Agency as Art

• In ordinary practical life, we usually take the means for the sake of the ends. But in games, we can take up an end for the sake of the means. Playing games can be a motivational inversion of ordinary life.
• Games, then, are a unique social technology. They are a method for inscribing forms of agency into artifactual vessels: for recording them, preserving them, and passing them around. And we possess a special ability: we can be fluid with our agency; we can submerge ourselves in alternate agencies designed by another. In other words, we can use games to communicate forms of agency.
• Games turn out to be part of the human practices of inscription. Painting lets us record sights, music lets us record sounds, stories let us record narratives, and games let us record agencies.
• games let us experience forms of agency we might not have discovered on our own
• Notice that Hurka’s conclusion arises precisely because he thinks games are valuable in virtue of something rather commonplace—difficulty—rather than in virtue of something unique. Thus, the value of games is easily superseded by the value of other, equally difficult but more practical activities.
• All these approaches miss much of what’s special about games. Games, I will argue, are a distinctive art form
• In ordinary life, the form of our struggle is usually forced on us by an indifferent and arbitrary world. In games, on the other hand, the form of our practical engagement is intentionally and creatively configured by the game’s designers. In ordinary life, we have to desperately fit ourselves to the practical demands of the world. In games, we can engineer the world of the game, and the agency we will occupy, to fit us and our desires. Struggles in games can be carefully shaped in order to be interesting, fun, or even beautiful for the struggler
• When we play games, we take on temporary agencies—temporary sets of abilities and constraints, along with temporary ends. We have a significant capacity for agential fluidity, and games make full use of that capacity.
• Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. (Suits [1978] 2014, 43
• Suits contrasts game playing with what he calls “technical activity.” In technical activity, there is some end that we value, and we pursue it because of the value of that end. Since that end is genuinely valuable, we try to pursue it as efficiently as we can. But in games, we don’t take the most efficient route to our in-game ends. In game playing, we try to achieve some specified end under certain specified inefficiencies. The end is largely valuable only when achieved inside those constraints.
• you might be pursuing the win for the sake of the struggle. Let’s call that striving play. In striving play, goal and purpose are skew. An achievement player plays to win. A striving player acquires, temporarily, an interest in winning for the sake of the struggle. Thus, striving play involves a motivational inversion from ordinary life.
• In ordinary practical life, we pursue the means for the sake of the ends. But in striving play, we pursue the ends for the sake of the means. We take up a goal for the sake of the activity of struggling for it.
• This motivational inversion is, in my eyes, the most interesting possibility raised by the Suitsian analysis.
• Take another paradigmatically aesthetic property: harmony. When chess players discover a move that elegantly escapes a trap, the harmony of the move—the lovely fit between the challenge and the solution—is available both to themselves and to outsiders. But something more is available especially to players: a special experience of harmony between their abilities and the challenges of the world. When your abilities are pushed to their maximum, when your mind or body is just barely able to do what’s required, when your abilities are just barely enough to cope with the situation at hand—that is an experience of harmony available primarily to the players themselves. It is a harmony between self and challenge, between the practical self and the obstacles of its world. It is a harmony of a practical fit between your whole self and the world.
• I value philosophy because I value truth, but I also savor the feel of that beautiful moment of epiphany, when I finally find that argument that I was groping for. Games can provide consciously sculpted versions of those everyday experiences. There is a natural aesthetic pleasure to working through a difficult math proof; chess seems designed, at least in part, to concentrate and refine that pleasure for its own sake. In ordinary practical life, we catch momentary glimpses, when we are lucky, of harmony between our abilities and our tasks. But often, there is no such harmony. Our abilities fall far short of the tasks; or, the tasks are horribly dull.
• The common artistic medium of aesthetic striving games—the technical resources by which the game designer sculpts practical experience—are the goals, the rules, and the environment that these various parts animate into a system of constraints. The game designer crafts for players a very particular form of struggle, and does so by crafting both a temporary practical agency for us to inhabit and a practical environment for us to struggle against. In other words, the medium of the game designer is agency. If you want a slogan, try this one: games are the art of agency.
• Games turn out to be a way of writing down forms of agency, of inscribing them in an artifact. Games are one of our techniques for inscribing and recording bits of human experience. We have developed methods for recording stories: novels, poetry, film, and other kinds of narrative. We have developed methods for capturing sights: drawing, painting, photography, and film. We have developed methods for capturing sounds: written music, recording technologies, and wooden duck calls
• My suggestion here is more than the familiar old saw that games teach us skills and develop our abilities. My claim is that games can teach us the agential mindsets behind those skills—the pairings of a particular kind of interest with a focus on a particular set of abilities. And the practice of striving play itself teaches us how to be flexible with our agency—how to pick up and set aside interests for a moment. That flexibility is of great use outside of game. We use our agential flexibility when we switch between our various roles, such as parent, professional, and friend, and adopt the different frames of mind that go with such roles.