Games: Agency as Art

30 Oct 2021 02:15 - 28 Nov 2022 04:37
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    • C Thi Nguyen, Games: Agency as Art book
    • "games are yoga for your agency"
    • https://philarchive.org/archive/NGUGAT-2
      • what could possibly be the point of taking on these arbitrary rules and goals? ... The answer, I will suggest, is that the rules and goals of games are not arbitrary at all. They are actually a way of specifying particular modes of agency for the player to adopt. This is what makes games a distinctive art form. Designers of such games do not simply create the gaming environments and obstacles. They designate goals and abilities for the player; they shape the agential skeleton which the player will inhabit during the game. Game designers work in the medium of agency.
    • Sculpted agency
    • Achievement player vs Striving play (sounds a lot like Finite and Infinite Games
      • An achievement player plays to win; a striving player temporarily acquires an interest in winning for the sake of the struggle.
    • A stupid game is one where the fun part is failing (Twister, Telephone) – failure is funny, but it has to be genuine, that is, you have to be trying to win
    • "Games let us record forms of agency" (like novels record narrative, paintings encode visual media)
    • yoga forces you out of your postural habits
    • games force you out of your agential habit
    • Games:
      • Spyfall (party game) (sounds sort of like Mafia)
      • Imperial (sort of Risk-like, but you play the bankers)
      • Root
      • Apocalypse World