Games

Abstract

Games are a unique art form. Game designers don’t just create a world; they create who you will be in that world. They tell you what abilities to use and what goals to take on. In other words, games work in the medium of agency. This book explores what games have to teach us about our own rationality and agency. We have the capacity for a peculiar sort of motivational inversion. For some of us, winning is not the point. We take on an interest in winning temporarily, so that we can play the game. Thus, we are capable of taking on temporary and disposable ends. At the center of this book is a view about games as communicative artifacts. Games are a way of recording forms of agency; they are a library of agencies. And exploring that library can help us develop our own agency and autonomy. But this technology can also be used for art. Games can sculpt our practical activity, for the sake of the beauty of our own actions. Our struggles, in games, can be designed to fit our capacities. Games can present a harmonious world, where our abilities fit the task. Games are a kind of existential balm against the difficult and exhausting value clarity of the world. But this presents a special danger. Games can be a fantasy of value clarity, which can encourage us to oversimplify our enduring values.

”My Soul Got a Little Bit Cleaner”: Art Experience in Videogames

“…Second, while our fndings primarily concern representational aspects of videogames, game scholars have pointed towards the aesthetics of agency [48] as well as the kinaesthetic pleasures of videogame play [75,76], "the qualities of the physical interaction with the gaming device and the physical world it depicts" [76, p. 181]. It seems evident that kinaesthetic pleasure is often central to players' aesthetic experiences (e.g., when navigating Link through the landscapes of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild) and poses a promising avenue for future work.…”