure games to Dungeons and Dragons. During graduate school, David Ebrey and I used to stay up late playing board games, and then dissecting them afterward—trying to figure out what made one game delicious and fascinating, and another one boring and grind-y. I started posting on an online forum, boardgamegeek.com, trying to write reviews of these things. In retrospect, I realized that I spent years of my time as part of a community that was actively trying to invent an aesthetic language for games – looking for the terms of criticism that really caught the particular experiences we were having.
While I was teaching an aesthetics class, I taught a unit on the aesthetics of games. And I was dissatisfied with a lot of the academic literature, because it mostly seemed like attempts to annex games to other, more familiar art forms—trying to talk about their virtues in terms of their resemblances to fiction, museum pieces, conceptual art, rhetoric. And those resemblances were actually real. But those attempts seemed to be missing something. The academic discussion seemed so far from much of the reality of game-playing. The deepest stuff I was reading was all non-academic and mostly online—blogs, reviews, design diaries—from game designers, on online forum discussions.
I wanted to understand games on their own terms. Whenever you get a new art form, historically, you usually get people trying to assimilate it to previously known art forms—trying to make early photography feel like impressionist painting, for example. I wanted to get a grip on what made games unique as an art form.
But it was hard to make the space to think about the aesthetics of games; it was so far from any of the standard topics that you were permitted to write about, as a professional philosopher. At first, I was only going to write one paper, but each thing I wrote opened the door to an even deeper and odder idea. The pile of writing grew bigger and bigger and bigger, until it demanded to be a book. (What that demand looks like: I stopped being able to write articles below twenty thousand words, because I had to keep spending fifteen thousand words setting up this whole edifice of my theory in order to make the next point. So, it had to be a book.) I threw the bits together into a draft. Even then, I was pretty unsure that anybody would want to read it. Who wants to read a technical piece of aesthetics, that tangles with philosophical accounts of agency, about goddamn games? For professional philosophers, games are a silly topic. For the rest of the world, the philosophical approach seemed too technical. I had spent years developing a thing that I found deeply fascinating in the terms that it was natural for me to think in, but which I doubted anybody but me and, like, two other fellow weirdos would care about.
A major turning point, for this book and for my life: I had shown my current in-progress novel draft and the draft of Games: Agency as Art to a mentor I deeply trusted and respected. I needed Big Direction-type advice. I was at a decision point in my life. I didn’t know whether to leave academic philosophy or stick with it. I couldn’t get anything published. All the stuff I was writing, about games, about echo chambers, was coming back with rejections from reviewers. These rejections rarely offered substantive criticisms; I just kept getting rejections that said, “This is not of real philosophical interest.” I was starting to think that, though I loved philosophy, maybe philosophy didn’t love me back.
But my mentor loved the draft of Games: Agency as Art. He also said the novel manuscript was fine enough – well-written and artful and all that –but that it was entirely familiar, and very much like other nice little literary novels he’d recently read. But, he said, the Games draft was startling and completely unlike anything he’d read in philosophy.
Anyway, that was enough for me: I took his compliments to heart and went for it.
Which of your insights or conclusions do you find most exciting?
I had been working with Bernard Suits’s well-known definition of “games”: that playing a game is voluntarily taking on unnecessary obstacles to make possible the activity of struggling to overcome them. For Suits, what makes games distinctive is that the goals of a game are partially constituted by obeying a particular set of constraints. What it is to make a basket is to have passed the ball through the net, while following the rules of basketball—dribbling while you move, no stepladders, no stilts. This reveals that the value of playing a game is intrinsically connected with the constraints and the specified obstacles.
Suits’ account seems deeply true to me. Meanwhile, I was reading all this academic stuff about how video games were actually a fiction, or a kind of interactive cinema, and growing frustrated, because they rarely mentioned obstacles or struggles at all. But I still didn’t have a language that satisfied me, to talk about what was really going on. Then I heard a talk from Reiner Knizia—my favorite boardgame designer. He said that the most important tool in his game design toolbox was the point system, because it told the players what to care about. His comment hit me like a lightning bolt. It seemed so deeply true to me: that the game designer was telling you what you had to want in the game. They were sort of telling you who to be. And you could just sort of . . . put on this alternate self.
This became the central claim of the book is: the games are works in the artistic medium of agency itself. Game designers create a world, but they also tell you who to be in that world. They tell you what your abilities are, and, most fascinatingly of all, they set your motivations by specifying the victory conditions. They shape an alternate self for you, and design obstacles for that alternate self – all to shape a particularly delicious struggle.
Thinking about this lead me to make the key distinction which drives my book. There are two very different forms of game-playing, which arise from two very different motivations for playing the game. One is “achievement play”: playing for the sake of the value of winning the game. The other is “striving play”: temporarily taking on an interest in winning, for the sake of the struggle. The striving player doesn’t actually, enduringly care about winning. They just get themselves to care about it temporarily, to have the joys of absorption in the struggle. Striving players take on disposable ends—interests that they pick up, enter into, become utterly absorbed by, and then easily discard.
Striving play involves a motivational inversion. In ordinary life, you take the means for the sake of the ends. But in striving play, you take the ends for the sake of the means. I’m a rock climber. I try to climb to the top of the cliff, not because I actually care about being there at the top, but because adopting that temporary goal—and specific restrictions on my pursuit (no helicopters, don’t take the easy path up the back)—push me into a wonderful experience of physical movement—of controlled delicacy and precision balancing.
Striving play is the key idea in the book. In some sense, it’s an utterly obvious concept. From a certain perspective, it’s just a fancy way of saying “the journey is the destination.” But thinking about games forced me to articulate the motivational structure which lies under that saying. And that turned out to open all kinds of other doors.
For example: once you start thinking about striving play, it becomes clear that striving players need to the capacity to absorb themselves in some sort of temporary sub-agency – some inner layer of agency. You need to decide to play to pursue some larger purpose – relaxation, fun, the delights of absorption. But to get that purpose, you have to sort of forget that it’s what you really care about. It needs to feel to you, during the game, like winning is really important. But after the game, you can simply discard your interest in winning in the end. (Or, at least, some people can.) Striving play makes clear how fluid we are as agents, how easy it is for us slip in and out of different specified skeletons. Think about how weird it is, that you can just open up a rulebook, the game tells you what to care about—and you just do it. And afterward, you can be satisfied that your evening was worthwhile—even if you lost.
The concept of striving play also unlocked, for me, a clearer understanding of what was distinctive about games as aesthetic objects. They are very different from traditional artistic objects. In the traditional arts, the audience is supposed to admire the artistic object itself. But in games, the audience is supposed to interact with the artistic object and then appreciate their own interactions. In games, it’s the player that becomes beautiful, elegant, thrilling, comically awkward. Most of the traditional arts are what we might call “object arts”, but games are a “process art”—an art designed to evoke aesthetic qualities in the actions of the player. Games are a curiously self-reflective aesthetic experience; the player plays for the experience of the beauty in their own actions.
What were early versions of this manuscript like? What changed in the final version?
The first version of the manuscript had all the arguments, but it wasn’t funny at all. I realized that I would have completely failed my sense of my topic—and my spiritual essence—if I wrote a book on games that was no fun. So, I rewrote it all, basically from scratch. The second time around was way easier—I knew where I was going, I had all the arguments, and now I just had to make it flow and feel alive on the page.
The really nauseating thing was figuring out the ordering. There were kind of three central topics: there was this really technical bit about agency and motivational structures, this really aesthetics-y bit about the uniqueness of process arts, and then this really social-political bit about the badness of gamification and the seductive clarity of game-point systems. I didn’t know how to arrange them, and I ended up recutting and re-ordering the book like six times until it felt right.
There was a single greatest moment in the writing of the book. It might be my favorite moment in my entire career. It came, for me, while I was struggling with the argument for the reality of striving play. For me, it seems totally obvious that striving play was an available mode. But a lot of people seemed to think that striving play was a psychological impossibility, that I’d just invented it to fill a theoretical hole in my account. So, I needed an argument that striving play was possible. The original version of the argument was gruelingly arcane – ten pages of intensely technical philosophy. There were formalisms and, like, low-grade technical logic. I could barely hold it in my head, and I doubted it would make sense to most other people. The argument “worked”, I guessed, but it didn’t produce, like, any actual sense of illumination. It was just a very large number of steps to a conclusion.
Then one day, beating my head over this thing, I saw that I could do the whole thing with one simple example.
Consider the category of “stupid games”. A stupid game is one where:
- The fun part is failing.
- You have to try to win to have fun.
Like Twister, or many drinking games. In Twister, the funny part is failing. But you can’t try intentionally fail, because that’s not really a failure, and not really funny. To play Twister, you have to get yourself to get absorbed in the goal of winning, though what you really want is the joy of failing. If playing Twister is possible, then striving play is real.
I was so happy to find this argument. Like, I jumped out of my chair and took multiple victory laps around the room—followed by a victory martini—and the went back and immediately deleted the 10 pages of arcane logical bullshit, and replaced it with a single paragraph about stupid games. It was the most gleefully dumb version of a transcendental argument.
I have to admit, this is kind of my personal aesthetic in philosophy: if you can look at the most ordinary grain of sand, the most overlooked and mundane everyday activity, and find in it surprising depths—keep unraveling it, until you arrive at some lovely and large—that’s what thrills me, and that’s how I want to write.
How is your work relevant to the contemporary world?
First, I think the book is a defense of play, and lurking in secret behind that, a defense of autotelic activity—activity for its own sake. Suits’s The Grasshopper ends with a wild argument: that in utopia, all we’d do with our time is play games, so games must be the purpose of life. This is explicitly supposed to be an updating of an Aristotelian argument: that what’s really valuable in life is activity for its own sake. The argument used to seem wild to me, and now it seems utterly plausible. (I don’t actually think that games are the only kind of autotelic activity, but I do now sort of think that autotelic activity is what fills out a life with meaning—and games are a major category of autotelic activity. Art is another.) It’s the opposite view, the one I used to occupy—the one that finds this utopian argument weird—that now feels in need of diagnosis. Why is it so weird to think that play is a substantial part of a valuable life?
The more I think about it, the more I suspect that one of the reasons games and play are left out of various stories about the meaning and value of life is that they violently resist the productivity mindset. In games—in striving play—you’re not making some valuable product, some thing you can stack up and use. You’re often chasing something blatantly valueless or artificial—points—because the activity itself is so lush and interesting and satisfying. Play is a middle finger to the mindset of accumulation, production, and outcomes. And I think games and play seem obviously unserious and unimportant, only when your sense of what’s really important has already been captured by the productivity mindset.
At the end of the book, I start worrying about gamification. For me, one of the most distinctive pleasures of games is that they make the value landscape simple and clear. Instead of a wild chaos of subtle and plural values, you get to pursue something clean and simple, and your degree of success can be precisely measured. My worry is that when we export that to the external world, we end up simplifying the values of real activities in order to give them more game-like pleasure. Since the book came out, I’ve been writing about the dangers of gamification—like how Twitter gamifies the communication process, hyper-simplifying its goals.
The very last section in the book introduced the concept of “value capture”. This is when your values are rich and subtle, and you get parked next to some simplified, typically quantified version of those values, and they take over. Like going to philosophy graduate school with a love of fascinating thoughts and weird questions, and coming out obsessed with where your articles place in some ranked list of journal status. Since I’ve written the book, I’ve been going through a deep dive on the literature on the history and politics of quantification culture.
How have readers responded? (Or how do you hope they will respond?)
It’s been wild. The reception has been beyond my wildest dreams. First, lots of academic philosophers have actually read the stuff and gotten excited by it. I regularly get emails from people saying they had no interest in philosophy of games, but the book has helped them unlock puzzles in, like, philosophy of language and philosophy of mind.
That was kind of my secret hope. I have this private theory that there’s this whole host of weird phenomena that are pretty understudied in philosophy, that games bring to the fore. And it isn’t that they’re unique to games. But games formalize them and make them more obvious. They force us to confront our weirdly fluid agential nature. And one of the most startling, and deeply gratifying, responses has been graduate students writing to me to tell me that the games stuff gave them the motivation to write about what they were actually interested in.
I’ve also had a huge response from gamers. I’ve had lots of people write to me and say that this has finally given them the language to talk about and explain their love of games. I actually had somebody tell me that the book helped significantly improve his marriage. His spouse had never really understood his game-playing and thought it was this awful waste of time. He said my book had helped give him the language to explain himself and make his passions comprehensible, and dispelled a major source of marital conflict.
Some of the most gratifying responses I’ve gotten are from game designers, who’ve written to tell me that the book gave them the language to talk about what they’d always known in their hearts, but been unable to express—about the centrality of agency-shaping in game-playing and game-designing. I’ve had some games designers tell me that they’d been pushed to make games more like narrative fictions—like movies, like literature—in order to do something important and real. They said that my book had freed them up to actually make pure games without having to constantly look over their shoulders and worry about whether they were meeting standards set by more traditional arts.
But the most moving response was a letter from a student, who’d heard me give a talk about games and gamification. She gave me permission to tell her story, and I’m going to tell it in more detail in the popular book I’m writing right now. She said that my talk had pulled her out of a five-year depressive tailspin. That, she now realized, she’d been caught in bad games – obsessed with grades, obsessed with athletic success, obsessed with her weight loss. And that I’d given her the frame and language to think about those things as bad games, and realize that she had some significant choice in whether or not she wanted to play them.
Anyway, that response basically justifies my entire life.
C. Thi Nguyen
C. Thi Nguyen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah. He works in social epistemology, aesthetics, practical reasoning, and value theory. He has written on: games, trust, seductive clarity and how transparency metrics undermine sensitivity. In his mind, these topics are all united; they are about how social structures and technologies shape how we reason and communicate, and what we value. He has written some public philosophy – including pieces on echo chambers, moral outrage porn, and why teachers aren’t cops. A full list is available on his website.
Maryellen Stohlman-Vanderveen is the APA Blog's Diversity and Inclusion Editor and Research Editor. She graduated from the London School of Economics with an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy in 2023 and currently works in strategic communications. Her philosophical interests include conceptual engineering, normative ethics, philosophy of technology, and how to live a good life.
