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BOOK CLUB: Games: Agency As Art - Part 2 (Patreon)

Published:
2023-01-25 18:04:00
Edited:
2024-02-16 16:38:28
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

This is a discussion thread for the second part of Games: Agency as Art.

These section of the book defines more clearly what "agencies" are, how agency works as a medium of communication, and the surprisingly complex nature of agential relationships between an agent and the designer of a system.

Sound fun? It actually is,

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Chapter 5: THE AESTHETICS OF AGENCY

We begin with the luminous point that often to justify the validity of games as a medium we refer to their similarity to "more respected" art forms. But as Nguyen aptly put it to me personally in our Conversations With episode, what aesthetic philosophy does at its best is to investigating what is special about a particular medium. What is special about games, Nguyen proposes, is not their occasional similarity to movies, but the way we can aesthetically appreciate alternate forms of agency.

One of the ways alternating our agency (manufactured rules, manufactured goals) can provide aesthetic pleasures is through the simulation of a harmony of capacity. In life, we don't always get to feel a clarity of purpose, or a perfect synergy between our skill level and our task. Games can induce this feeling again and again by narrowing our attention and narrowing our agency and throwing us into a prepared parameters, all finely tuned so we experience the aesthetically desirable state of of struggling towards that newly adopted goal.

- "I can aesthetically attend to the very experience of having my attention narrowed." (120) - "We can justify our pursuit of an arbitrary-seeming goal in terms of the aesthetic value of that struggle." (105)

The harmony of capacity describes that addictive feeling of being pushed right to your limits within the harmony of acting--picture that .gif of laying down railroad tracks at the same time as the train goes 400km a hour. Essentially, Flow State!

- "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." (110)

- "An experience of beauty here, of harmonious fit, is something of a balm to the perpetual sense of friction between ourselves and the world." (110)

But it's not just about flow state, or the triumphant feeling of winning. It is the experience of being totally absorbed in this inner layer of agency, and having a valuable experience there of any kind. Nguyen in a moment of sheer fucking genius describes QWOP as "the gaming equivalent of horror movies" (113) in how your agency is so pressed and victory is so impossible, but we appreciate the inner layer experience of trying really hard anyways.

It ends off with Kantian stuff about interested/disinterested appreciation, and to be honest this conception of aesthetics really rubs me the wrong way because I don't really agree with the fundamental proposition that so called "practical interest" renders something unartistic, but I'll let you poke at that section if you so desire, I'm interested as to what you thought.

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Chapter 6: FRAMED AGENCY

Now we dig a little more broadly into art itself. Is a painting really just an object? Can you appreciate it in any way? Have I properly appreciated a painting if I have a blindfold on, and I just smell it and touch it?

No. Art comes with prescriptive ontologies. Part of what the painting IS includes rules on how to interact with it. You gotta look at the front!!

Yuriko Saito (whom we also stan) calls these rule sets prescriptive frames.

- "The prescriptive frame consists of norms which tell the observers what to pay attention to and what to ignore in order to encounter the work." (125)

What Nguyen turns out to be getting at here is further reinforcing his point that Games are (you guess it!) the art of agency. The material of art (painting, board game) does not encompass the work, or the medium (looking at the front of a painting, sincerely adopting an new agency). To really get what games can do, we shouldn't only look at how pretty the board of the board game is, we should look at what he calls the agential center of gravity.

Party games have a frame that emphasizes a lack of skill and obviously arbitrary of goals that can be easily discarded. Heavy strategy games have a frame that requires repeated playthroughs and Getting Gud to properly appreciate. Community evolution games' prescriptive frame requires caring about the meta, which is when you read too many reddit threads about something.

he also throws shade at Cards Against Humanity

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Chapter 7: THE DISTANCE IN THE GAME

First things first, object art vs. process art. Object art is when the aesthetic experience centers around observing some relatively static event (like a song, or a book), process art refers to when the art artifact serves to induce some sort of activity in the audience (like a rock climbing wall or a board game).

[[We then throw ourselves into a taxonomy frenzy on pages 147-148 that I watched Ellen squint at and then furiously graph and I have included that graph at the bottom of this chapter.]]

I was very very compelled by the parallels between game designers and the government?!

- "Games, it turns out, are the artistic kin of governments, architecture, and urban design" (157)

The proof of this comes in how each other these systems come with rules and limitations in order to manage the autonomous behaviour of its agents. They all try to predict and manipulate their agency. Nguyen calls this problem agential distance.

- "The game designer, the urban planner, and the architect face a similar sort of agential distance. They are all trying to shape the sorts of activites that arise from autonomous agents encountering the systems of designed constraints while engaged int he practical pursuit of some goal." (156)

The difference between the two is that in games, they can actually prescribe our agency. They can tell us what our goals are, and we use our inner layer of agency to wholeheartedly commit to them, regardless of our multiplicity of outer layer real world values, which the government has to fuckin deal with.

- "Game designers can use their extraordinary control over both agency and the practical environment to create surprisingly fine-tuned effects. In other words, designers of governments, urban environments, and roads largely work in the medium of constraints for agency, where game designers work powerfully and directly in the medium of agency itself." (158)

Finally, I really like this sentence:

"In fact, there seems to be some relationship between coemdy and meta-reflection on the nature of a medium." (161)

Anyways here's Ellen's cool graph:

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So what do you think? 

This is shaping up pretty fluently. It's fun to see such love poured into all the game examples and their explanations. I want to play 1830 and Spyfall, I'm gonna have to get them. Maybe we can do a Book Club zoom games night lol.

I think with the little political references to aimless freedom vs. constrained and therefore refined agency, and now agential manipulation crossing the agential distance, we're starting to see where this kind of understanding of games might take us in application to other places in our lives. I suspect that's where part 3 is going to take us.

Let me know in the comments below!

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PS. 

Apologies on my lateness on posting the thread last week, I know that doesn't exactly inspire excitement about our little formal book club, or incentivize tryna stay on schedule. I got a little rocked by my schedule (new video new video look over there its a tasty treat forgive me) but I've set up some organizational changes to ensure from now on, the Book Club post will happen on the day that it is scheduled by approximately 1pm EST.

Finally, would yall be interested in a book club town hall at the end of this? We can do a live zoom call and talk about the book, but also talk about the book club itself. What books we could cover in the future, and also what kind of pace of reading yall are comfortable with. I want to be able to run it at a pace that you and I both can keep up with if I'm gonna keep it ongoing, which I plan to do. I got lots of shit to do and I'm sure you do too! But I do love this. Anyways okay on with Book Club drop some knowledge see you down there.

Files

Comments

Natthew Lee

hihi . This section was more boring to me than the previous one. I guess a lot of the stuff in it just seems like straightforward premise setting? seems like very little revelatory to me: premises that need to be laid out that naturally follow from the previous section, and I assume set up for the next section. eat your vegetables. Def less engaging to me than the first part. I feel like I have less to say about this part than prev? “Photography was starkly unlike the nearest available recognizable art form, painting. Early photographers who aimed self-consciously at making photography an art form often engaged in various manipulations to undo that clarity - like blurring and soft focus” (105) This quote is really interesting to me because it reminds me of a Brian Eno quote: “Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature.” So it seems mediums have an evolutionary cycle? They start out new, trying to emulate the familiar. Then, they are able to establish a unique identity. Then, they are replaced or become so distinct that they have a signature which can be referred back to as its own thing. Take analogue film as an example: Early films were trying to copy vaudeville or theater in their format with largely still camera angles from the front, like a theatrical audience. Then, film became its own medium with its own conventions. Finally, digital cameras came along, and now scratches and film grain are the hallmarks of film, which would have been seen as imperfections that were were trying to remove through our “improvement” to digital. Thinking of this: what are the weird, ugly, uncomfortable, and nasty elements of games that will/have become its signature? I guess with 8-bit games its hard edges and low-quality pixel art, which have a charm. But not thinking aesthetically, thinking agentially, what is the characteristic ugly signature of games? Is it complicated rule books that have to be read over rather than video games which teach you the rules through interactions? The fairy from Ocarina of Time that wont stop shouting at you? I think I’m not thinking base enough. Idk! this was a big tangent oops really funny how much this guy hates cards against humanity lmao I thought it was cool: the ambiguity between who creates the object of appreciation: the player or the game designer, depending on the game. Referencing back to motorcycle lore: Pirsig would say The Art is not subject nor object, but the evaluative interaction between the two. Nguyen is saying The Art is in fact an object, but an abstract object that is created at the point of interaction, in collaboration between the player and game designer? Or, would Pirsig just say this is a special exception unique to games/process art and the Quality/Art Moment still comes from the evaluative interaction between the player and the Object of Appreciation; The Object of Appreciation here being an abstract object which has been created by the agential interaction between player and designer? Idk! Cool to compare tho. (i mightve mixed up the terms “object of appreciation” and “attentive focus”. so many new terms. but hopefully y’all know what i mean here lol. he also at some point uses “object of aesthetic attention” to mean the same thing i think? not sure why there’s three terms for the same thing.) “The recalcitrance of the digital medium is actually the overload of possibility itself” (150) SO COOL, MIND BLOWN. Makes sense, so simple and obvious yet so mind blowing when its pointed out. I guess one could say the characteristic/signature ugly aspect of a medium mentioned by Brian Eno in the quote earlier is the result of that medium’s recalcitrance? The limited storage space of a GameBoy is a recalcitrance that must be worked around, that leads to the characteristic ugly messiness of 8-bit pixel art, which gives it its charm in retrospect once the recalcitrance has been overcome by the development of another medium! So if the characteristic ugliness follows from the recalcitrance, and the recalcitrance of games is distance, then might the Characteristic Ugliness of games be confusion/lack of clarity? Unclear directions? I guess most arcade cabinet games throw you into things without much direction before rules of video game development were more solidly drawn. Idk still brainstorming! Its fun and nourishing to my brain cells to try to synthesize these things together! Ok thats all i got c u next week bye nat

Ricardo Aguilera

i have lots of thoughts on this section but I'm not quite done reading it; i hope to write some of those thoughts here later today or maybe tomorrow :)

Ricardo Aguilera

Chapter 3 thoughts i know we didn't read this one this time but i cannot be stopped: I think lusory goals exist, but I don't think pre-lusory goals exist in general. The actual goal of basketball is to get the most points, to to put the ball in the basket -- different ways of putting the ball in the basket net you different numbers of points. So I don't think there is, in general, a game goal that you can export outside the game. Put another way: Suits's view seems to have the rules of the game only as obstacles and means, as if the goal could be defined outside the game. While that could work for some sports, I think it's a bit simplistic -- there's too many games where the goal of the game can only be described in the game's terms. Videogames and board games are classic examples -- the goal of Scythe is too complicated to be explained in terms outside of the game. Chapter 5 thoughts Hm, I'm not sure I understand the motivation for the accounts of aesthetic experience Dean is talking about here. I'm inclined to have a more permissive concept of aesthetic experience, but maybe I'm missing the point or the motivations for those accounts. Taking the accounts at face value, I think there will be a problem with accommodating aesthetic game experience. When I'm enraptured by a game and thinking nothing else, I don't think I'm disinterestedly observing my experience -- when I'm in good flow, I don't think I feel layered in that way. I'd almost want to take this as a reductio of the disinterested aesthetic view. A beautiful moment of enraptured flow strikes me as beautiful even though the internal frame is instrumental and the external frame is "quiet". To be fair, when Dean talks about our outer agency being in the backseat (and not just absent), that did seem intuitive enough. but I'd think of the outer agency and someone who's prompted out of hiding when something weird happens, rather than as something that's occupying attention and observing. This layered attention view is more plausible in the case of slower strategy games (and not in games like super hexagon or fighting games). I'm also not sure that very partisan sport spectators pick up a disposable end, some people are really ride-or-die. But maybe those are like the people who are "too competitive", and spectators can be partisan without falling into some extreme that stands in the way of aesthetic enjoyment. Chapter 6 thoughts Ok, this is the one I had most to say about. I'll try to be concise! The notion of game prescriptions initially felt too prescriptive, like, why should me playing Magic The Gathering over and over with friends using old banned cards not count as playing MTG? However, when I remember that the point of those prescriptions is communicative, that makes more sense — if I'm to discuss the aesthetic merits of MTG, I'd think metas definitely matter, insofar as we will tend to try to judge the kind of game the author intended to make. and communicate with peers. That does make me wonder, though, about the notion of adequate encounters. How and where do we draw the line for the kind of play that gives an adequate encounter? Like, sure, someone wha hasn't ever played a game hasn't had an adequate encounter. And someone who has only played one match of Go hasn't had an adequate encounter. But what about someone who's only played Street Fighter once, or twenty times, or a hundred? And what of very casual vs very competitive play, say, in something like TF2 or Overwatch? I'm almost inclined towards a view of encounters that goes in degrees, where the person who's attentively read Jane Austen a bunch of times has a more robust encounter than someone who has only speed-read through it once, and where a competitive player has a more robust encounter of Guilty Gear than a casual player. But that could face issues when (a) competitive play is distinct enough from casual play (when competitive play isn't "casual play, but more of it"), and (b) with drawing the threshold of how robust an encounter needs to be to be minimally adequate. It could also probably bias aesthetic judgments against negative judgments, since people will not read/play something over and over if they hate it. I guess basically my worry here is this: It's reasonably clear that you need to read a complete novel for a minimum adequate encounter with it because (a) that is what fits with the author's public intent and (b) it fits social intuitions about minimum adequate encounters. But (a) is problematic for games (and I guess (b) could face problems in general). For (a), it seems implausible that the inventor of Go could foresee enough of the game's strategic depth to intend a certain degree of repeated plays. And the developers behind Overwatch talk about striking a balance between catering to competitive and casual forms of play. Maybe a way out of (a) is to say that adequate encounters apply, not to games, but to games and to salient modes of play. To aesthetically judge CasualOverwatch, I need a certain amount and kind of play. To aesthetically judge CompetitiveOverwatch, I need a different amount and kind of play. (b) is just the worry that e.g. some will intuit that seeing a good-quality photograph of a certain painting is adequate acquaintance, while others will intuit that you need to see it in person, and that disagreement is problematic for communication, when communication was part of the point of determining adequate encounters. Chapter 7 thoughts Really interesting how he talks of urban planning and government but not explicitly about law. It's probably implicit in his talking of government, but it definitely seems to me like the closest analogue to, like, board games and such. Thinking a bit more, I think the emphasis on government and architecture makes more sense insofar as laypeople are more aware of architecture and public policy than of specific law. So someone will design a building to try to corral people's agencies in certain predictable ways, while someone making law may be more worried about, like, consistency, the effects of the law, and so on, rather than directly to how the law itself will motivate action? Hm, I don't know… Law still seems to be a kind of writing-down-rules to encourage some forms of agency. But there's probably big disanalogies I'll have to think about more later.

Ricardo Aguilera

I would love love love a book club town hall! Agreed that the pace is a little fast -- it's hard to read anything else while reading for the book club. I like weekly discussions rather than every-two-weeks discussions, so maybe it could just be a bit less content per discussion.

Ricardo Aguilera

Also I forgot to mention that I really loved these chapters even when so many of my thoughts were, like, critiques (I just get a lot of fun and value out of trying to push at these edges) One last thought one last thought: I don't think I agree with his analysis of negative aesthetics in games. Consider something like Rocket League. I've never gotten good at rocket league, so whenever I try to play it, the experience is something closer to QWOP and Getting Over It than like some other game. But that doesn't mean that Rocket League is about the ugly mismatched struggle of an uncoordinated agent; it's just an interface that I as an agent have trouble with. Like, when I played Getting Over It (kind of a qwop-like), getting better at the game felt like the kind of aesthetic striving that I'd enjoy in, like, a fighting game. So I don't know if we can distinguish between "this game is hard, ooh so strivey" and "this game is hard, what a horror agency"

Adison

“But the philosophers of sport have mostly focused on the aesthetic experiences of spectators. We’re after something quite different here: the aesthetics of deciding and acting, as experienced by the players themselves. We’re looking, not for an aesthetics of skilled performance, but for an aesthetics of agency. Still, the aesthetic experiences of spectators surely show something about the aesthetic experience of the players. If a spectator can see the grace, elegance, or beauty of an action, then surely the player can, too. (chapter 5) I love this shit. There is so much beauty and truth to be gained from allowing our experiences to shape our understanding of the world. I really enjoy how Nguyen advocates that the mundane or “silly” parts of our lives not only have value, but also provide a unique framework for understanding the world around us. “Players are the ones who analyze the situation and discover that particularly effective move. They have access not only to the aesthetics of the Chess move itself, but also to the aesthetics of the process of generating that move.”(chapter 5) “Aesthetics of the process of generating that move” is the part of this that really sticks out to me. I love how it highlights beauty in the experience of reasoning and creation, I love how it comes from the perspective of the player, and I love how it captures a very real, yet very mundane type of experience. You solve puzzle, it feels good, but also you get to have the experience of feeling what it’s like to come up with a solution and the inherent beauty in clarity. Genius. “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.” Delicious. Overall I found a lot of Chapter 5 enthralling to read, and I really appreciated the type of truth it was trying to get at. Forget elite sports I want to philosophize about playing basketball with your friends!

Josh Foreman

Hey I was, coincidentally, in the middle of this book when I saw your last video! And I was like... Hey, I've never done a book club so here I am. So far I love that Nguyen's greatest cudgel against critics of his model is Stupid Games.

Josh Foreman

Also, I'm a very old game designer/artist. Don't know if there are other's here, but I'm available as a resource if that kind of experience would be helpful for anyone. :)

valentin

Wow I'm truly obsessed with this book. I wish I'd started earlier so I wouldn't be this far behind schedule but sadly school consumes a lot of my time (I hope anyone actually sees this and I'm not just rambling into the void). Well now I'm on vacation and I have just enough time to spend one half of my days skiing and the other reading this book. Thi Nguyen uses some weird words sometimes here's a list of words that I didn't understand (I am not a native english speaker and also small brained) fecund engender proprioception fisticuffs Some thoughts on this part of the book in no particular order: 1: Wow Nguyen really doesn't like cards against humanity. "The SUPPOSEDLY funny tabletop game Cards against humanity..." "... Cards against humanity is, in my view, truly abysmal" What are your thoughts? I think CAH is a perfectly fine party game, maybe it relies a bit too much on vulgarity. 2: This is the first time a philosophical book has ever resonated with me this profoundly. Nguyens writing style is simple enough for me to understand and he slowly builds up to complex concepts in a way that doesn't feel overwhelming. It also helps that he uses a lot of examples. I can personally relate to what he says about climbing and chess because i have experience with both of those. Just overall the way he makes me FEEL what he's saying really helps me to understand it. When we read ZMM I mostly understood pirsigs philosophical thoughts but I didn't FEEL them the same way I feel what Nguyen has to say. 3. The most interesting chapter to me was chapter 5! Specifically what Nguyen has to say about sports. I've never thought about sports as art objects or art moments but the more I think about it the more excited it get about this point of view. It opens up a lot of new ways of thinking and interacting. As I've mentioned above, I've been spending my vacation skiing and it's been fun. I just want to talk a little bit about the aesthetic experiences I had while I was rushing down a mountain at some 50 kilometers per hour. When you're carving (skiing technique where you try to use the edges of your skis in order to go with the flow of the slopes and create as little fritcion as possible) there are sometimes moments where you just hit a perfect spot and all of your momentum is translated in just the right way and instead of hearing the SSHKSKKH of the friction between your ski and the snow it's just kinda quiet and you GLIDE. It feels so beautiful and I mean beautiful in its fullest meaning. There's really a lot of beauty in this motion, this moment. Same when you jump of a little hill at just the right speed and just at the right moment, when you're at the crest and you've just DONE what physics and maths tell you (like the crest of a curve or something, that has something to do with maths right?) and now you're in the air and flying. This is how experience the HARMONY OF SOLUTION. Now sometimes skiing is not as graceful as I just described, sometimes you're fighting the slope and it's steep and icy and really you're just barely holding on and the SSSHKSHHKSH is now everpresent but it's beautifully intense and as Nguyen would argue and I would agree, there is also a lot of beauty in these moments. He calls it the HARMONY OF CAPACITY, I call it fucking awesome. What's also great is that these aren't mutually exclusive. In some moments you perfectly execute a jump/curve (anything actually) while also being at your physical limit. Here's a clip of skiing legend Marcel Hirscher just absolutely decimating the same slop that I had a lot of struggles with today: https://youtu.be/kUB5RFFP9s4 And heres a clip (this time with English commentators, thank me later) of Beat Feuz, also a skiing legend, completely destroying the "streif" widely regarded as THE HARDEST slope of all time. https://youtu.be/tHUVKqJsTjA Yeah so those are my thoughts, I hope found them interesting, I basically just touched on a very small fraction of what we discussed, because I think this is where I can add my personal experience and knowledge to this discussion. I hope anyone sees this (if you read this let me know if you found it interesting / if you have anything to add I would love to hear your thoughts)

halley

CH 5 I struggled to wrap my head around 'the disinterest requirement for aesthetic experience', as it seemed to go against my intuitive understanding of what an aesthetic experience is, though admittedly this book is very much informing my understanding of aesthetics since I haven't done enough research or reading to have a deep understanding of the term and philosophy. So he seems to be claiming that we have to be disinterested in order to have an aesthetic experience- or at least have an 'outer layer' of disinterest. But can't passion, partiality, and intense interest make us more attuned to the details and entirety of something, because we have the experience of engaging with it more intimately and seeing more of the layers of the experience itself? Going off of the example of being a disinterested spectator- I remember being taken to football games as a child and reading a book because I didn't understand what was going on or care to. On the other hand, in the crafts I am interested in and have studied, I can now appreciate the artistry of others using the same mediums because I understand the nuances and variables in the process in a deeper way. Without interest, what meaning or use is there in the experience? I think the layering concept makes sense as an explanation, but I feel like in lived experience there isn't such a clear division- we aren't so much layering distinct and opposing attitudes, but feeling multiple complex and oppositional motivations as an integrated experience. CH 6 "The question “Are games art?” isn’t really about whether games share enough properties with other, more established arts. The underlying question is one of value. It is a question about whether games could ever be worth spending time with" I found this to be useful framing that also relates to the debate of 'are crafts art?' And- what separates "fine" arts from folk art? Which is to say, is artistic work worthy of value if it is undertaken for practical reasons or out of necessity, as a way to pass the time, or created by historically undervalued social groups and peoples? CH 7 - I found it very interesting to consider the distinction of process arts and object arts. The first process art that came to mind was horo dancing, a circular social folk dance common where I live that often spontaneously starts at gatherings and celebrations. I also wonder if ceremony and rituals more broadly could be considered process arts. I think there are also things that could fit into both categories, where there is an aesthetic experience involved in the creation of the art object more important than the creation itself- such as a community mural project, or vision boarding by collaging. I took up spinning last year to create my own yarn, but I've discovered that the experience of spinning is so fascinating and pleasurable and interesting that I enjoy the process of spinning as much or maybe more than the yarn I end up making. So I think, even without an audience and regardless of the created art object, the process of creation is a profound aesthetic experience in its own right. In regards to "participatory art" I immediately thought about haunted houses and Meow Wolf -which I highly recommend visiting if you ever get a chance! It was one of the most unique and impressive immersive art experiences I've had.

annie liz

*jason from the good place voice* Oh Ariana, we’re really in it now [with prescriptive norms and games as agential process generative participatory art analyses]. This meaty section on aesthetics and agency as a medium was what I was most looking forward to really educating myself on in this book, and I wasn’t disappointed. This stuff is interesting and really fun to dig into. There was a LOT here and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to get to every underline, let alone fully understand it all, but as always! that never stopped me from trying. In the “intro” to agential aesthetics in Chapter 5, I found a lot of continuation of that intuitive “ah yeah, I’ve felt that” we’ve found in a lot of this work, especially in the three harmonies. Applying vocabulary to felt experiences, exploring useful understandings of implicit feelings, etc. etc. very pointing_spiderman.jpg with it all. In later chapters, I felt a lot of that recognition in object-centered arts and process-centered arts as well. “An experience of beauty here, of harmonious fit, is something of a balm to the perpetual sense of friction between ourselves and the world.” (p. 110) OOF that felt good. It helped me a lot in the common subsequent “so what?” that often comes up when looking at how something works. Yeah, so the aesthetic is in the agency, in the action not the goal or result. Why do it then? Well, so much of what we do in life doesn’t fit (e.g. all the disharmonies on the bottom half of p. 111) and there is Value in having those harmonious moments. In short, because it fucks. Additionally, there were applicable connections in “Other Game Aesthetics” and sports to my thoughts in part 1 of this book club talking about aesthetic experiences with rowing; while this absolutely speaks to the internally understandable nature of a lot of Nguyen’s work… ngl, it made me feel good about myself that I caught it. Very few things make me feel smart in this club so I’m taking my feeling of triumph while it’s here…. Nowwww let’s take that feeling away again. The disinterest section beat my ass. Absolutely did not get it, mostly because even if I DID get it I feel like I would fundamentally disagree with its premise. I can’t find any resonation with a need for a constant disinterested attention to practicality in order to fully experience an art? It’s giving very “must enter Ultra-Mecha-Empirical-Impartial-Mind-State-Go! in order to Appreciate,” which, for me, takes subject power out of the Art Moment in subject-object interaction. I know that’s a tad dramatic, sometimes art is not practical, but that shouldn’t mean practical disinterest is the ONLY state in which to “take it,” right? Or maybe I’m just not quite seeing it/applying it correctly. “Communication involves shared norms. The more I reject shared norms, the more freely I can play, but the less I can receive communication. And the more I wish to communicate, the more I must bind myself, for the moment, to a set of shared norms.” (p. 130). When I was majoring in Comms, I LOVED learning about social norms and social structures. For a while, I went down the rabbit hole mindset of “wow dude literally everything is made up,” which is like… technically true, but not always useful. Yes, sometimes it’s great to see the world without certain norms or structures in order to mess with what you could do without them… and sometimes they’re there for a good reason, and just going “woooo everything is everything” can be a bit of a cop out. This chapter felt like a summary of my process with that philosophy. Prescriptive ontologies basically said, as far as I can grasp, “sure you can revel in the fact that everything is made up, but also that’s dumb if you ever want to have fun on purpose.” Even if you want to have fun breaking the rules, rules need to be there first! It turns out we can create interesting experiences if we make norms and rules, sometimes there’s a richness of experience that ONLY COMES from select rules and goals. Oh wait, games give you all sorts of different rules and goals. No shot bucko, it’s his whole central argument! Yay comms. In a meta time shenanigan book club moment, I found a very cool trace between prescriptive ontologies and Braiding Sweetgrass’s Grammar of Animancy. What is it to be a striving game? What is it to BE a bay? It’s about the ACTION, the difference between a lifeless end and an active experience, to be the process of something instead of an object of passive consumption. Like yeah it’s really just about assigning meaning to concepts, but it’s also about the LIFE of the concepts as well. Very cool very Dynamic. Leino’s intentional fallacy argument made me laugh a LOT specifically because, as a child, I used to take the boards of the game Battleship out of the box and walk around with them pretending I was a super secret spy and those were my super secret spy laptops. I sure was playing a game, but that game surely was not Battleship lmao. Some meta notes after the meta chapters: more thoughts on Nguyen’s writing style! I love his repeated use of the same example. Using different perspectives of aesthetics on the same art pieces, like Van Gogh’s Irises or Moby Dick, helped keep certain concepts on the same track. Less helpful is when he spends two pages on someone else’s view/approach, so I think he’s encouraging it, only to say “Now *I* think that’s wrong and instead this is *MY* approach” which sometimes throws me off lol. Most likely an academic defense system, and a fully recoverable issue for me lol. Meta notes cont’d: my own interaction! You know, in previous book clubs here, I used to read through a chapter carefully (or less carefully lol) and be like “damn that was pretty cool. I bet I’ll gain even more from it when I read this book again after I finish it.” I’d go back to specific sections for notes, obviously, but my reading portion was concluded. NOWWWWW I finish a chapter and immediately reread the same chapter straight through again, because this damn book club is making me want to pay even more attention in order to have interesting and exciting interactions with the topics contained within complex book bullshit. And you know what? Devastatingly, it’s very effective. It’s making my analysis and understanding better, putting me back in college-mode except I really want to be reading this time. And it’s all your fault book club! Look at what I’ve become! A mad woman with tangentially improved analysis capabilities!

Chandler Sterling

I think what really helped me focus in on this section was when Nguyen hit me with, "I have no quarrel with any of these accounts, so long as we treat them as each describing only one way, among many, that games can be artistically valuable." (pg. 103) It was a great shift from, "Let's hear what the critics think," to, "Alright losers, let's get this show on the road." There were definitely many points where ideas took a page or two to be defended, but I was glad to see that the focus of these chapters was more on developing rather than defense. We've entered the midgame, and things are starting to get really interesting. Brenda Romero's "Train", the art-installation/board game where players slowly learn that they're shipping prisoners to concentration camps, sounds like The Last of Us of board games. An aesthetics of suffering or maybe just thinking very poorly of people is just radiating off of it. I can't wait for "Train: Part II" to come out, surely people will have a normal and well-reasoned discussion about it. This whole section of how the established art world thinks of games really doubled down in a much smarter way on the feelings I had in an earlier post. "One way to put it is that all these account approach games by asking for their *meaning*, in the strictest sense of the term." (pg. 104) I think this is exactly what most people get at when they complain about the focus on narrative video games as being evidence of art. It leaves too little space for a large swath of other genres that also have a pretty good claim to art. This part of the book provides a much better approach. "It took the rejection of the traditional painting paradigm for photography to begin to explore some of the artistic potential special to the medium." (pg. 105) Oh hey, "How to Do Nothing" I did NOT expect to see you here! This is probably a bit biased since I'm currently reading that book at the same time as this one for the book club of the future/present (depending on how you think about these posts as the present/past). Either way, if you want a detailed example of one of the more interesting ways photography can be used in the way only that medium is capable of, check that out, it is a significant part of one of the chapters. The description of the *harmony of capacity* as somewhat requiring a first-person perspective in the moment really stuck out for me. Like that's absolutely why it's fun to play a game in the moment. It reminds me of the issue most people take with Monopoly which is that it always takes too long for the endgame to finish. A 4-hour game of Monopoly will have a clear winner by the second hour, but there is just enough chance (both literally and figuratively if you consider the Chance cards) that the winner will make a bad roll or that the remaining players will make an intentionally bad deal just as a dig at the clear favorite, that no one is willing to concede yet. For 2 hours, no one is at their capacity, the person on top is skating by without a care, and the remaining players are just trudging along waiting for the axe to fall. That also segues nicely into the idea of a negative aesthetics of games. I'm sure a couple of clever folks out there caught on to the fact that the mind-numbing endgame is sort of the point of Monopoly as it was originally designed. You're supposed to recognize the way that markets naturally conglomerate goods until what started as multiple equal parties turns into one person with all the power, and a whole lotta struggling people with no chance to get it back. If that's the agency we should be playing in, then Monopoly is doing its job, but I think that the biggest reason Americans hate it so much is because its not an agency we needed help cataloguing in our libraries. Oh, a game where I go broke trying to keep up with a rent that's only this ridiculous because you want more money? What a novel experience that we would never have without this fun game! Saito's "everyday aesthetics feels extremely close to the metaphysical Quality idea. "Non-art objects are frameless. We, the appreciators, frame the object for ourselves." (pg. 126) These objects are just existing without a frame, and it's our (the subject's) interaction with them that creates the frame (Quality moment). It's another really interesting way to conceptualize the way that everything is capable of providing the "art moment". It's just that art objects are pre-framed, and non-art objects require us to create the frame. Chapter 7 was requiring some real mental work to hold all of the splitting hairs in place, and then I saw the graph. That sort of summed up the whole thing really... So about agential distance. The idea that the design of the player's agency is the answer to how to convey agency to a player has a sort of symmetrical nature that feels both obvious and important to point at. I think the build-up to actually saying it was more than I would've expected, but it was all interesting so who cares?! I do like the thought that what is considered the "difficulty" of a medium is really its strength, and that once again calls back the way that rules actually increase freedom. Nguyen paints (ha get it? oh yeah, I haven't finished the thought yet so you can't get it yet. Finish the sentence, then reread it, this'll be hilarious) watercolor in this light most clearly in my opinion. The difficulty of painting with water lends to the very way people paint with watercolor. In that same way, the difficulty of making people do what you want with just a bunch of stuff lends itself to designing, through rules and more importantly, the agencies they convey, specific goals that can be achieved by using the stuff. Neat, I love it!

mouse

1) "in fact, the harmonies of solution and act art mist present in the warmup. I am at my most elegant when I am fully in control and operating well within my abilities. When I am maxed out, on the other hand, my movements will be far uglier to the outside observer." this feels very true to me, and I think it also kind of indirectly acknowledges the benefits of having and mentor or teacher. an outsider observer who doesn't know the experience a person is attempting to their max abilities won't automatically know why there is more struggle and why it isn't more beautiful. but a person who is an expert who is able to teach how to make art and/or experience more aesthetically beautiful can see where adjustments can be made, and can also see where improvements have already been made. I think that's why so many people find so much value in being a teacher or mentor. 2) "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." this is why I try to focus on people's small successes as much as the big ones, because the world we live in doesn't want to ever acknowledge small success. but like, not everyone is cut out to be a star or a main character or THE person curing cancer or whatever. if your value is best by being supporting on the sidelines, that's a really big success to acknowledge that and follow through I think. like kronk lol 3) I loved the part about games that are "the gaming equivalent of horror movies." I think a lot about the genres of horror and comedy and how structurally they are so similar. it's why Jordan Peele is so fuckin good at what he does. its why his choice to cast a whole lot of comedians in his Twilight Zone reboot makes soo much sense. people with high Quality, acute senses of comedic timing are able to transfer that to the similar tension and release of the unsettling. Quality comedy and horror evoke this very intense reaction of surprise even to a physical degree, and learning how to manage that in the context of horror can be really helpful, so I like what Nguyen is saying about adding that flavor of agency to your library. 4) ok so, I was really interested in Nguyen's description of the framing of art, in the metaphorical sense and the literal sense. I work as a framer, and one of the key elements isn't just the technical abilities, problem solving, and knowledgeable experience required to put a frame together, but also the expectation of the result. what colors and patterns will draw out the beauty already there, how do you design a frame that elevates the artwork inside of it? to contain the artwork inside the social prescription of experiencing it, while not taking away from the artwork itself? the best framing is beautiful, but also kind of invisible. the frame isn't the experience, it's the social prescription, like Nguyen says. since I've been working as a framer, I always notice how things are framed lol and I like thinking about the technical aspects of how it works. but from my experience, the majority of people don't really see the frame at all. if it is a Quality frame, it disappears into the background, but also elevates the aesthetic beauty already present. I fluctuate between considering framing as artistic practice or not, but I tend to think that supplemental beauty is pretty valuable. so I guess I'm wondering if I'm interpreting this right, but I think Nguyen is describing game design as supplemental art to the aesthetic beauty of human experience? 5) the section about process-arts at the beginning of chapter 7 reminded me a lot about the first part of Art As Experience. removing art from its cultural context can devalue it 6) Rirtrik Tiravanija's artwork about people's participation in eating a meal made me kind of sad about the world right now? lol I guess because eating and cooking together isn't as valued as it should be. 7) "the player has many decisions to make, freely, in Android: Netrunner, but the corporation player must always think in terms of defense and health and building defensive structure. because these are the tools the corporation player is provided." this chapter has given me a lot to think about in terms of addiction recovery programs. tools are provided, but they must be malleable enough to be individualized for the person in recovery to adapt to their corner of the world. the tools aren't rules like gaming rules, but I think the tools shouldn't be as constrained as governments must be constrained. the balance of trust and faith between the recovery program and the recovering addict feels like it might be in between these two forms of agential experience. I don't know I'm still thinking about it, I'm jot really sure if I'm on the right track it's just interesting to me. this book is so good! I'm really enjoying it!! I can never tell if my thoughts on texts like these are useful or accurate, but i do like thinking about it