BOOK CLUB: Games: Agency As Art - Part 3 [FINAL] (Patreon)

This is a discussion thread for the THIRD and FINAL part of Games: Agency As Art.

The stirring conclusion of the book starts to tie games and multiple agencies into real world application, for better and for worse. Is it good to gamify your experience? What does aesthetic striving play have to teach us about our values, our systems, and how we navigate the world?

Turns out A LOT.

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Social Transformation:

By working the medium of agency, designers can also work int he medium of sociality. (p. 172)

Nguyen takes the simple step between games manipulating our agency, to games manipulating our GROUP agency. The functionality of multiplayer games not only guides our individual experience of action and value, but also guides our interactions with EACH OTHER.

Art can create different social relationships. And art need not be confined to critiquing or reflecting on the rest of the world. Art can effect change directly. Art can create real mirco-utopias right now, for us to inhabit. (p. 185)

Well, yeah! Hard to argue with that. In this way, as much as games can offer us a library of agencies to try on and experience for practical and aesthetic reasons, so can they function as a library of socialities.

John Stuart Mill was referenced with his assertion we need to conduct "experiments in the living", to explore The Good in different contexts through empirical investigation.

Pretty delicious stuff, wonderfully leading into the Big Guns.

Gamification & Value Capture:

Really unrolls the artillery on us in the final moment.

[I highlighted the fuck outta chap 9]

I'm going to assume perhaps presumptively that you have seen my stranger things video.

Narratives can be used to transmit simplified, errant, or vicious emotions. Their emotional power makes them good both for moral development and for maclicious propaganda. I suggest that games are similarly double-edged - but their special potency arises from how they work with agency, rather than emotion. (p. 190)

So games are static patterns, specifications that are useful and actionable and definable, but they also distract us from the fluidity and subtlety of true value, in all its oneness and complexity.

This can be fine. This can be good.

Quantified measures strip away context. On the one hand, context-stripping reduces the rich informational content at hand. On the other, it makes the information that does remain easily comprehensible and usable across many contexts. (p. 204)

But Nguyen now focuses on Value Capture. What about static feedback loops, that are MEANT to point us to value, but distract us away from it?

The idea of idolatry, or my Baudrillard influenced point about Representation vs. Reality, really comes into play here. You can see its similarity with a games GOAL and a games PURPOSE.

You need to be able to engage in your analogues, engage in your temporary agencies, interface with reality, while also retaining the ability to opt out of that value pattern.

When a value pattern leads well intentioned people to pursue the signifier over the actual value, this is what Nguyen calls Value Capture.

The tantalizing prospect of Value Clarity offered by limited, gamified interpretations of reality can suck us into a system for its own sake, removing our ability to disengage from these patterns when they no longer serve our ultimate purposes.

Grades in Universities. Likes/Retweets on Twitter. Analytics on Youtube, everywhere else. Value Capture. Why are we doing this? You can get distracted by the number, and feel horrible despite winning the game. What is this supposed to represent?

And yet you can't live without them.

We need such heuristics to manage in everyday life. If we always had to reason keeping in mind our full range of values, in all their richness and complexity, we would never be able to act. (p. 211)

The Solution: Striving Play Mindset

As a byproduct of our pursuit of the aesthetic experience of striving, we also end up practicing a mental transition between more and less narrowed forms of evaluation. (p. 221)

I think it is wonderful how Nguyen builds the framework of games, then demonstrates their danger, THEN demonstrates how the salvation from this danger exists IN the framework.

Here is the hope: if you spend a lot of time engaged in aesthetic striving play, you will have plenty of practice losing yourself in, and then drawing back from, the pleasures of value clarity. (p. 222)

Nguyen at the conclusion returns to his goal/purpose dichotomy, and the way this is emphasized by aesthetic appreciation specifically.

Something about aesthetic appreciation resists second hand testimony. It is subtle, and demands contemplation. Therefore it inherently shrugs off the limitations of value capture. It resists gamification because it acknowledges our higher agency that has dominion over our sub agency that cares about the game. It's not just the number... how do we feel?

Aesthetic evaluation, by its very nature, resists simplification. (p. 219)

This striving play dualistic desire has a lot to teach us about how we engage with the world, our philosophies, and the systems that guide us in pursuit of value.

Aesthetic striving play... brings us to practice a pair of crucial, and opposed, human capacities. First, any kind of striving play builds the capacity to submerge ourselves in narrowed agential modes. Second, aesthetic striving play builds the capacity to step back and reflect on the value of these narrower states from a wider, less artificially clarified perspective. And this second, reflective capacity may turn out to be protective against the stickiness of narrowed agential modes. (p. 221)

Our practiced ability to adopt agencies, try out new methods, and abandon them in pursuit of higher, more subtle values, can actually help us USE value patterns without falling into Value Capture.

those narrowed agential states are very handy to have around. We get a lot done when we submerge oureselves in a sub-agency and pursue a well-defined goal. When the practical going gets tough enough, deploying a series of narrowed agential modes may be the only way to get anything done. But we need to develop the capacity to manage those narrowed states, to deploy them under our control, and to extract ourselves from them. (p. 218))

K. THAT'S IT.

Please do comment below what you think! Did my best to summarize. Hope to see your thoughts. Will be here and active in the coming week.

I will tentatively say Book Club Town Hall is next Saturday at 1pm EST. This is to be focused on the people who HAVE ALREADY PARTICIPATED IN BOOK CLUB. So let me know if you have been an active participating member of the book club so far if you can make this date/time. Will communicate and make it work.

Everyone is welcome but people who have committed time and energy are prioritized for practical reasons. All will be welcome & it will be accessible going forward, just being expedient here.

Ok bye