Games : Agency as Art [2nd read]

[droqen]

Regarding C. Thi Nguyen's
"Games : Agency as Art"
(This is the 2nd read. Link to my 1st read here.)

[droqen]

Preface:

When I first read Games: Agency as Art, I hated it so much. I didn't finish it. I read some of it and encountered so many things about the content, but mainly about the form/style, of the book that I could not stomach that I just had to put it down and step away. Recently I had an experience with Art After Money Money After Art that has me feeling more open to penetrating a text that is 'unpleasant' in this way, and Matt B has suggested many times that I should give the book another try.

So here I am, giving it another try: I've placed a hold on it at the library. However, there are 8 holds ahead of me and they only have 4 copies, so it may be a few months before it arrives.

I expect (and hope) my experience with G:AAA goes something like this.

Phase 1- I read it, noting down here every complaint and irritation that passes my way, while passively consuming all the raw data presented by Nguyen.

Phase 2- I step away, mad, but at least certain what I'm mad about.

Phase 3- I come back, madness named and placed neatly on a shelf to the side, and summarize the essence of what Nguyen is saying through all his actions -- every word, every tone, every example -- and what I think about it.

But this is all months out. I have to wait for those other people to finish up.

[droqen]

Update: Despite all the holds, I was casually browsing the book location tracker on the Toronto public library website and saw a book at a very local branch not marked as on hold or taken out or for reference only... so I took a chance and biked over there. Long story short, I now have a copy of the book in my hands. Cool.

[droqen]

p3

In many cases [the arguments for the value and importance of games] assimilate games into some other. . . category of human pratice.

. . . a type of fiction. . .
. . . a type of cinema, one that adds a new technique--interactivity. . .
. . . a kind of conceptual art, which is valuable when it offers social critique. . .
. . . a special way of making arguments, which can criticize . . . systems by simulating them. . .
. . . a kind of procedural rhetoric, making arguments by modeling causal systems in the world. . .

But I worry that overemphasizing these sorts of approaches may also suppress our appreciation and understanding of the truly unique potential of games.

p3

Over in the philosophy of sport, the value of game playing is usually spelled out in terms of skills, excellences, and achievements. But notice that this also cashes out the value of games in some very familiar currency.

p3-4

Tom Hurka argues that games are valuable because they enable difficult achievements. But difficult achievements are, obviously, not confined to games. . . . This leads Hurka to conclude that playing games is generally less valuable than engaging in more useful non-game activities. . . . Games can offer us only difficulty (Hurka 2006).

[droqen]

My commentary here - I agree with some of what Nguyen is saying! I think Hurka's argument is interesting because I've gone down this path of thinking myself (though not about difficulty). I am more interested in what Nguyen is going to say about games than what he is going to say about what games are not, but I'll read through the chapter to make sure there isn't something else I need to keep an eye out for in order to not miss his point.

[droqen]

p4-5
Changing my core values would take, at the very least, significant time and effort.  . . .But game activity is different We can change our in-game ends easily and fluidly. . . . 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.

Okay, so what I see here is a straightforward argument for role-playing in games. Other art forms do allow this - a writer, i think, does this when writing characters, for example. A designer does this when imagining the person or persons for whom they are designing. Unique to games? Not really, but it's fun, I like it as a thing that we can use games for -- that games can play with -- that games can allow us to play with.

It's not how I would define 'agency', generally I associate agency with the ability to have influence on things, actual things. I've often thought of games as 'agency fantasies' or as creating 'the illusion of agency', but if we define agency as instead the feeling of having influence on things, i.e. agency as that very illusion, then sure, games give you agency.

[droqen]

For the remainder of this book, I will focus on understanding those games and playings that fit the Suitsian definition. For the sake of brevity, whenever I simply use the bare term game, I can be taken to referring to Suitsian games.

As a skimmer, I am not a fan of this. A book really needs to make sense even if you miss some random sentence in the middle of page seven in the middle of chapter one. This is seriously a broken nonfiction writing pattern in my opinion: if something on page 200 can be totally misinterpreted because it relies so completely on something on page 7...

Well, I'm glad I read it anyway.

[droqen]

I have read Suits, and I feel that this next bit is basically summarizing The Grasshopper for people who haven't read it. I can't tell if it's a particularly sparkling summary. I don't love it, I don't hate it, it's just not necessary for me.

[droqen]

p13

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. . . . we can design games for the sake of this harmony of practical fit.

This seems to dance terribly close to Hurka's line of reasoning given on page 3-4 above, which Nguyen decries, and also "cashes out the value of games in some very familiar currency." If indeed this is the, or even merely part of the, "truly unique potential of games" to which Nguyen aspires, then as in Nguyen's own summary of and counterpoint to Hurka's argument, can we not say (p4, but edited) "Science and philosophy are valuable in the same way as games in offering [harmony], but they are also valuable in other ways. They give us truth and understanding or at least some useful tools, as well as [harmony]. Games can offer us only [harmony]."

[droqen]

Nguyen next attempts to describe or define "the artistic medium of games" which amounts to a discussion I don't much care for ('what are games???'), so I won't touch any of this.

[droqen]

Earlier I noted I wouldn't define 'agency' the way Nguyen appears to, and here he addresses what is definition is. sort of. Mostly he rejects the idea of defining agency at all, which is not very useful to me.

p18

When I speak of agency I am generally thinking in terms of . . . intentional action, or action for a reason. . . . I think that investigating how games work in the medium of agency will actually teach us something about the nature of our agency.

Rather, given his line of thinking here, I think that the title is saying very little at all. If we are spending all our time defining games and handwaving agency, we might retitle this book 'Agency as explored through the lens of games'. Agency is not foundational here, and the particular way Nguyen avoids that problem is very frustrating to me.

[droqen]

p18

I don't think we need a full definition or metaphysical account of "paper" to usefully say that origami uses the medium of paper folding, and I don't think we need to settle on a particular philosophical account of "agency" to usefully say that games use the medium of agency.

This is the last I'll touch on this point for now. Seriously disagree. Look, if you don't want "agency" to mean anything in particular, don't place it in such a pivotal place in the book title, man. Paper is a lot simpler and we can very easily come to an understanding about paper as it relates to paper folding and origami. Paper as it pertains to paper folding is just not a metaphysically complicated thing. Agency is. This is a terrible, terrible false equivalency.

[droqen]

OK, next section.

p19

But games also offer one more promise. They can function as a refuge from the inhospitality of ordinary life.

Literally, escapism. Nothing more to say or quote from this section.

He offers a summary of each of the chapters in the book next, and I think I'll use this to see which, if any, I plan to read.

[droqen]

I'm interested in...

Chapter 4: "Games can communicate modes of agency. And when we play games, we can learn new modes of agency."

Chapter 5: ". . . the aesthetics of agency."

Chapter 10: ". . . aesthetic striving play might offer us some protection against the fantasy of moral clarity."

That's it.

[droqen]

Chapter 4

It is what it says on the tin! It's good and offers a few terms like 'agential mode' and 'library of agencies', but the basic point is more or less that by playing games we expose -- no, immerse -- ourselves in different, potentially new, 'agential modes' (or new modes of 'thinking and doing' as Frank Lantz describes what games are the art form of), which we can apply in life, especially paired with the fluidity afforded by choosing to both start play and stop play, which are effectively transformations in agential mode.

Of interest to me is that Nguyen definitely suggests that a person can only embody one agential mode at a time, though is capable of switching, which is something I believe in as well.