Daniel J. Peterson

I get around to reading academic books I’m interested in much more slowly these days than I used to, which is why I’ve only just finished up C. Thi Nguyen’s Games: Agency as Art, which came out back in 2020. Nguyen’s book is expectedly excellent; I assign his “Trust as an Unquestioning Attitude” to my intro students each semester, and, like that paper, Games: Agency as Art is a clear and thoughtful project that pushes analytic philosophy into new, headier terrain. Reading Nguyen provides fertile ground for interesting conversations and future academic projects, so I continue to be excited by his work.

That said, what prompted me to write a post about his book is the fact that I do think Nguyen’s discussion of games has some shortcomings worth exposing and addressing, and they’re shortcomings that I think I’m particularly attentive to given my own experiences engaging in what Nguyen calls aesthetic striving gameplay (and varieties of gameplay in its neighborhood).

Nguyen focuses on a particular kind of game (and, more specifically, a particular kind of gameplay), then considers its ramifications for philosophical accounts of games and agency more generally. Nguyen calls the games he’s interested in discussing Suitsian games, which, per Bernard Suits, are games where “Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” (Nguyen 5). Nguyen observes that we might engage in at least two kinds of play when it comes to these games: in achievement play, our purpose in playing the game is simply to win, while in striving play, our in-game goal may be to win, but our more general purpose in playing is simply to have a good time.

It is this second kind of play that Nguyen discusses at length, and I think he’s right that this kind of play is quite common: when I invite my friends over to a game night at my house, my goal is an enjoyable evening, not to show off by winning every game we play. While playing a specific game, however, my in-game goal of winning may conflict with my more general purpose of having a fun time, revealing nested layers of agency. I may be of two minds, desiring victory in the game from the perspective of my in-game agency while not caring whether I win from the perspective of my out-of-game agency. But, to achieve my general goal of having fun, I may have to fully commit myself to my in-game goal, submerging myself in an agency constructed by the game’s designer(s). By stipulating the goals, rules, and environment of the game, the game designer creates a temporary agency that I inhabit for the duration of the game and then cast off when the game concludes.

The reason many striving players play Suitsian games, Nguyen argues, is that games provide them with a particular kind of aesthetic experience. Nguyen describes this experience as one where the player is “absorbed” or “engulfed” by the goals of the game. Put more formally, the primary aesthetic experience of Suitsian aesthetic striving play one of total submersion within the temporary agency constructed for us by the game’s designers. I agree with Nguyen about the desirability (for some people, myself included) of the kind of experience he describes. But Nguyen takes what I consider to be a simplistic view of in-game goals (or, as he calls them, lusory goals), arguing that it is transparent and simple in-game goals that allow for the kind of submersion within the agency of a game that he’s interested in. In what follows, I want to challenge this claim and suggest some benefits that could come from a more nuanced picture of in-game goals and agency. In other words, while Nguyen is right that game-playing reveals a kind of complicated, layered agency, the story may be even more complicated than his account suggests.

When playing what Nguyen calls a “heavy strategy game” (135), I often confront nested agency within the context of the game: I have a specific goal, which may be winning the game, but there are multiple strategies I can adopt to help me win (or at least avoid losing). The board/card game 7 Wonders Duel is a good example of a game like this (though, unlike Nguyen, I’m not sure I’m comfortable calling games like this “heavy”) as there are multiple ways to win or lose: I win if I earn the most victory points, but I can win early if I get cards or tokens with 6 different scientific symbols on them, or if I gain enough shields from military cards that the conflict pawn enters my opponent’s capital. To achieve my primary goal of winning the game, then, I have many secondary goals to choose from: should I focus on a military victory? A scientific victory? Just getting as many points as possible? If I really want to win, I need to pay attention to all of these possible routes to victory (for both myself and my opponent), wearing my secondary and even tertiary goals lightly enough that I can abandon them when an opportunity to pursue some better strategy presents itself. When I’m totally absorbed in a game like 7 Wonders Duel, the agency I’m submerged in is complicated as I’m constantly evaluating and reevaluating different pathways to success.

Speaking personally, it’s games like 7 Wonders Duel that provide fairly complicated agential structures that I find most absorbing, and, from his examples, I get the sense that Nguyen feels the same way. A simple game with a straightforward goal and only one strategy worth adopting will not lead to the immersive experience that Nguyen associates with absorbed gameplay because it provides few interesting decisions to make or possibilities to ponder. But this observation seems to run counter to what Nguyen sees as a seductive (and potentially destructive) feature of the kind of games he’s talking about, which is that “In games, we are permitted a brief respite from the pains of plurality” (192). Nguyen claims that games give us a kind of “practical clarity” that comes from single-mindedly chasing “our own goal, in all its simplicity and selfishness—and that goal is usually put in simple, clear, and utterly stark terms”, and that this kind of clarity is “the basis for many of the attractions of games” (192). But if this were so, shouldn’t I find the simple card game War (insofar as it counts as a game, given that no decisions are ever made) more immersive than something complicated like a 7 Wonders Duel?

To further complicate Nguyen’s account, while the state of total submersion that he focuses on is what drives many aesthetic striving players to games, those players may prefer to dip into and out of that state while playing. I love doing sudokus and crossword puzzles, but, when I know I’m going to tackle a hard one, I plan to take short breaks to do other things, preventing myself from getting stuck “in the tank” as I unproductively mull over empty boxes. After a short break, I return to the puzzle with new eyes and enjoy solving it more than I would have if I’d just stayed submerged in the world of the puzzle. And while playing a board game, it doesn’t seriously interrupt my immersion in the game to stop for a snack or take a bathroom break.

I bring up these points because I don’t think Nguyen’s response to Quill Kukla about total absorption in games is the best one available to him. Kukla raises concerns that the kind of total immersion in games that Nguyen focuses on seems to ignore important, relevant moral considerations. What’s to stop a Monopoly player, totally absorbed in their game, from slamming down pieces or cackling maniacally when an opponent lands on their property, which are ways of playing the game that might come off as overly aggressive or “dickish” (to quote Kukla) to other players? If the player is totally absorbed in their game and its goals, they won’t be attending to the way they’re treating others, so such immoral or offensive behavior seems not just possible but likely!

Nguyen agrees with Kukla that moral considerations matter in games, and he rejects the “magic circle” view that treats games as somehow separate from the rest of the moral universe (10-11). His response to Kukla’s concern, however, is to put the onus on the immersion-seeking player to find companions to play with who won’t be turned off by their behavior. I think there’s another response available to Nguyen here, which is to reiterate a central theme of his book: agency is fluid, and it can be fluid even within a game. Agents can walk and chew gum at the same time – they can immerse themselves in the world of a game and enjoy themselves even if that immersion gets temporarily interrupted or still requires us to attend to the well-being of others.

My favorite examples of the ability to fully submerge in a game while still attending to other values all come from playing games with my young daughter. My daughter was interested in playing chess, but she got frustrated with losing all the time when playing more experienced players. Rather than intentionally misplaying or “going easy” on her, which would have meant abandoning the pursuit of the immersive aesthetic experience both Nguyen and I value, I would instead play my best but then offer to switch spots with her whenever her position seemed particularly bad or she seemed to be losing interest in or getting frustrated with our game. Upon switching positions, I’d suddenly have a new puzzle to focus on that would absorb me, often more fully than planning out my moves previously had as I was now playing from behind. I enjoyed the experience of playing those games with her as much as, if not more than, many other chess games I’ve played, and temporarily pulling myself out of that immersive experience to offer to switch sides improved, rather than detracted from, my opportunities for immersive play.

Another example that comes from playing strategy games with my daughter is that I often commit myself to adopting brand new strategies I’ve never tested before when playing games with her. One of my daughter’s favorite board games is Clank!, a push-your-luck deck-building game where players explore a dungeon in search of treasure (and, of course, victory points). The game supports multiple viable strategies: you can try to rush through the dungeon and exit as quickly as possible, putting the pressure on your opponents to seize as much treasure as they can before their time runs out, or you can linger in the dungeon to grab as much treasure as possible before another player triggers the end of the game and you have to make a mad dash for the exit. Over many plays, I’ve found a strategy that seems to work well for me, but I’ll readily admit that there are many strategies that I’ve never seriously tried out in the game. So, when my daughter (who regularly beats me at Clank! now) and I used to play a game of Clank!, I would often commit myself to trying out a secondary in-game goal that I’d never worked towards before. This would result in incredibly fun, immersive gameplay even though I often fared worse than I would have if I’d pursued one of my “tried and true” strategies, either because the strategy I was trying out wasn’t very good or because I was so new to the strategy that I adopted it poorly. In this case, the complicated structure of in-game agency allowed for immersive play despite my balancing several goals (the goal of providing a fun play experience for my daughter and the goal of achieving an immersive play experience for myself) at the same time.

This last example especially shows that, while game designers can structure agency within a game through their use of in-game goals, rules, and environment, the distance between the game designer and the game player (which Nguyen highlights in chapter 7 of his book) allows the players to tweak the goals of the game in ways that can heighten the immersive player experience. Though it’s tempting to claim, as Nguyen does, that the goals of games are simple and dictated by the game designer’s decisions alone, even his chosen examples seem to undercut this point. In his discussion of the videogame Super Mario Brothers, he claims that speedrunners have changed the goal of the game because “the point is no longer to get the most points possible” (128).

This perhaps reveals a vast gulf between Nguyen’s Nintendo skills and my own because I am no speedrunner, but my goal in Mario games has never been to get the most points possible: it is always to survive to make it to the end of the game! The fact that different players with different goals can submerge themselves into slightly different temporary agencies within the same game speaks, I think, to the power and resilience of games as medium, but it does complicate the story Nguyen tells about layered agency. Perhaps, instead of simply adopting the goal of winning a board game, I can, as a striving player, adopt the goal of winning while keeping my daughter engaged, or of winning while being a good sport. All of these goals seem fully available to me when I choose to play any particular game, and I can choose which goal I’d like to pursue for any particular play session. I can even change my goals as I play, as I might if I started finding Super Mario Brothers levels easier and wanted to challenge myself by pursuing a high score, or if I became enraged by an opponent’s actions and, perhaps wrongly, decided that I should no longer care about being a good sport.

(A quick side-note: one might object here that what I’m really talking about aren’t goals but instead some kind of constraint or rule I’m imposing on my play – for instance, “winning while keeping my daughter engaged” may not really be a goal but instead just a mashup the goal, which is just to win the game, with a constraint on that activity added in, namely that I must keep my daughter engaged while pursuing this goal. I don’t think there’s some hard and fast line between goals and constraints, and there are many examples that reveal how fluid this distinction can be. When I set out to write a haiku, I can represent that project as having the goal “write a haiku” or as having the goal “write a poem” with the added constraint that the poem must consist of 3 lines, the first and last of which have 5 syllables while the middle line has 7 syllables. When I play the popular children’s game the floor is lava, my goal might be portrayed as “getting to the end without touching the floor”, or it might be to get to the end with the additional constraint that I not touch the floor as I pursue my goal. In short, I don’t think anything I say here hinges on how rigid we want to be in our definition of “goal.”)

Perhaps all I’m pointing out here is that recognizing the complexity of layered agency requires the philosopher of games to think more deeply about what conditions lead to the kind of all-consuming game-immersive experiences that Nguyen centers in his book. This post is long enough already, but I do want to sketch what I think might be a promising direction for those working in this area. Let’s start by thinking about immersion and imagination: when we’re in the submerged agential state that Nguyen describes, we’re attending to the imaginings prompted by our game so fully and completely that other things we might attend to (our finances, upcoming work deadlines, our health, etc.) no longer take up the mental real estate they typically do. These imaginings seem similar to those we encounter in other fictive works like novels or movies, but some may find them more immersive because what we’re asked to imagine changes constantly based on the choices that we make. What’s more, compared to other mediums, games may prompt different imaginings from different agents engaged with the same work – when I am playing a board game, for instance, I’m imagining and comparing the consequences of different choices that I, the red player, could make this turn; but my opponent, the blue player, is imagining and comparing the consequences of a completely different set of choices relevant to her position. And this is especially true in games with information asymmetry, like card games where each player’s hand is hidden from the other players.

Thinking about imagination and absorbed striving play suggests, to me, an alternate view of in-game agency from the one that Nguyen describes. Instead of treating our in-game agency as a layer within my own agency more generally, maybe it isn’t mine at all but instead belongs to a specific role within the game-world. Perhaps what I choose to do, when I play a game, is to select among a vast array of possible temporary agencies attached to roles within the game-world and adopt one as my own. One virtue of this model for thinking about agency in games is that it seems quite a natural one for making sense of my experience playing chess with my daughter: I start off the game submerged within the aesthetic experience of striving for white’s victory, and then, due to my daughter’s frustration, I slough off that temporary agency and instead immerse myself in the already available temporary agency of the black player. Similarly, this model helps explain that when I play Clank!, I adopt the role of the red player, which comes with the goal of accumulating the most victory points for the red player, to which I can add (within reason) certain goals based on my out-of-game agency (like trying out a new strategy) and append new secondary goals based on that strategy (like “leave the dungeon quickly”) as the game develops.

A final advantage to this framework that I want to note is that it makes space for a kind of game I was hoping would receive more attention in Nguyen’s work: table-top role-playing games, or TTRPGs (here, I partially echo Trystan Goetze’s concern in their review of Nguyen’s book). Sure, Nguyen discusses Sign and TTRPG-like games like Fiasco and Werewolf in his book, but I find it interesting, for a philosopher who uses Dungeons and Dragons to teach ethics and who calls out D&D by name in an interview about his book, that D&D and other popular TTRPG staples don’t show up in Nguyen’s book despite the fact that (for me, at least) there’s no clearer example of games fostering agency or the kind of immersive play experience that Nguyen values. Perhaps this is because most TTRPGs don’t fit neatly into Nguyen’s framework – There is no simple, clear goal to pursue in most TTRPs (e.g. there’s no way to “win D&D”), and Goetze states that it’s not clear that TTRPGs are Suitsian games because they often try to make the game’s central activity easier rather than harder. But I think the role-centered account I’ve hastily sketched above accommodates TTRPGs and the agency they foster quite nicely since, in these games, we help construct and then take on the temporary agency of the characters we play as. And perhaps these TTRPGs feel more immersive to some players because they accommodate a wider set of goals associated with the roles characters can take, allowing players to imagine not just how they might pursue a particular goal but also whether to abandon their goal and adopt another one instead. A D&D player might mull over not just what actions will most likely result in their character defeating a dragon but also whether their character should want to defeat the dragon in the first place instead of joining forces with it or simply running away from the fight to spend their time gambling at the local tavern.

TTRPGs raise questions about the fluidity of some of the categories Nguyen establishes, such as who counts as a game designer in a TTRPG (many TTRPGs have a “gamemaster” whose role seems similar, at times, to both a designer’s role and a player’s role), whether TTRPGs count as games fullstop or instructions for how to build games, and whether two players who engage with a game-work with wildly different goals (as TTRPG players often do) are experiencing the same or different works. I think these kinds of questions are likely to push any account of games to be more nuanced and interesting. So thinking through all of this leaves me with two main hopes: I hope that philosophers (and those with any interest in games) thoughtfully read and engage with Nguyen’s book, and I hope they build on his work, tinkering with the tools he’s given us to build a theory that accommodates a wider array of games.