Games: Agency As Art

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 Thus, the value of games is easily superseded by the value of other, equally difficult but more practical activities.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.

We do not fit this world comfortably. The obstacles in our path are often intractable, exhausting, or miserable. Games can be an existential balm for our practical unease with the world. In games, the problems can be right-sized for our capacities; our in-game selves can be right-sized for the problems; and the arrangement of self and world can make solving the problems pleasurable, satisfying, interesting, and beautiful.

Outside of games, much of the pain and difficulty of social life with others arises from the dizzying plurality of values. Each of us cares about different things; trying to mesh the plurality of disparate values into livable communities is incredibly difficult.

games, each person is a simplified agent. And in most cases, competing agents are pursuing the same goal. When we are playing tennis, I do not have to cope with subtle differences between your and my view of the good. You and I are after exactly the same thing: points and victory. It is not that we are cooperating, exactly—but we are motivationally coherent to one another.

When games work, they can sometimes present us with the world as we wish it could be. The worlds of games are harmonious and interesting worlds, where even our worst impulses are transformed into the pleasure of others. In ordinary life, we must build practical activities and relationships from gears that were never made to fit. But in games, we can machine all the gears to fit from the start.

And this, I suspect, is both the great promise and the great threat of games. Games can offer us a clarifying balm against the vast, complicated, ever-shifting social world of pluralistic values, and an existential balm against our internal sense that our values are slippery and unclear. In games, values are clear, well-delineated, and typically uniform among all agents. But this also creates a significant moral danger—not just from graphically violent games, but from all games. This is the danger of exporting back to the world a false expectation: that values should be clear, well-delineated, and uniform in all circumstances. Games threaten us with a fantasy of moral clarity.

We can tailor our struggles in games precisely because our game ends are disposable. But when we try to make the rest of life like a game, we will need to adapt our enduring ends to make the struggle more pleasurable and satisfying. When we do that—when we instrumentalize our enduring ends as if our lives are a game—we court disaster. When we gamify our ordinary lives, we will be tempted to shift and simplify our ends for the sake of the struggle—but then we are no longer be aiming at the same target. Games can be safely tailored precisely because they are games.

I. Games and Agency

We take on ends for the sake of the means they force us through. And this picture of the inverted motivational state will help to show why gaming activity isn’t a waste of time.

In games, we justify our goals by showing what kind of activity they will inspire. The justification of game goals has a backward-looking, rather than forward-looking, direction. And those backward-looking explanations can point us to valuable aesthetic qualities. Those who condemn striving play as useless or arbitrary crucially misunderstand its inverted value structure.

What makes striving play possible is the existence of disposable ends. A disposable end is an end that is not directly attached to one’s other enduring ends. It is an end that one takes up voluntarily and that one can rid oneself of without doing significant damage to one’s enduring value system or core practical identity.

The paradigmatic experience of game playing isn’t one of being at some sort of intellectual remove; it is one of becoming utterly absorbed in trying hard, of trying to get something you really want. In fact, a certain kind of person doesn’t seem to be able to care about winning in any form at all; such a person typically complains that games are silly and that points are just arbitrary. Such a person can never really become absorbed in game play at all. For games to provide any sort of engagement, for their challenges to have any grip on us, it must be that we can come to care, in some way, about winning

Achievement players care about winning all the way down. But striving players need only to temporarily acquire an interest in winning, in order to sustain the experience of engagement. That doesn’t require a thoroughgoing commitment to the value of winning; it only requires that we acquire an interest in winning for the course of the game. And this, I suspect, is the actual mode of play for many game players

When I have described striving play in talks, some audiences have responded with overt skepticism. What is the point of playing, they say, if not winning? [Kris:I find this surprising and realize that many people don't think of games as I do]

Academics—especially philosophers—tend to devote their theoretical energies to the serious side of human, and tend to ignore the humorous, the playful, and the ridiculous. There is, for example, a great inequity between the rather great amount of philosophy that has been written on tragedy, and the paltry bit of work on comedy. This suggests an explanation for the philosophy of sports’ focus on elite sports. Elite sports are valuable in the way that many other serious activities are valuable, and so are more amenable to theorizing with pre-established conceptual tools. The discussion in the philosophy of sports has, for this reason, largely been couched in terms of such familiar values as difficulty, achievement, winning, skill development, and the production and display of personal excellence. The philosophical work on games has largely ignored stupid games, silly games, and funny games. This is, I suggest, because such games are exemplars of the motivationally unfamiliar category of striving games, and do not fit well with our standard accounts of justification and value.

it is only funny as a failure, and it is only a failure if I was trying to win. And the best way to make sense of this strange motivational state is as a form of striving play. The interest in winning is not an enduring one, but one confined to a particular temporary agency, adopted for experiential motives.

In order for a player to become fully absorbed in play, the disposable ends must occupy a central place in their consciousness. Thus, disposable ends are genuine ends in the following ways: they ground reasoning; they guide action; and for a period of time, they occupy the forefront of the agent’s mental awareness.

In Millgram’s view, boredom and interest are instrumentally useful—they are guides for the gradual transformation of oneself into something better.

Sometimes, as Millgram suggests, we use boredom and interest as a guide to changing our enduring self. But sometimes we play around with a toy version of our self for the sake of avoiding boredom and having interesting experiences.

paradox of hedonism—that one cannot achieve pleasure by pursuing it directly, but only by devoting oneself to some other end (Sidgwick 1907, 136–137). For example, the pleasures of being a devoted parent aren’t available to the selfish hedonist; it is only available to parents who are genuinely and wholeheartedly devoted to their child. Moral theories with this quality have been called “self-effacing” (Pettigrove 2011, 192–193).1 Loosely following Sidgwick’s formulation, let’s call something a self-effacing end if it is an end that cannot be achieved through direct pursuit, but only through pursuit of some other end.

yoga has self-effacing ends. You can’t achieve relaxation by pursuing it directly. Instead, you must set your mind to little tasks of balance and posture, from which relaxation will un-self-consciously arise. Similarly, you cannot achieve a calm and blank state of mind by directly aiming at it. (Have you ever tried?) Such a state usually arises out of the pursuit of some other goal, like getting to the end of a hike or counting your breath for ten minutes.

can’t actually clear my head just by directly willing myself to clear my head. What I need to do is set my mind to some other task, like hiking to the top of a mountain. And I need to exclude from my awareness, for a little while, the reasons and considerations that brought me to this activity. Suppose that I am a ball of stress because of my work and family responsibilities. Those responsibilities are, in fact, the very reason that I’m trying to de-stress in the first place. I need to fix my head in order to get back to work and do what needs to get done. But in order to de-stress, I must put all those considerations out of mind.

Submersion is also crucial for getting many of the key experiences of games. What we want out of many games is an experience of practical absorption in a task. Take one of the characteristically desirable experiences of game play: flow-state. To achieve flow-state, you cannot take flow-state as your constant and conscious end; the very nature of flow-state is of being un-self-consciously absorbed in the details of the task. We want to be absorbed in the practical moment, and not worried about whether we are in fact absorbed in the practical moment

We have, then, the capacity to submerge ourselves in a temporary agency, and thereby create layers of motivational states. In striving play, the inner layer involves taking on motivations to succeed in the game’s terms—to win, and to win by achieving whatever the game specifies as the goals. The outer layer involves those motivations which brought us to play the game in the first place—an interest in aesthetics, fun, fitness, or whatever. These motivations of the inner layer are justified by the motivations of the outer layer, but that justification isn’t phenomenally active during the game. We do not hold both layers in the forefront of our consciousness. We hide our larger reasons from ourselves for a time, submerging ourselves in the inner layer.

all scoring systems promote a banality of value—they present the purposes of life as oversimplified. But that is precisely the point of games! One of the greatest pleasures games offer is a certain existential balm—a momentary shelter from the existential complexities of ordinary life.

In a game, for once in my life, I know exactly what it is that I’m supposed to be doing. This helps promote the single-mindedness that is so crucial to many of the desirable aesthetic experiences involved in striving.

something of a contradiction lies at the heart of game playing, says Juul. We both value and disclaim valuing game achievements. And we shouldn’t be so anxious to get out of that contradiction. If we resolved game playing into a wholly normal context, then the failures would hurt too much. If we resolved game playing into a wholly deflated context, then the successes wouldn’t matter, and we wouldn’t have that lovely sense of triumphing over painful failure. So we must suspend ourselves between these two states, pivoting as needed—caring about the achievement when we pull it off, and pretending to ourselves that it doesn’t matter when we fail

It has sometimes been thought that artworks put a frame around a little bit of the world, and direct the viewer to pay special attention to it. If Spyfall is a work, then it is perhaps best described as putting a frame around the practice of bullshit and bullshit detection

games permit us to record agencies and pass them around. Since we can communicate forms of agency, we can help each other in the project of developing our agency and autonomy. We can help each other to experience modes of agency, alone, we might never have found on our own. The point of communication, after all, is to gain access to states of mind that an individual might not have thought of independently.

when we are more familiar with different agential modes, we will have a wider range of options for how we will conduct ourselves in practical situations. Games can help build our inventory of ways of being practical.

Chandra Sripada suggests that an agent’s freedom is dependent on the size of their option set. Importantly, Sripada notes, those options are constructed. People, says Sripada, have more freedom than animals, precisely because they have a wider range of constructible options

Playing Chess made the short-term interests that were conducive to analytic philosophy more psychologically available to me. I could then deploy them at the appropriate time, like during graduate seminars. Why does this work? What matters here is that interest come in stages. I have, in general, an interest in finding the philosophical truth. But in order to do that, it helps to have the appropriate agential mode. This can involve any number of mental postures: a certain type of focus, a style of reasoning, some degree of rigid self-control or relaxed fluidity. Perhaps most importantly, taking on an agential mode can transform a merely instrumental interest into a direct interest, for a time. To be a philosopher, it helps enormously to have a direct interest in getting all your fussy little distinctions right. Certainly, my interest in getting at the philosophical truth generates instrumental reasons for me to get all my distinctions right. But I will be even better at getting at the truth if I also have a direct interest in finding those distinctions—if I take immediate pleasure in finding a good distinction; if I love distinctions for their own sake.

the best athletes and the best musicians are the people who love to practice for its own sake.

I had little interest in practicing my scales and drilling technique. I went through those dreary exercises only as a means to an end. That kind of purely instrumental justification generates a relatively faint form of motivation. It would have been far better for my development as a musician if, knowing that my purpose was to play great music, I could have temporarily adopted a direct interest in performing repetitive technique drills. I couldn’t, so, unsurprisingly, I washed out. [Kris: reminds me of Seinfeld realizing the brutality of writing was the job]

Strictly instrumental means have a weaker grip on our motivational psychology. An agent who eats and has sex only as a means to the end of survival wouldn’t actually survive that well. Agents who love eating and sex for their own sakes will actually have a better shot at surviving, because such agents will seek out food and sex with more gusto. Better to be an agent with a rich hierarchy of related ends, and to take a direct interest, not only in survival, but also in the various means for survival

The appropriate agential mode for having a casual chat with my friends is very different—it is one that seeks out opportunities for emotional connections, for ways to support and encourage others. It cares more about intimacy than precision. I need, as it were, to put on a different agential face when I transition from doing philosophy to hanging out with friends. The capacities that render me a decent analytic philosopher would make me, in the social context, something of a jerk.

Playing a variety of games gives me a broader menu of agential modes to choose from. They can also familiarize me with how those modes work in a variety of practical contexts, so that I can better recognize when a particular situation might need a particular mode. Thus, games can make me more capable of regulating myself appropriately, by making me more capable of selecting the appropriate mode for the situation.

My favorite exercise, from one early manual for monastic living is the “Hello” exercise: Zen monks, upon encountering anybody else, must immediately and unhesitatingly shout a hearty greeting. The point is to move past deliberation and reflection toward an automatic embrace of the world. However, the actual mental state of meditation is so delicate that it cannot be taught directly, but only indicated through some oddly strict-sounding procedures. One cannot acquire the Zen spirit by reading a theoretical description of it, or through an argument, or by reading a Zen manual. One must follow that direction, and actually practice the prescribed actions.

Strictness is a technique for surmounting one’s natural impulses and learned routines. Most people tend to move in habitual patterns and hold habitual postures. Strict, precise, demanding instruction help to break you out of the trap of your own nature.

To get out of our habits, we often need artificial strictures, to help us find our way into different patterns of doing and thinking. Others can provide us with such artificial strictures; they can help us to get out of our own patterns of thought and action.

Here, too much freedom, in the strictly negative sense, may simply lead to a repetition of one’s own ruts and habits. We need a richer conception of freedom, in which an agent can impose restrictions on themselves in the short-term as part of the long-term project of developing more freedom and autonomy.

In this light, the absolute, unyielding resistance to ever submitting oneself to another’s rules turns out to be, not some proud victory for autonomy, but a symptom of profound distrust. Sometimes, we don’t yet know what mental states and practical patterns we need, and the only way to get a hold on them is to trust other people to mold a little bit of ourselves—for a little while.

II. Agency and Art

we can obscure a new medium’s artistic potential when we bid for its art status by trying too desperately to assimilate it within a more traditional art form.

The sense that one’s abilities are working perfectly in tune and performing actions right at the limit of one’s capacities is, I think, a particularly special and profound experience of harmony between self and world. That specialness helps to explains why we might seek games that are difficult for us. We want the harmony of capacity because it is offers us a feeling of fitting the world, practically speaking. An experience of beauty here, of harmonious fit, is something of a balm to the perpetual sense of friction between ourselves and the world. The satisfactions of this fit help to explain why pure striving players might be interested in difficulty, even if they uninterested in the value of difficult achievements themselves. Striving players here aren’t doing it in order to have done something difficult; they are doing something difficult for the experience of harmony between their utmost capacities and the practical world.

But the experience of that most delicious of harmonies—the harmony of capacity—is particularly rare in the wild. I’ve had it very occasionally: finally solving a difficult philosophy problem that had been tormenting me for years; swerving and weaving perfectly through a tiny gap in traffic to dodge an out-of-control drunk driver. Harmonies of capacity occur so rarely in ordinary life because so much of the world, and the tasks it forces on us, do not fit us well. There are things that we must do that are boring, because our abilities are too great for them, but we must do them (folding laundry). Then there are the things we must do that, though they are difficult, are also unpleasant (proofreading a book for the seventh time). There are things we must do that might start out as interesting challenges, but the world forces them on us in such mind-numbing volume that they lose all interest (grading). And then there are all the tasks we wish to do that are far beyond our capacities: curing cancer, fixing the politics of climate change, easing intercultural conflict. But in games, the obstacles can be engineered to fit us. Some of this is the work of the game designer; some of it is the players finding the right game, or the appropriate opponents, or even just fiddling with the difficulty level. But in our life with games, we design, fiddle, and pick until the struggle is tailored just right.

Games are a technology of communication. And efficient communication depends on using some norms and prescriptions of some sort. We need some common rules to have a language—to stabilize the meanings of words, for example. And games are a language, of sorts, for communicating modes of agency and forms of activity. Games are a frame hung around specific and sculpted forms of our own activity.

I take the term art to be best explained by a cluster theory. Thus there are no good necessary and sufficient conditions for being “art,” but only a loose set of family resemblances.

Such prescriptions help ground the structure and specificity of a work. They help guide the attention of many people along similar lines. They stabilize the experience, making it more shareable between people. They steady the lines of transmission between designer and the player, and between one appreciator and another. Prescriptions help us achieve communicative stability.

III. Social and Moral Transformations

This perplexing phenomenon is quite easy to explain with the analysis of disposable ends and temporary agencies. For a striving player, the desire to win is a disposable end. A striving player takes on the desire to win for the sake of the struggle. When striving players oppose one another in a game, they are impeding only one another’s attempts to achieve their disposable ends. In terms of their enduring ends, they actually support one another. By opposing a striving players in a game, you are actually helping them get what they really want in life—a particular sort of valuable struggle. Here’s another way to put it. For striving players, it’s only the temporary in-game agencies that are competing. Their full agencies are cooperating in creating a struggle. But they are cooperating by submerging themselves into temporary opposed agencies.

Some have argued that competitive game playing is a zero-sum activity. If the value of playing a game comes from winning, the argument goes, then the positive value of game playing for the winner will be precisely counterbalanced by the negative value of game playing for the loser.3 But this line of thinking neglects the possibility of striving play. Striving players don’t really care about winning; they only take up a disposable and temporary interest in winning for the sake of having a struggle. Striving players thus are not locked into a zero-sum activity. Game playing can be quite productive for them. If we all enjoy a good struggle, then a competition between striving players can function as an engine of transformation, turning competitive actions into valuable experiences for all. For that reason, we can think of games as morally transformative technologies. They take an action that is normally negatively valenced—brutal competition—and turn it into something good. We can all get what we truly want out of playing a game, if we are striving players.

If games can offer us a library of agencies, then multiplayer games can offer us a library of socialities. They enhance our autonomy, not only by showing us more options about how we might inhabit our own agency, but also over how we might construct different forms of society from all these various agencies

John Stuart Mill suggests that, to make social progress, we need to explore what life would be like as lived under different conceptions of the good. And we need to do this through empirical investigation. We need, says Mill, to conduct “experiments in living”—to try out alternative forms of life which explore alternative conceptions of the good. In practice, this means conducting small-scale experiments with radically different social arrangements. Small communes conducted by American citizens living under large-scale capitalism would count (Mill [1859] 1999; Anderson 1991; Muldoon 2015). Games, I am suggesting, are another form of experiment in living; they are quickest rough-sketch version. When we interact under an disposable end, we are exploring how social life will go under an alternative conception of the good.

Reading, watching, and listening widely can help us develop into fuller and better people: through narratives, we can receive experiences from other people. Those experiences can infiltrate the rest of our lives; they can shape our experience of, and our way of being in, the world. Why is it so strange to also think that games—the human art form in which we play with agencies, take on alternate practical identities, take up different abilities and goals, and take up new social arrangements—can also do such a thing? So many of our other constructed artifacts—books, movies, music—give us access to a wider range of experiences than we could experience directly. It is not so strange to think that games would also widen our range of experiences in their own special way.

accidental gamification, which introduces game-like features into our lives for other reasons, but can also come to motivate us in game-like ways. For example, academic life has recently come to be ruled by quantified metrics for research quality—like citation rates and impact factors. These metrics may not have explicitly been designed to produce gamification among researchers. Conceivably, they arose from the bureaucratic need to collate information, or in university administrators’ quest to make more objective-sounding decisions about faculty hiring and promotion. But the clear, simple, and quantified nature of such metrics can also foster game-like motivations. Metrics, after all, look a lot like points. They offer some of the pleasures of games when we pursue them wholeheartedly. And if we are too eager to recapture the pleasures of games in ordinary life, we may be excessively drawn to using such simplified measures in our practical reasoning. We could be drawn to redefine our notion of success in the newly clear terms specified by those metrics, in order to get more game-like pleasures from our work. This is not all for the good

dangers arise from that peculiarly powerful motivational pull of clear goals and quantified scoring

awareness of the fictional status of game events seems to block most of the psychological after-effects—just as awareness of the fictional status of events in film and television seems to block most of the psychological after-effects of viewing the violence in those media. For the few people who cannot recognize the fictional status of video game events, playing violent video games may indeed increase the likelihood of violent behavior in real life. But for the rest of us, there is little risk (Young 2014).

game play involves taking on an all-consumingly instrumental mode of practical reasoning. In so many games, we throw ourselves into the wholehearted pursuit of a goal. We instrumentalize everything else in the game. Every resource, every competitor, is used and manipulated in our single-minded pursuit of victory.2 As I argued in Chapter 8, this total and single-minded instrumentalization is morally permissible when the right conditions obtain. In games, we are permitted to temporarily inhabit a motivational state where only one thing is valuable. Crucially, this means that we don’t need to treat others’ interests as valuable. We need not treat them with, as the Kantians might put it, dignity and respect. We are permitted to manipulate, use, and destroy. This attitude is permissible in some games because our opponent’s ends in the game are disposable, because our opponents have consented to the struggle, and because the design of the game can convert our purely selfish attacks into a delightful struggle for our opponents. There is a significant danger, however, if these attitudes leak out and infect one’s life outside the game.

How is possible for us to take up, and then set aside, this all-consuming instrumentalizing attitude? The account of striving play and agential layering tells us how. Striving players take up an interest in winning for the sake of the game. By devoting themselves to winning, they are implicitly taking up the instrumentalizing attitude. But if the instrumentalizing attitude is simply part of the temporary agency for striving play, then the attitude should also disposable.

Exporting an expectation of value clarity outside the game, however, brings its own dangers—and they are subtler dangers than those of the all-out instrumental attitude. That very subtlety may increase the risk

If we expect value clarity, we may be drawn to those social milieus and institutions that present values as artificially clear. We may be drawn to take on value systems and theories of values that provide the same satisfactions as we get from games.

We will be attracted to whatever systems can give us game-like levels of value clarity in our non-game lives. Is that such a bad thing? Jane McGonigal and other gamification activists have suggested not. According to McGonigal, we should gamify our lives, to harness our incredible powers of absorption in game play. By gamifying work, education, and fitness, we not only increase our motivation to perform the activities; we will also make the activities fun.7 But I am not nearly as optimistic as McGonigal. What McGonigal and other gamifiers neglect, I think, is the degree to which gamification changes the nature of the target. Gamification can amplify our motivation to act, but in order to do so, it needs to alter the goal. Trying to export the value of clarity we find in games to the rest of life, I will argue, can quietly undermine our aims and our autonomy. Many kinds of gamification are quite pernicious. And one of the dangers of indulging, unreflectively, in the value clarity of games is that it may encourage us to design and use excessively gamified systems in non-game life.

explicit and self-conscious gamification is only one part of a larger phenomenon. Simple and clear statements of values or goals can take over our motivation and decision-making processes

The use of the term gamification has become extremely diffuse, we want to focus on just one specific aspect: the motivational draw of value clarity. Consider a phenomenon, which I’ll call value capture. Value capture occurs when: Our values are, at first, rich and subtle. We encounter simplified (often quantified) versions of those values. Those simplified versions take the place of our richer values in our reasoning and motivation. Our lives get worse.

using the simplified version of the value can profoundly change the nature and direction of the activity.

Note that the notion of value capture is different from the notion of perverse incentives.

The long-term effect of the policy is that the actual quality of students’ writing worsens, though they do become significantly better at gaming standardized writing tests. This is a perverse incentive, but it doesn’t necessarily operate by changing the teachers’ values.

the perverse incentive is just applying a malformed lever to a preexisting value.

In value capture, on the other hand, the simplified value takes over as the primary guide in my practical reasoning. My values—or at least, the ways that I represent my values to myself—change.

The worry here is not that I can be incentivized in counterproductive directions, but that my values are transformed by the seductive clarity of simplified values.

quantification trades informational richness for usability (Porter 1995, 1–72). Quantified measures strip away context. On the one hand, context-stripping reduces the rich informational content at hand. On the other, it makes the information that does remain easily comprehensible and usable across many contexts. And it makes the information easy to aggregate.

Gaming the system occurs when people intentionally exploit the gap between the measure and the value, usually for their own ends. Value capture occurs when they internalize that imperfect measure and so transforms their ends.

Off-the-rack, prepackaged, simplified values are easy to use. They have, first of all, all the pleasures of any kind of simplified value—the game-like pleasures of value clarity. But their very publicity adds another set of attractions. When we succeed in those terms, our successes are so easily comprehensible to others. If I chase a better income or more Twitter followers, then my successes come in clear terms, in some common currency of value. But the cost for centering our lives around such off-the-rack values is deep, for we cannot tailor them to fit our psychology and situation with any degree of delicacy.

I treat my income as a measurement of my capacity to satisfy my desire; then I begin to value my income as an expression of my own good, and do whatever I can to increase it. Or: we treat a country’s Gross Domestic Product as a measure of its capacity to satisfy its citizens’ desires. And then we begin to value GDP itself, and try to increase it in whatever way we can. But, of course, GDP is not the same as the satisfaction of human desires, and my income is not the same as the actual fulfillment of my desires.

A system like Duolingo is a particularly good case of an autonomy-enhancing gamification, because the target of the system—learning a language—is a relatively clear goal. Learning a language is, by its nature, a clear and simple target, and is easily translated into a set of game-like goals with little loss of content. The gamification of language learning seems to leave the goal largely in place. But even intentional self-gamification can lead to a loss of autonomy, when we gamify a subtler value.

In heuristic drift, my values don’t change. Rather, the way I represent my values to myself, in some daily and usable form, is captured, pulled away from my actual values. Heuristic drift undermines my autonomy by diverting my efforts of self-control toward a more game-like target.

A yoga teacher once told me that we all needed to develop a pair of opposing capacities. We need to be flexible, but we also need to be strong, to control that flexibility. More flexibility, by itself, would just make it easier the world to push us around and hurt us. This, she said, is why we need to have a yoga practice that builds strength and power, along with flexibility. Freedom comes from a balance of flexibility and control.

When we are involved in striving play, especially aesthetic striving play, we are learning to wear our agency lightly. We are learning not to be too stuck in a certain practical frame of mind, not too attached to certain clear goals. We learning to dip in and out, to devote ourselves and then to pull back. We are learning to play around with our own practical attitudes. We are learning to be more light-footed with our way of being in the practical world.