Games are a unique art form. They do not just tell stories, nor are they simply conceptual art. They are the art form that works in the medium of agency. Game designers tell us who to be in games and what to care about; they designate the player's in-game abilities and motivations. In other words, designers create alternate agencies, and players submerge themselves in those agencies. Games let us explore alternate forms of agency. The fact that we play games demonstrates something remarkable about the nature of our own agency: we are capable of incredible fluidity with our own motivations and rationality.
This volume presents a new theory of games which insists on games' unique value in human life. C. Thi Nguyen argues that games are an integral part of how we become mature, free people. Bridging aesthetics and practical reasoning, he gives an account of the special motivational structure involved in playing games. We can pursue goals, not for their own value, but for the sake of the struggle. Playing games involves a motivational inversion from normal life, and the fact that we can engage in this motivational inversion lets us use games to experience forms of agency we might never have developed on our own. Games, then, are a special medium for communication. They are the technology that allows us to write down and transmit forms of agency. Thus, the body of games forms a "library of agency" which we can use to help develop our freedom and autonomy.
Nguyen also presents a new theory of the aesthetics of games. Games sculpt our practical activities, allowing us to experience the beauty of our own actions and reasoning. They are unlike traditional artworks in that they are designed to sculpt activities - and to promote their players' aesthetic appreciation of their own activity.
Industry Reviews
Winner, 2021 Book Prize, American Philosophical Association
"This book is a total joy to read. Thi Nguyen's energy radiates from every page -- the prose is truly delightful, with all sorts of poetic turns of phrase enlivening the arguments and a whole world of games vibrantly described in rich detail. Indeed, if you're sceptical that games could be art, it may be because your game playing is limited to the likes of chess and gin rummy, and you are totally unaware, as I was until reading this book, of the incredible richness of the world of games." --
Gwen Bradford, Mind Association
"Nguyen's stunning book is philosophically deep, playful and incredibly readable. It changed how I think about games and art and (ultimately) life." -- Aaron Meskin, Professor and Head of Philosophy, University of Georgia
"Nguyen's book is simultaneously a field-defining treatment of the aesthetics of games, a deep (and very cool) move in ethics and theory of agency, and the strongest, mostexciting work I've seen on practical reasoning since the mid-2000s" -- Elijah Millgram, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, University of Utah
"Nguyen (philosophy, Univ. of Utah) analyzes games as aesthetic creations engaging the "art of agency," whose ultimate higher-order goals include the development of a "library of agencies"DLthe discovery (or creation) and practice of modes of achieving goals in general. Despite the obvious (and acknowledged) debt to Bernard Suits's The Grasshopper (1978), this is no mere echo or defense of Suits's view of play, but rather a sophisticated and updated
elaboration thereof, with many carefully chosen examples to support a variety of nuanced theses. ... This work significantly advances the philosophy of games, and will be a rewarding read for anyone interested in
the other fields mentioned above, regardless of their level of experience." -- S. E. Forschler, CHOICE
"Nguyen.s book is lively, provocative, and immensely rich...Games is undoubtedly the most important philosophical monograph on games since Suits's 1978 The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia. It also makes important contributions to aesthetics more broadly, ethics, and political philosophy. It is a delight to read." -- Jonathan Gingerich, King's College London
