Factually! with Adam Conover - The Philosophy of Games with C. Thi Nguyen

Episode Date: January 26, 2022

Playing games is a fundamental human activity. But despite their ubiquity, they’ve never gotten the serious study from scholars they deserve. Why do we play them? And what, exactly, ARE games? On the show this week is C. Thi Nguyen, philosophy professor at University of Utah, and author of the book, Games: Agency as Art. Check it out at  factuallypod.com/books. You can also find the first chapter free online here: https://philpapers.org/go.pl?id=NGUTAO-8&aid=NGUTAO-8v1.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me once again as I do my favorite thing in the world, which is talk to an amazing expert about all the incredible things that they know that I don't know and that you might not know. All of our minds are going to be blown together today. We're going to have a fantastic time. Now, I want to start with a big announcement. Folks have been asking me for a long time how they can support the show. Last year, I asked you to weigh in about how you would like to best support the show.

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You know, on this show, I talk to amazing experts, but there's a lot of other people that I want to talk to as well. I want to talk to my fellow comedians, people I think are interesting. Sometimes I want to bring back an expert for a second interview just because I have more questions to ask them. Well, that's what I'm going to be doing on the Patreon. I'm going to be posting regular bonus episodes for you to listen to and enjoy. But it's not just that. It's not so transactional. Just you give me money, I give you bonus episodes. We're going to create a community of people who love to learn, love to laugh, love to

explore the world around them and love to do that with other people who feel similarly. So we are also going to do a book club where we pick a recent nonfiction book that we all want to read. We all read it over the course of a month or two, and then we get together to discuss it on a big live stream. You, me, and hey, maybe even the author discussing the book live together. And that's not all. I'm also going to post updates and clips as I write my new stand-up hour. I'm working on a big new show, and I want to blog

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week's episode, huh? This week, we're talking about games. You know, I've been pretty much obsessed with games my whole life. I have a lot of hobbies. I've gotten into bird watching. I've gotten into bread baking. I ran a marathon once, you know, and you know, they fade in and out, but games are the one thing I have never stopped doing. I didn't even like watch movies as a kid. I literally just played video games, video games based on movies I had never seen. And you know, for most of my life, this video game obsession was kind of looked down on, you know, games were seen as this weird, lesser form of media that, you know, pimply teenagers would play in basements, all of which was true of me. But still, it was a little like unnecessarily derogatory. In fact, for a lot of

my childhood, there was a straight up panic around playing games. Adults worried that games were warping kids' minds or turning them violent. And all of that is really strange because the fact is that play is a fundamental human activity. In fact, it's a fundamental animal activity, something that we have in common with a lot of animals like octopuses and dolphins, and heck, even your dog, your cat loves to play, right? This is part of what it means to be a reasonably smart organism. There are even some psychologists who argue that play as an activity helps select for

the big brains and expansive neural networks that define us as homo sapiens. In other words, that we literally couldn't have evolved without playing. As a result, it's no surprise that games show up throughout human history. There were board games in ancient Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt. There are classical Greek vases where, I shit you not, you can see Achilles and Ajax throwing dice. Even Plato, thousands of years ago, understood that games were more than just something for fun, that they were clearly useful for things like learning. He said, no compulsory learning can remain in the soul.

In teaching children, train them by a kind of game, and you will be able to see more clearly the natural bent of each. But you know, that was a couple thousand years ago, and it often seems like no one has thought that deeply about games since. Even though play is a fundamental human activity, there isn't very much scholarly work on games. For instance, people are finally starting to talk about games as art, but when they do, they often refer to other media. You know, the ways in which the game is like a movie because it tells a story, or the way it reflects the qualities of literature. You know, the writing is so good,

that sort of thing. But that kind of analysis misses the fundamental gaminess of what a game is. It means we miss out on an understanding of what games are and what game designers are truly doing when they make a game that moves us. So what we're missing is a better account of gameness itself. What is it that we are getting from games specifically when we play them? What was it that kept me riveted to my TV six inches away from it in my basement when I was eight years old? Well, today for you on Factually, we have a conversation that is so goddamn cool. You are going to love this. On this show, I speak with a philosopher who gives an extremely smart and comprehensive account of what games are. He's literally the first person I have ever encountered who has thought through games so thoroughly that

I think he might be approaching like a comprehensive theory of what games actually are. Maybe I'm overstating a little bit. I don't want to put words in the guy's mouth, but I was truly blown away by the thoroughness of his theory. And whether or not you're a Call of Duty headshot veteran or you only play Mario Kart with your cousins on the holidays, I think you are going to love this interview. It is going to give you a lot to think about. Certainly gave me a lot to think about. So please welcome my guest today. His name is T. Nguyen, and he's a professor of philosophy at the University of Utah and the author of a new book called Games, Agency as Art. Please welcome T. Nguyen.

T, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you for having me. So you're a philosopher, you write about games. You just had a thread about the new game that is sweeping the nation, a game called Wordle, and how Wordle works. I'd love to just talk about that real quick because it's topical. This is a show that's topical. It's on the money of whatever the hot button topic is.

So I'd love to just start there as a way to, you know, jump into it. Right. Yeah, it's actually kind of weird. This tweet is kind of blowing up and I'm getting like love, but also more aggressive pushback and anger about it than I've seen. And I write about things like conspiracy theory and the alt-right and the thing that's pissed the most people off is a threat on Wordle. Okay. People are really just, there's a lot of weird energy behind Wordle right now. It's a little tense out there.

When people are posting their bubbles and, well, go for it. Yeah, I mean, I think part of the reason is, and this is in the background picture of Wordle, is that what makes Wordle kind of good is it's a semi bit of connection. And it's like, for some people, it's like all they have. And for other people, it's like this thing that's flooding in and invading their social connection and their, their piss. So, okay. So here's, here's, here's a basic theory of Wordle, right? So I'm, I'm not really a word game person.

Cause I think a lot of word games have this like real unidimensionality of skill. Like the, the game that's least interesting to me is like Trivial Pursuit. Because there's only one thing, you either know it or you don't. And games that are more interesting may have more dimension of skill. So normally I'm not too into word games.

Wordle seems kind of interesting. Partially because when you play Wordle, the skill just isn't a word knowledge skill. It's like that crossed with the skill of probing the space of possibility with the letters. People that don't know Wordle... Yes, I was about to say, please

tell us how it works. When you put a word into Wordle, the game tells you... You're trying to guess a five-letter word and then the game tells you if your guess has trying to guess a five letter word. And then the game tells you if your guess has any of the letters right. And any of the letters, if one of those letters is in the word of the day, but not in the right place. And so when you're guessing words, you're not just guessing words, you're trying to pick words that might have high frequency

letters to like search the space. And so that's pretty cool. That's kind of cool. But I think the actual innovation of Wordle is if you play it, so you have five lines, and each of the lines has a graphical representation. So it's very graphically clean and nice, right? Yeah. The letters that you get in the right place are green. The letters that are in the word but in the wrong place are yellow.

And the others are blank. And so after your like three or six guesses, you have this little graph. And then Wordle lets you post this graph with the letters removed. So you don't spoil it for everybody. Because an important thing about Wordle is there's only one word of the day. Everyone's playing the same puzzle. It's like a crossword puzzle. But that graph is the most interesting part to me.

I think that's what's making Wordle powerful and exciting because when you go through Wordle, you have this little drama. And this is the thing that really interests me, like the drama of trying to figure out what the word is. You have good guesses. You have bad guesses. But when you look at someone's little graph, it's just this little graphical representation of their struggle, right? It's the shape of their struggle. You can see if they, like, did it amazingly and got it immediately or, like, got stuck. And I think the really special thing about Wordle is it opens this little portal to somebody else's like puzzling, dramatic journey.

And so you can kind of get in their head. And that I think is the magic. Like you look, you look at the graph and you say, Oh, they got it on the second try. Right. Like suddenly,

you know, and they, and they must've been amazed or they eked it out piece by piece. And at the last moment, they barely managed to figure out what the word is and you can tell that just by looking at their little graph yeah no it's like it's a little and since the puzzle is so similar i mean one of the interesting things about games is um because the restrictions are so specific and because the goals are so specific we can get

closer to the same headspace right like one of the things that's interesting to me is like one of the most intimate experiences you can have somebody with somebody is playing chess against them and i think that's because chess is much more artificially narrow than the rest of life like if you and i are doing different things next year who the fuck knows what am i allowed to say that who the fuck knows what you want and what I want? And like, why, but like, why we're there and what we're thinking about with chess. Like, we have exactly the same interest. We're winning. We have exactly the same possible actions.

And so, because the, okay, first technical term, because our agencies are so closely defined, like, it's easier for me to get into your head. And I think like Wordle is really flexing that because the puzzle is so sharp, the moves are so sharp, because the space of action is so limited, it's so much easier to like get a glimpse of what somebody else was thinking and doing and feeling. And then I've just never seen a game that has such a clear graph. You just glance at it and you're like, that's what that person felt like. Wow. Okay. So this is like five minutes, very detailed analysis on what I think a lot of people would describe as a pretty simple word game, a game that has like taken us by storm. Right. But you know, this is just a word puzzle.

You are, you know, you've written an entire book called Games Agency is Art, using that word agency. Let's just start here. Games are often something that's not taken very seriously as a field of study. Why are games, including Wordle, worth thinking about on such a deep level in your view? By the way, I'm an easy audience. I agree with you that they are, but I'd love to know when you're talking to a skeptical person looking down their nose at you at a dinner party, right? How do you, why, you know, what's, what's,

what's the value in this sort of inquiry? The funniest thing about the Wordle stuff, by the way, I mean, I tweeted it out and went a little bit viral is people are really excited by it, but there's a small crowd of people that are just offended. And they're trolling me. And what they're offended by is the fact that I'm paying any attention or energy at all to explaining Wordle, right? They think it's insane that anyone would devote intellectual energy for a second to explaining Wordle. And this is... Okay. So, for a second to explaining Wordle.

And this is, okay, so we live in a world, first pass, we live in a world shaped by games, right? Not just like games we play, but like things that are game-like, like Twitter, that have points. So this is, first of all, just really morally important to study because I think it's shaping our motivations and what we're doing. But I also think just like play is one of the most important things in human life. And the fact that we're unwilling

to spend energy thinking about play, understanding how it's important, what it's doing to us, how it's shaping to us. Like the thing that needs – I think sometimes I get up in audiences. I'm a philosopher. Philosophers don't normally talk about games. That's not one of the permitted topics. And I try. And people are like, what's wrong with you that you're so obsessed with games? And I want to say, like, what's wrong with you all that you're willing to spend, burn years of your life talking about like subtle definitions

and morality, but you think that talking about games and play for five minutes is somehow deeply wrong. Like I think the diagnosis should run the other direction. Why aren't you thinking about play? You get that much shit for it in academia. Yeah, it's really uh it's really i mean things things are a little different now like uh i was like i i want a bunch of like big prizes in in philosophy and so now people like have to

take me seriously okay but like for a really long time, it would be a talk about like the philosophy of games at a conference. And people would just like sit up, stand up and like walk out of the room. Literally. This is, you know, in comedy,

we have a word for this. This is called walking the room. Like, and, and comics will be proud of this. They'll be like, oh, I walked 10 people because they hated me because I offended them or whatever.

No, this is before I start talking. This is just knowing that the topic is games. Oh, wow. Okay, got it. They're not even willing to hear. I have some theories, but I mean, there's some specific theories, but I think one of my suspicions in the larger scale

is that part of the nature of play is that play is inherently unproductive. And if you have a world that's obsessed with optimized production, then you're going to think that play is unserious. So unless you, like, part of what I want to do in giving a theory of the value of games and play is, like wrest back some attention from like this hyper-production mindset. Yeah. Okay. Can we just dwell on that point for a second that like the fundamental nature of play is that it is unproductive. And also you said earlier, play is something that's very inherent to humanity and other species, by the way. Like when I look at my dog, right? One of the things we have most in common is that she plays and that I also play.

I'm like, oh, that's one of the reasons I can even feel, oh, I think my dog is like a conscious entity because we both are clearly experiencing the same emotion. Like it's harder for me to tell if my dog loves me because maybe she just wants me to feed her, right? But I know she likes to play because there's no other reason that she would like be doing that to that her, right? But I know she likes to play because there's no other reason that she would like be doing that to that toy, right?

It's just fun. And so that's something that I experienced as well. But yeah, I mean, it's even something I've been wrestling with in my 30s because I love games. I still play games, but I wrestle with their unproductiveness sometimes because I'm in a very productivity focused period in my life where i'm trying to like output as much as possible and like climb

a ladder and like do a lot and uh i wrestle with that about games but also the unproductiveness is like one of the things that makes them makes you feel free while you're doing them because it's like oh whatever happens here fundamentally doesn't matter. And that's nice. Like everything else in my life matters. It doesn't matter if I lose at the game. I mean, that's, so one of the early definitions of play that people have wrestled with is Huizinga's definition

of play and games. And he has his account, it's quite, it's a really famous account. Most people who think about this have know this really well. Where he thinks that what play is, is stepping into an alternate space that he calls a magic circle that has different meanings and different roles from ordinary life. I mean, part of this is, I mean, part of this is for, should be just really obvious and straightforward.

Like, if I block the pass, your pass in basketball, it'd be weird for you to get angry at me afterwards, right? Like, you don't understand what it is to play a game if you get mad at me for blocking your pass in basketball, right? Yeah. And there's just a lot. That's unsportsmanlike. We know that if somebody does that, like, I don't play basketball, but the person who, like, throws the controller because I beat them in Smash Brothers and they said, oh, you're being cheap. I'm like, no, I'm just playing. That person is like sort of breaking

the social compact of gameplay when they do that. Exactly. I mean, okay. Can I lay a like shit slab of philosophy down now? Please do. Okay, okay. So I think, so I've been trying to answer your questions without giving you the theory,

but I think I need to give you the theory now. Do it. I want to hear it. So, I was thinking about this a lot. And one of my mentors, a philosopher named Calvin Normor, handed me this book that like changed my life. And the book that changed my life is Bernard Suits' book, The Grasshopper, which is, I think in philosophy, as far as I know, for a long time, the only really good book about the philosophy of games. And he had this question. He was like, what is a game? Famously, some philosophers have thought that the notion of game is undefinable. And he thought, no, no,

I can define it. So, he has two versions, a short version and a long version. The short version is games are, to play a game is to take on unnecessary obstacles voluntarily to make possible the activity of struggling to overcome them. Whoa. Let me say that. You're voluntarily taking on obstacles you don't need to take on to create this activity of struggling to overcome them. Okay.

That relates to a lot of my experience of playing some games where I want to take on something difficult and then, ah, I did it. Yes. Okay. So here's this really profound analysis under the hood. profound analysis under the hood. And that analysis is like, what you're trying to aim it in the game doesn't even make sense without the obstacles. So, the philosopher's way of putting it is the goal is partially constituted by the constraints on getting there. So, let me explain. Look, so, some examples. You're running a marathon. His point is the point of the marathon is not just to be at that point at the finish line, because there are other more efficient ways to do that.

You could take a shortcut. You could take a taxi. Right? Call an Uber. Fucking, like, shoot someone and take their bicycle. Right? But we don't do that because it wouldn't count as having gotten to the finish line unless you did it under that constraint. Because it wouldn't count as having gotten to the finish line unless you did it under that constraint.

Similarly, the point of basketball is not to pass the ball through the hoop by itself because you could literally go to a court after hours the latter and just do that a million times. You could just get a hula hoop and roll a basketball through it if you want to pass a ball through a hoop. Exactly. basketball through it if you want to pass a ball through a hoop. Exactly. So, what it is to make a basket in the way that we care about is to get the ball through the hoop while obeying certain constraints. So, that means whatever the value is, because we know that the activity is basically valueless without those constraints and valuable with those constraints, we know that those constraints, those like voluntary inefficiencies are at the heart of the activity. Yeah. Do you consider, I just have a question. Do you consider a marathon? And I'm actually going to run the LA marathon later this year. So I'm like thinking about this and yeah, you're

right. There's like, and it certainly is. I'm taking on needless obstacles for the sake of achieving a goal. Like I'm like, I have no idea why I'm taking on needless obstacles for the sake of achieving a goal. Like I'm like, I have no idea why I'm doing it other than I kind of like listening to audio books. And, you know, I like and I don't know, people will say good job if I do it. But but do you consider running a marathon a game? Right. Like I know basketball is a game and a sport. Running, I would call a sport. Is it, but is it necessarily a game? Yeah.

So under the Soutian definition, under this analysis, it's definitely a game. And you can tell it's a game because there are constraints where if you broke them, it wouldn't count. Right. So here's, Soutian has this great example. He was like, okay, imagine two people climbing a mountain side by side. One of them is climbing the mountain because there's valuable herbs at the top of the mountain. The other is climbing the mountain because they're a mountain climber, right? Yeah.

So, a helicopter passes by. They say, hey, you want a lift? The person who just wants the herb says, give me a lift. I just want to be at the top of the mountain. They're not playing a game. Yeah. The person, the mountain climber is like, no. Right. Why would they possibly say no? Because the constraints of doing it with their own hands and feet are essential to the activity they're doing. It wouldn't be mountain climbing. So,

the essential difference is some kinds of activities that we do, the point of them is just to get the product. Those are like normal practical activities. Yeah. So we want to do it as efficiently as possible. And Suits' whole insight is that what games are are things where the inefficiency or the obstacle is central. So we don't want to skip around it.

We don't want the shortcut. But that inefficiency and obstacle also makes the activity pointless to some degree. Like you could maybe say, once I get to the top, I'm also going to get some herbs and then I'll have the herbs too, or something along those lines. Or maybe I'll get better, I'll get stronger too, but that is not the point of the activity. Oh, you want to say something really bad. This is the heart of everything. It's only pointless if you think the product is the purpose. But the product in a game is not the purpose.

So here's, I think the insight that Suits makes really available to us is that in games, there are two things. There's the purpose, and then there's the in-game goal. And sometimes they go together for some people, and sometimes they come apart. So let me give you an example. Please. A professional poker player, the purpose and goal are the same. The purpose is to make money.

The goal is to win and make money. When I play charades with my friends at a party, the purpose is to have fun and the goal is to communicate something, to win. But the goal isn't the purpose. And communicate something, to win. But the goal isn't the purpose. And here's how I know. If I lose, I don't say afterwards,

fuck, I wasted the evening. What a waste of fucking time. What I say is we had fun. Yeah. So sometimes, okay. So in my book, what I say is this reveals there are two major motivational states you can have towards play. One is achievement play.

Achievement play is playing a game for the value of winning. The other is striving play. Striving play is temporarily taking on an interest in winning for the sake of the struggle. It's because you value the struggle. And you don't really galactically care about winning. And two arguments that there's such a thing as driving play. Because some people think that... I think it's really obvious, but some people think this is really ridiculous.

So, one argument is... So, my spouse and I play a lot of games. And, you know uh a lot of the times are not evenly matched because she's right here looking at me um because because she's much she's a chemist and she's much better at like tetris like geometrical manipulation and i honestly am much better at anything that involves deceit and social manipulation. But sometimes we find a game where we're exactly matched, right? Yeah. And then it's great.

It's just delicious. We're having these great games. And then at night, like, I'll be insomniac and I'll find a strategy guide. Now, if I was an achievement player, there's one thing I should do. I should read the strategy guide and win. Yeah. player, there's one thing I should do. I should read the strategy guide and win. But I don't read the strategy guide because I know that that would wreck the joyous, even struggles. So, either I'm insane or I'm a striving player. And does that make sense? So, striving play makes sense to this. So, even though I'm trying to win in the short term,

So, striving play makes sense to this. So, even though I'm trying to win in the short term, in the long term, I'm not making the moves that would help me win. And the reason is because I don't actually care about winning. I just temporarily make myself care about winning for the sake of the struggle. Well, you're talking about like, it's the difference between an NBA player and someone who's just like, I don't know, wants to play basketball with their dad, let's say, right. Just for, just for fun. Like, oh, I do want to win sort of temporarily, but I don't have this like overall goal of becoming the best for all time, you know, of, at this game. Now, I mean, I think even in like amateur play, I think some people are achievement players and some people are striving players. Some people care about winning and you can tell, because if they didn't win, they're disappointed, period. And some people try to win and afterwards they're like,

if you could say, oh, that was a great game, did you win? No, I lost, but it was so interesting. That's a striving player. Yeah. No, and when I run this race, there'll be people who are like pissed off because they didn't beat their personal bests, even though they are not anywhere close to a world-class amateur, you know, runner, but they're still like, they've got some like goal. I'm like, Hey, I'll be happy if I'm faster

than I was before. Maybe I want to try that for a year. Right. And like, try to get a little bit faster, but I'm not like ultimately. And a lot of what you say also connects to when people play a game professionally and then they quit or they get burnt out. They say, oh, it wasn't fun anymore because they were no longer like the sort of the game part fell out like a professional poker player. Professional poker players are an interesting example

because they literally make their living at it. it is a source of literal income um not just they don't even just get paid because they did well doing well gets them paid um but if they cease to have any fun or enjoyment at all they will tend to stop because it becomes it becomes joyless which is not something that we say about other jobs necessarily. You don't say, ah, I stopped working at the grocery store because I, I don't know, it wasn't, it wasn't fun anymore. You know, you just keep doing it, but. Here, let me give you one more example. And then I want to get back to the thing. You're pointing to this really big thing. So let me say a small thing and I'll get to the big.

So the small thing is one more example, just because I think you'll like it because you're pointing to this really big thing. So let me say a small thing and I'll get to the big. So the small thing is one more example, just because I think you'll like it because you could be. So the other argument that striving play is real is consider the category of stupid games. And I should say, this is a term I invented. This is my term. So this is my contribution philosophy and analysis of stupid games.

So stupid game is a game where the fun part is failing, but you actually have to try to win to have fun. Like Twister. Or one of my favorite examples is a game called Bag on Your Head, which is a traditional social game. So you play it with like 20 people in a room and everyone puts a paper grocery bag on their head and then you try to take the bag off of other people's head um and when the bag is off taken off your head you lose so you have to go to the side so of course like the play is everyone's stumbling around um like trying to take the bags off each other head each other's head and the best part of the game is actually, at some point,

one person has a bag left on their head and they're the winner. And then everyone on the side of the room tries to stay quiet for as long as possible to see how long it takes for the winner to figure out they've won. So the fun part of this shit is always the failing, the stumbling, right? Yeah. But if you intend failure, it's not going to be funny, right? You have to try to win, even though what you want is failure. So for me, this reveals that we can do this funky thing where we have this larger scale purpose, and then we can make ourselves forget about it and just try to win. Because sometimes you just

have to try to win in order to have fun or relax or have the comedy you have to forget that what you wanted was to fail yeah wow there's a there's a lot of ways that all these properties can like vary to create different sorts of games in interesting ways but sorry now what's the bigger point that i was hinting at yeah the the bigger point that you were hinting at in your deep philosophical profound mind, is that... So, what you have to think about with a lot of these things is there's an activity, and there's a process and the output, right? The process is what you do along the way, and the output is what you get at the end. And we have this orientation that thinks all the value has to be in the output, but what games reveals a lot of the times, the real value for us is in the process,

in the doing, in the experience of doing, in like the act, like why would you play a game and take an inefficient way to an end unless there was something deeply valuable about the being stuck in the process? Yeah. And I think all over the place, we get like,

we get obsessed with the value of the product, and we don't think about and calories, you get to the top, but really the reason you want to hike is you want to be walking through nature, right? It is the process of doing it. So, I think one of the things... So here's an answer to your first question. Why do people not value games? Because in the background, they have a theory that the activities are only valuable for the products you get out of them. If on the other hand, you think that processes are valuable, doings are valuable, that it can be interesting to be in the process of solving a puzzle or struggling or balancing

your way up a rock line, then the value snaps into place. So the big theory of my book is that games are an art form and the art form they are is that the game designer is manipulating ends and rules in order to produce beautiful activity. Hmm. We should have opened with that because that's a wonderful, it's just such a wonderful summary

and we could spend so much time pulling that apart. And in fact, we will, but we're gonna take a short break. How about that? We're gonna take a short break. We'll be right back with Teen Win. Okay, we're back with Teen Win talking about games as art. I just want to ask philosophically, like you said, games are an art form. It's taken a very long time for, I feel like people, a lot of people now agree that games are an art form.

But it's taken a long time for us to get to that point. I think a lot of people still are not with the program. long time for us to get to that point. I think a lot of people still are not with the program. And so I'm wondering, like, why do you think it has taken so much time, especially in the world of philosophy? I mean, you said people walk out of the room for philosophy of games. When I was in college, I took a wonderful class about philosophy and art by a wonderful professor named Gary Hagberg, who, you know, we plumbed aesthetics and, you know, asked these questions of like, why do we put certain objects in museums? Right. And what is the value of art? We all know it's not the price.

It's not the productivity. It's the, it's our enjoyment of it. It's the experience of beauty. That sounds very similar to a lot of the things that you're saying about games, right? We could make a, make similar comparisons. Why, why have games not been taken seriously in the same way? Is it just the newness of the medium? I mean, the medium's not new. That's the funny thing, right?

Because as I was saying that, yeah, it's very old. Sorry, finish your thought. Yeah, no, it's not new at all. I mean, so, I have a diagnosis. Let's see, the diagnosis, it's a little bit technical.

Tell me if this is interesting or totally incoherent. So my theory is that... So one of the reasons I started working on games was I was looking at all these things where people were arguing that games were an art form, but they kept doing it by saying that games are an art form because they're like movies, because they tell stories, because the graphics are beautiful, because they look like a painting. And I was instantly suspicious because I would read all these things about

how games are an art form, and they would never talk about skill or decision or choice or action. They'd always talk about, oh, there's a story. And one of the interesting things I kept seeing was when I was playing games, people were like, oh, this game is really like art. It's got a story like a movie and graphics like a movie. And I'd play it and I'd be like, wow, there's almost no choices for me. And the reason is because they had to remove a lot of the choices from the game to make it more cinematic. So I was really worried that... So if you look at art history, a lot of the times when a new medium comes around, people like try to make it like art by making it like an old medium. Like in the early days of photography, people would like think that, well, photography is too clear to be art.

It has to look more like impressionist painting. So they'd like rub Vaseline on the lens and like blur things to make it look like paintings. And they didn't realize the potential in the medium. blur things to make it look like paintings and they didn't realize the potential in the medium so one of my thoughts is that what makes games different is the what the game designer has meant what they're manipulating they're not just like building a story or a world they're manipulating what your goals are and what your abilities are right they're telling you what you want and what you can do so one way to put it is the artistic medium of games is agency itself. They're manipulating the agency that you'll have in the game.

But the weird thing is, and I think this is why a lot of people miss what's good about games. I think a lot of the primary aesthetic experiences, the comedy, the thrill, the beauty, they don't show up in the game. They show up in the game they show up in the player right like like it's your mind that makes the brilliant move or like when i rock climb like it's me that becomes graceful yeah and art is so used to the artist making an object yeah and the good shit being in the object, the same for everyone to see. And I think the game designer is actually doing something very different. They're making an object and we interact with it.

And then our interaction and our actions are the things that are beautiful or thrilling or comic or interesting. But what's interesting is it's not like it's just us. It's that like when you take a computer game like portal like so many people that play portal have the same experience of like mental brilliance and epiphany yeah and it's because of the design of the puzzles the agency the so like the fact that i think a lot of the times we're so used to art where the goodness is centered in the physical object, the artist made like the static object, like the novel.

And we're not used to this, this, this other thing where the, the, the beauty and the richness is in the process of audience interaction, coming to terms with an interacting with the object. So I think they're just really different. Yeah. I'm used to that kind of thing. Wow. That is beautiful. And it really

connects to something that I experience when I play games that I have the most profound experiences with. Something that people will say about, I really love puzzle games, games where you have to figure things out. I love Portal. I love the game The Witness. I love the old Myst games, things like that. One of the many types of games I like, but people will say, oh, that game made me feel so smart. And I'm like, no, no, no. The best of those games make you be smart. They make you become smart. Not like, oh, I was smart enough to figure it out. I'm smarter than people who couldn't figure out. No, by playing the game, you gain some sort of intellectual knowledge or ability that you

did not have before and then you employ it to solve the game and you're like now i have a fucking like skill like i became a different person through the act of playing the game or another example of this is there's a incredible game uh crusader kings which is a simulation of oh yeah of like medieval you basically you're like a medieval king or queen or whatever, or Royal in like this extremely well-modeled version of Europe where there's other Dukes and they're plotting against you. And like, it's basically just a big simulation sandbox where like all these characters, Queen Catherine, the great is like converted into a series of numbers who you sort of have to grapple with. And the thing about that game is it doesn't

make you feel like you're a king. You literally just start acting like one, like you start going, Oh God, if I want to retain control of this civil, of this kingdom, I've got to assassinate my brother or he's going to take it away from me.

And you just find yourself making decisions the way a king would, because you're in a sort of simulation of the same situation they're in. As opposed to watching a movie where you're watching other people behave this way or like getting some, you yourself are changed in your actions, in your agency, as you put it. This is, okay, I have two totally different things to say.

Okay, one, the wildest part of the book basically says exactly what you just said. And it says something like, look, every game stores a different kind of agency. Chess stores this very like look-ahead-y movement. Like games like Civilization and Crusader Kings store this kind of like large-scale management optimization thing.

Like games like Diplomacy store this kind of like intensely manipulative right like so every medium stores a kind of information like painting store visuals like movies store like stories and visuals so i think games store different agencies and the body of games is actually a library of different agencies wow and so when you play them you end up exploring totally different ways of being a practical being you can be the wow you can be the manipulator you can be the reflex and so like i think everyone thinks that libraries expand, help us be more free by exposing us to more ideas.

And I think games as a body help us be more free by exposing us to like all these different forms of agency. I literally learned to do- Mind blowing. Thank you. No, that's, no, that's huge. No, I'm sorry. Keep going, keep going.

No, just like, i i am in some ways a bad philosopher like i was bad at like the rigorous logical stuff i'm like very romantic and like i literally learned that mindset through chess because because it's so narrow and specified it forces you into a different kind of agency um in a way that's really hard to do when things are more nebulous. Yeah. Yeah. I love a library of agencies, like a library of different ways of being or applying what force and efficacy to the world. Like, so, so I think about when I play and, and, you know, by the way, this doesn't have to all be video games games it just happens to be what I play a lot of but like um I have in my life experienced new ways of being through a game like when I like I started playing from software games the Dark Souls games Bloodborne

these sorts of games that a lot of people may know they're very like difficult uh there's a lot of difficult combat in those games which wasn't like a thing I thought I would be good at until I started trying and learning how to do it. And like, that's now a whole suite of ways of being that I have mastered. And like, I can, yeah, it's like a certain, it's a certain like way of being human that like, I understand something about that I didn't before. Whereas when I played Crusader Kings, I'm like, oh, I understand a little bit of something about politics, perhaps. Those are completely different, but I'm gaining access to something through playing them. Yeah.

So one of my favorite board games is Imperial. And Imperial is this incredibly cynical board game. So it's World War I one and it's a fight it looks like risk you know like germany and prussia and england like they're all fighting each other world war one but you don't play the countries you play mysterious investors trading stocks and bonds on the countries and you manipulate whatever countries you have you can control whatever countries that you happen to have the greatest investment in the moment. But the point isn't to win the war. The point is to make money. And so then you get access to all these weird ways of thinking that I would never like, so

you think things like, oh, I'm heavily invested in England. The other players heavily invested in Germany, they're about to attack me. Oh, I could just give them some cheap stock in England. And then they're co-invested now and they won't attack me. And so like, that's a mindset that I'm a philosopher. I don't think about shit like this. And so I have access to this. And then later on, like, and at some point I'm in a meeting where like the business school is trying to defund the philosophy department.

I'm like, I know what mental state I have access to that I can borrow. Yeah. Yeah. No, I can think of so many more examples like this now. Like there's a really great, you must know the game Papers, Please. For folks who don't know the game who are listening it's a game where you're a you're a bureaucracy like a drone in a bureaucracy who's like there are people coming through trying to immigrate into a very closed off kind of 1984 type country and they come up to you

and they say i would like to enter the country you have to look at their papers you only have like 15 seconds to look at their papers to see if they're valid or if they're forgeries and then let them in and sometimes they say this is a forgery, but please let me in. Like my daughter's in there. I need to get to her. And you need to decide whether to let them in or not. And if you let too many people in falsely, you could be fired and you lose the game. And there's someone breathing down your neck. And it's just the entire thing makes you feel that you are puts you in the role of that type of person so effectively

that the next time you are in a DMV line, you will think a little bit differently about that line because in this game, you have been in that situation. And I think there are things more important in this than just, oh, it can give you insight into how someone else lives or how someone else thinks. But that's an example of like a really powerful thing that games can do that

you can't get out of another art form i mean the philosopher martha neusbaum really famously says that like the point of like narratives especially like like fictional and non-fictional narratives is they contain emotional perspectives and you can like feel what it's like to be from in someone else's shoes in an emotionally rich way i think one of the best things about games is they embody like they encode different like agential perspectives and so you can know not exactly like i think your example is a great one you're the you you don't know what it's like to be in this person's like emotional space but you know what it's like to be in this kind of a gentle incentivized space dealing with these kinds of

problems yeah so all of these things give us more like i don't know empathy understanding it by by give and like ability by giving us awareness and familiarity with a broader kind of perspective but each medium is different right like painting encodes different visual perspectives novels encode different emotional perspectives yeah games encode agency perspectives wow that is look i mean i've heard a couple theories of games before and you know i read enough about games i play enough games i follow the discourse enough that like i've i've heard of the magic circle and stuff like that um but they they've always sort of felt a little bit incomplete as accounts of like what games do.

This feels really comprehensive to me as like a theory of how to understand games like on a really root level. Like it really is all coming together in this account. And I really, I mean, you're blowing my mind with this. Thank you. I mean, this is like eight years of my life that I thought no one would be interested in.

But one thing I can tell you is, so, I mean, this language is, is for me, but like, I think the idea, so what happened was I was reading a lot of academic and cultural critic works on games. I was like, this is not really about games. This is like people who have a theory of fiction applying it to games. Yeah. And then I would read like game designer diaries and like dev blogs and be like oh these people know what the fuck they're talking about but a lot of the times like they didn't have a history in the philosophy of art so i ended up like you know i have a lot of background in the philosophy of art and just reading obsessively like game designer

diaries and like reviews online and being like i'm trying to capture what they're saying so a lot so like for example one of the core ideas for me this agency is the medium thing i came from sir reiner knittia who's this amazing german board game designer like the mozart of german board games um has an interview where he's like the most important tool in my game designer toolbox is the point system because it tells the players what to care about and i was like she's fucking right that's exactly it and i've never seen that insight in any academic theory but it's all but all the game designers know it in their heart. So I feel like this is like, I feel like in some cases philosophers get to act as like translators.

And I'm like trying to use what I know from the philosophy of art to like give a clearer taxonomy language to insights that come from game designers and game players. Like I think there's all over that community, but just it hasn't been translated into theory that much yet yeah well i mean that's what good philosophy should do right it should be it should be like rooted in the thing that it's trying to understand it should like be somehow interface with the with the actual medium that it's that it's looking to describe

rather than being completely abstract because Because you can't actually, if you just try to do it all a priori, you won't actually understand what the thing is that you're trying to analyze. I have to say, there's also plenty of people in the game design space who don't seem to understand this, who make games that are more like movies than games. Interestingly, I think some of this is like

capture by this thing i i've been talking sometimes to game designers and i've also been co-teaching with a game design teacher uh game design class in summit university of utah which has one of the biggest and best game design programs in the world so i'm now getting to teach this stuff with a game designer to game design students cool and something i've heard in several cases is students and game designers have told me that in their hearts, they knew this, but they kept getting persuaded by things they read

that games should be more like movies to be serious art. And that having the language makes it easier for them to actually build games that are doing the game thing yeah the happiest thing i could possibly hear i'm just a fucking philosopher i don't like i can't do anything in the world but i'm thinking like i don't know midwife game designers to give them the language to think about their like that's my life yeah i'm done oh I think, and game audiences also know this and are open to it if it's brought to them. And you've seen over the last couple of decades,

game audiences get smarter and smarter about, you know, using, for instance, like it's much more common now for people to use language about how the game is designed to describe which games they like rather than, you know, like for the rise of the term like roguelike in video games as like a genre of game you know like game genres used to be like action game right as opposed to roguelike design for those who don't i won't go into it but

it it describes a very specific set of game mechanics that are a suite of game mechanics that that are used or not used that like give you a certain feeling and create a certain uh create a certain activity that some people enjoy um and that's like a pure design term that is about agency all those things you're talking about that is now the audience is using to say hey here's what i here's what i like or don't yeah it's funny when i started when i was um i used to think something like oh it says i would have loved to have been around in the 50s and 60s uh at the birth of jazz to be like a writer about jazz um i wish there was some new art form that could be like that and literally at the same time i was obsessively commenting

online at a website called board game geek like board games it took me years to be like oh no obviously the the most the art form of our time and yeah i cared about the most is games it's just yeah no this is the exact no i've used this exact metaphor all the time that that we are in as i change to a decade but i was like we're we're in like the 40s for film or the 50s for film where like, you know, the film got, you know, the 10s, the 20s, right? We're in like the, maybe we're out of the golden age, maybe we're more in the 70s. I don't know. We're, you know, we're moving through the stages of evolution's there's still so many fascinating things every every year especially in board game and tabletop role-playing game design i see new games that they do things i've never seen before where i'm like holy shit you did what design and i'm just like i'm just blown away yeah i've heard about, I've heard this about new trends in a friend who works in games media was just telling me that in tabletop role-playing games, that there's incredibly

innovative things happening. So interesting. I got to get into it. So for, for example, I want to get back. There's a second piece of theory I'm going to tell you about, but let me just give you an example. So, so Johnper's this really interesting indie rpg designer and so if you play dnd you're really used to um you're really used to like oh the point is to like uh kill monsters and make money right yeah and and have your level go up yeah and have your level go up so this game so he he's a he's a free game that you can play with a rule book is half a page it's online it's called lady blackbird and this is part of a movement game that you can play where the rule book is half a page. It's online. It's called Lady Blackbird. And this is part of a movement where,

okay, you get experience points by you have a set of character motivations and you get experience points for acting according to your motivations. And you get double experience points in this game for acting according to your motivations in a way that gets you and your team into trouble. And then you get, so you have a pool of various like these the stamina point pool and you can use to get bonuses and you get your stamina points back by having a refreshment scene

which is a scene where you and another player character have a conversation where you reveal shared backstory so the game incentives are to generate to generate difficult situations and to generate backstory and then the best rule is you can have your refreshment scene as a flashback so what happens of course is like shit's going wild everything's going crazy everyone's tired and then two characters the players realize they need more stamina points. So their characters lock eyes and have a flashback. And then the players have to make up the story of how they met and fell in love or whatever

in order to get their stamina points back. And so the game just constantly, the incentive structure is just constantly spitting up rich background narrative as part of the mechanics. Yeah. That's, that's incredible. That's beautiful. And that, and that reminds me of like the, the moments in games that I've had the most profound, the most profound experience I feel that I have in a game is when the game

mechanic makes me do something new and amazing that is also related to the overall theme of the game, that is related to the thing that the game designer was trying to get across. Makes me act like the person I'm embodying in the game or something like that. Yeah, exactly. I mean, there's so much stuff about this in this world, about trying to find mechanics that motivate the kind of interesting action you wanted. So a lot of these players, a lot of the designers here ended up criticizing D&D.

They were like, look, we want these great action epics, but D&D, it just tells us to go into rooms and kill things and loot them over and over again. Yeah. Like, what's interesting about it as a narrative so here's another device john harper same person as i was just same designer as i was just talking about for lady blackbird has a later game called blades in the dark which is this like it's a fantasy world there are demons there are wizards you're like cons trying to rob them and the way the game works is you decide you're going to break in. You decide you're going to break into like some wizard's vault. And then the game skips you forward a month and your

characters are planned for a month, but you, the players haven't. And you're mid break-in. And what happens is you're given 10 stamina points. And as you were into trouble, you use the stamina points to have flashbacks where you play out the prep you did in the last month for this very moment. And that, like, again, that's exactly what you're talking about. That mechanic gets you to do this incredibly – it's like it just generates these, like, Ocean's Eleven-y moments over and over again. Wow. And you're, like, constantly in this creative space of thinking, like, what could my weak, physically weak character have done to prepare for this? Well, so, man, and it's one of the cool things, by the way, is how these principles crop up in video games, board games, tabletop role playing games.

We could talk about how they're found in sports or other things as well. But this is really like a like a unifying theory of of what games are let's talk about though uh you know how these ideas become perverted right not pervert not sexually perverted but perverted in a like yeah let's talk about like these concepts of gamification um you said earlier Twitter is like a game. This is like an idea that's really sort of has a lot of currency right now. It seems to be infecting a lot of parts of non-game parts of

society. Is that good or bad? So actually, I have an opportunity now. I wanted to say something about game aesthetics before and it got lost, but I think I should say it now because it's going to help answer this question. Sure. You were talking before about how and it got lost, but I think I should say it now because it's going to help answer this question. Sure. So, okay.

You were talking before about how, like, it's so amazing in a game that you actually get to do things, that you get, like, you have these actions to succeed, that you become skillful. I think one of the interesting things about games is they can actually engineer a practical situation that fits you.

So in ordinary life, things are terrible. There are things to do that are either incredibly boring and easy or incredibly overwhelming and impossible and exhausting. But games can engineer the goal and your abilities to fit each other so you just have just the right amount of ability to barely do the thing. Yes. Because games are like controlled practical environments and because the game designer can specify exactly what you want, they can create, so I call it like practical harmony,

this feeling of just fitting. Yes. And this is why, to the extent that I worry about games, a waste of time for people when they could be doing something more productive. It's, I think about times in my life where the real things I needed to do in life were very, very difficult.

And through a game, I could get a sense of accomplishment. Right. Um, that I, if my, my worry would be that it replaces a sense of accomplishment in the real world.

Now there's a flip side of that, which is maybe it teaches me how to get that sense of accomplishment and I can take that into the real world. But that is a, that is something I think about vis-a-vis games sometimes. Yeah, no, absolutely. So the, so the thing to think is not games are awesome because of this agency thing. It's that we should understand that agency is where games are powerful and all their goodnesses and all their dangers are going to radiate from that. Right.

And the goodnesses are, Oh my God, you can have these beautiful experiences of action. And the dangers I think are games can be used to pacify people by giving them a sense of accomplishment when they can't get it anywhere else. That's part of the danger. Yeah. So,

so the, the, the important thing for me here is that games give you this like clarity so i want to call it like value clarity and like practical clarity right for normal life is really exhausting and really confusing and there are billion things you want to do and you don't know what to care about because and how to balance them but games just tell you it it's simple. Get points. Points in this game are sheep and gold.

Do it. Yeah. Exactly what it is. You know exactly how to get there. And I mean, I think they're a kind of shelter from like the exhausting overload of ordinary life. Yes. And it's beautiful.

Okay. Gamification. So most people think if games are good, gamification is great. Gamification is adding game-like elements to real world situations. Here's the key idea. For game, what makes games good

is that they've, among other things, is they've incredibly clearly specified simple goals. That's okay in real games because they're temporary and what we're doing is disconnected from the real world. Gamify Twitter. So what Twitter does is it takes communication, which is a rich

multivariate plural activity that should have a billion subtle values that we're all pursuing and it imposes on it a point structure connected to a very simple thing. Likes and retweets. So if Twitter increases, if the point system is motivating you, then it's motivating you and it's giving you the pleasure of value clarity and the pleasure of success. And in exchange, all you have to do is radically simplify your

values for communication and peg them to a value system engineered by a corporation. pleasure of success. And in exchange, all you have to do is radically simplify your values for communication and peg them to a value system engineered by a corporation. That's the trade. Right. Right. It similarly focuses, hyper focuses you on a very singular part of this very complex thing. And so you end up optimizing for that one thing. And I think a real danger of that, cause Hey, maybe if you do that to a real thing, maybe you optimize for something good.

Maybe optimize for something bad. I think we'd probably both argue in Twitter's case, it's something bad. But the other problem is that, as I said at the beginning, the good thing about games is that they don't matter. It doesn't matter if you win or lose. It was, you're inside win or lose. It was,

you're inside the magic circle. It's like a special world where, you know, like I'm happy if the Yankees won, I'm unhappy if the, well, I'm not a Yankees fan, but if I were, I'm happy if the Yankees won, I'm unhappy if they lost, but it doesn't fundamentally affect my life. That's the point. Twitter, sorry, communication does matter for the real world. Like when we are on Twitter, we are speaking to real people about real matters. It's not fake. We actually are affecting the world around us. Same thing for other forms of gamification. And that can be a real danger.

Yeah. I mean, it's not just, I mean, I think students gamify on grades, right? Researchers gamify on citation rates. People gamify on grades, right? Researchers gamify on citation rates. People gamify on money. And I think in each of these cases, I mean, it's not, you can say that some of the metrics are bad, but even if we try the best we can to get a good metric, part of what makes it a metric is it standardized right and and the same for everyone the twitter is a game when its point is the same point system for everyone yeah but what we care about is the same so like it's kind of like forcing us into a pre-fabricated system. So the, I mean, the, I'm writing, I'm working on a second book right now. And one of the basic ideas is that what's going on right

here, I want to call value capture, which is when you have rich values and then the system gives you these simple little values and you take them on and what you're actually doing is outsourcing your values to a corporation. Wow, that's bad. And this is, well, and this is cropping up so many places, you know, you've got Fitbits, you've got, I mean, even to a certain extent, you know, there's people love the website Letterboxd, but like there are metrics there, right?

There's a year end summary of who you listen to on Spotify. Those are not, I don't know which of those, like I would call gamification, which I won't, but this sort of like metric, metrification of things. And this is like, I mean, people talk about, oh, here's a great example. Amazon literally, my understanding is, for pickers in their warehouses,

they have literally gamified that, where like it's literally on a little iPad, like a fucking game of asteroids or something that represents how well they're doing at picking items off the shelves. And that, that seems somehow nefarious that, that we don't really, I don't know if we like that.

This is, since I finished the games book three years ago, all of my research has been on metrification and quantification of value systems. So we could talk a lot about that. There's a lot that I'm worried about. But I want to say one more thing about the Twitter gamification thing. Please. That's going to relate to the exciting idea before.

the exciting idea before um so games are good for freedom in my argument if you play lots of different ones and you explore a space of them yeah they're not going to be good if you're stuck in one game forever uh-huh and i think if you're thinking about twitter fitbit what these are pervasive games. They're presenting us one value system over and over again. So here's an analogy from the book. So some people worry that, a worry people keep giving me when I give them this argument about the library of agencies and games, is that it seems really weird to them that you could become more free by adopting these clear, simple rule systems. And I actually have a response that I've stolen from a yoga teacher who's sad.

I'm sad I can't remember her name anymore. What she used to say is, you have to follow my directions exactly because normally we move out of habit. We just do the same movements over and over again. And the point of my precise directions is to force you into a new posture that you've never felt before. You get more flexible if you follow the rules and through a different set of poses. Does that make sense? The specificity of yoga poses and moving through a different set of poses. Does that make sense? Like the specificity of yoga poses and moving through a cycle of them is what pushes you out of your normal habits. So what I want to say

is that games are yoga for your soul, right? They're pushing you into different shapes of agency, different postures of agency, right? And you're cycling through lots of them and you're becoming more flexible. Twitter is telling you to hold one yoga pose forever. Yeah. Yeah. And a yoga

pose that's making someone else money. They want you in that pose because they can earn money off of it if you hold that pose as long as you possibly can. Yes. One last trend that's a wonderful metaphor and i think uh makes me want to fucking quit twitter which i have tried and failed to do dozens of times um i'm on tiktok now even worse um i uh the last thing i want to talk about games is there's this new thing there's

this new i think very ominous phrase that's being tossed around um uh play to earn that's coming out of the crypto space and you know the idea that we're gonna play games on the blockchain um that there's there's a couple of very prototypical games that work this way where basically through playing them you like earn cryptocurrency um and the idea is that people will play these games in order to start earning money off of them there's even all these examples of you know and these examples are written by people who are like very deep in this economy are clearly promoting it so it's hard to tell how true they are but like examples of like people in the philippines and places like that who are earning money playing these games um and people who actually play games a lot as a hobby seem to hate this kind of,

like it's, because it, it seems to like, I don't know, rob games of like an essential part of their purpose, which is to have fun. And I wonder if you have any thoughts on that. In some senses, what makes games really special is that they don't matter that's what lets us dip in and out of them right we get to choose right part of part of the pleasure of a game is that you're not trapped in it you don't have to play this game forever unlike maybe your job or whatever right you can play and be like i don't like that fuck that game that wasn't fun and then you can pick a different one and so you have freedom over the choice of activities. But if someone is attaching a reward to a particular activity,

now you're stuck there. You're not there because the activity is fun or pleasurable or rich. You're there because the activity will make you money. One of the special things about games is a lot of the times the world forces a particular activity on us. Like you have to do this fucking job. You have to do this. Like you have to go, like you have to dig your car out of the snow because that's the way the world is. And games are the one place where we're free to choose exactly the activity we want for ourselves

until someone says, if you do this activity, I will give you money. Now you're trapped again. Yeah. Because, well, you could do it a little bit and then go do something else. But if you're the type of person that, OK, well, this is the way I have to earn money. So now I'm going to do this eight hours a day. Now you're stuck unless you do something else. And it ends up being like, you know, Uber drivers. Well, there's, you know, yeah, you've got a friend who like Uber drives once a week and makes 20 bucks. But for the people who do it full time, they're not like feeling a lot of freedom, right?

I guess let me end on this question. Is it, because I've heard people debate this, is a fundamental feature of games that they are fun? Is fun one of the, you know, I mean, like we know that there is art that doesn't have to be beautiful, right? Is fun like that for games or is fun an essential quality?

I don't think games have to be fun. And I think one of the things that art history teaches us is that a lot of the times different arts, they have a rich capacity. And some of those capacities are for like straightforward, comforting pleasure. And for others have like, they have really rich, expressive capacities, right? Like not all books are fun. Some books, it's important to go through them because you understand something about the world yeah i think and i think games are the same like there are experience as i play

games more especially various odd indie games a lot of them are trying to transmit experiences that aren't fun and one of the one of the important things about thinking of games as an art form is thinking is that helps free it up from the demand of really simple quick straightforward pleasure right yeah so there i mean i remember like i don't know so there's this game i love called the quiet year it's another it's in this indie tabletop role-playing space and the quiet year uh you all play kind of the forces watching over challenging and protecting a village surviving after the apocalypse. And so the way the game proceeds, you make a map.

And whenever it's your turn, you tell an event and you draw it into the map. And a key part of the game is you're not allowed to consult the other player. and you draw it into the map. And a key part of the game is you're not allowed to consult the other player. Even though you're collectively building this village, you're not allowed to consult the other players during most actions about what you should do. There's actually an action you can take

where you can ask a question and everyone else weighs in once, but you're not allowed to discuss, you're not allowed to come to a consensus. And the key part of the game is that when someone takes an action and you felt not heard, you take something called the contempt token

and you put it in front of you. called the contempt token and you put in front of you and the contempt token just stands there it doesn't do anything else so you just pile up these contempt tokens and the game is trying to simulate among other things just to capture the experience of how difficult it is to communicate how like grudges linger and this isn't i wouldn't call this game fun i would call this game sad, moving, moody, evocative, helping me understand the difficulties in communities, sorrowful, memorable. But this game makes people fucking cry.

Yeah. Man, there's... Hearing you talk about games, it's almost impossible to feel, to understand why games have been neglected as a field of philosophical inquiry for so long. Because they're so clearly capable of doing so many different things in such a profound way that no other medium is. It's pretty astonishing. You're really justifying why I've spent so much of my life playing these fucking things.

Awesome. Well, the book is, tell us again the name of the book. Where can people get it? Where can people find all your work? Games Agency is Art is the name of the book. You can get it, I mean, in all of your normal places.

I think it is, Oxford University Press has it when other places sell out of it. A lot of my stuff is available online. I try to put free versions of everything online. So my website is objectionable.net. And there, so if you're interested in some of the stuff I was talking about, I have a paper called How Twitter Gamifies Communication,

which is about that stuff we were talking about. I have a paper called The Arts of Action, which is about all the things, not just games, where it's about the process and we miss how lovely the process is. And all that stuff, it's linked from my website. There are free versions you can find. You can read any of it.

Incredible. And if you want to pick up a copy of the book, of course you can get it at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books. T, thank you so much for being on the show. This was an incredible conversation. And we'll have to have you back to talk about metrification once you have completed that work. Awesome.

Thank you so much. Well, thank you once again to T. Nguyen for coming on the show. Once again, if you want to pick up his book, Games, Agency is Art, you can find it at factuallypod.com slash books. That's factuallypod.com slash books. And hey, if you want to support the show, don't forget, check us out at patreon.com slash adamconover. That's patreon.com slash adamconover to get bonus episodes, join us for book club live streams, and join our community. I want to thank our producers, Sam Roudman and Chelsea Jacobson, our engineer Ryan Connor, and our WK4R theme song, the fine folks at Falcon Northwest, for building me the incredible custom gaming PC that I'm recording this very episode for you on. You can find me online at adamconover.net or at

adamconover, wherever you get your social media. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next time on Factually. That was a HeadGum Podcast.