A Philosopher Uncovers The Artistry In Games

Games Invert Our Motivation

Usually, in everyday life, we do something in order to achieve some end. Like we might cook to create a delicious meal, or tidy our rooms to create a neat workspace.

When we play games, we adopt what is called a “motivational inversion of ordinary life.” For instance, let’s pick an old-fashioned game like hopscotch. 

We might play it to win, no doubt, but we also play it to just have fun. We are more invested in the means – the hopping around from square to square, the company of fellow players – than in the end. Even if we lose, we are not likely to regret playing.

Why Play Games?

While we are immersed in a game, the goals of the game overtake everything else in our consciousness. Games have been considered a form of fiction or even a type of cinema, with interactivity built in. Games have also been considered a means to engage in social or political critiques, by inhabiting make-believe systems and adopting the role of citizens or dissenters.

But games are not just a means of achieving certain goals after contending with difficulty. According to philosophers like Tom Hurka, games are mostly a waste of time, since we are not achieving anything “practical” by playing them.

However, Thi Nguyen disagrees. He not only thinks games are critical, but they are also a “distinctive art form.”

Games Allow Us To Experience Different Forms of Agency

In general, game designers – including board game designers, video game designers and so on – are creating goals, an ability that you need to possess to play it, and a world or environment. For the period in which you are playing that particular game, you willingly submit to the rules set by these designers. In other words, we develop or exhibit a different sense of personal agency each time we play a game. According to Professor Thi Nguyen, games inscribe or record our agencies. “Just as novels let us experience lives we have not lived, games let us experience forms of agency we might not have discovered on our own.”

In real life, we have to contend with whatever life throws at us. In games, we can play certain chosen roles, in accordance with the worlds and rules set by game designers. “Struggles in games can be carefully shaped in order to be interesting, fun or even beautiful for the struggler.” We can’t change our own personal values or life goals very easily.

But in games, we can choose uncommon or uncharacteristic ends, and adopt a different mindset for a temporary period. The experience then, is very different from our everyday, humdrum lives. Many of us can be many things, but we are rarely accorded an opportunity to explore these multiple selves. “We have a significant capacity for agental fluidity and games make full use of that capacity.” Games expand our repertoire of possible agencies; of possible practical ways in which we can inhabit the world.

Games also help widen or shift our mindsets. For instance, in the case of the author, chess gave him a “focused, logical and tactical mindset.” Rock climbing imbued him with balance and precise movements. Games can also transform competition to collaboration.

Sign: A Game That Prods Us To Create A Shared Language

As an example of a game that really stretches the experience of players, he cites a game called Sign. The game itself was developed based on real world experience in Nicaragua in the 1970s. At an experimental school in Managua, a bunch of deaf children were encouraged to lip-read, but they did something else: they created their own expressively-rich sign language.

In a similar manner, Sign invites players to invent a sign language. It also accords each player with a backstory and an “inner truth” – things like, “I really disliked my parents during childhood” or “I have a real phobia of flying”. The objective of the invented sign language is to communicate the “inner truth” to other players. “To play Sign is to become utterly absorbed in the practical details of inventing language and stabilizing meanings.”

Goals Versus Purpose of Games

In games, we willingly sign up to overcome obstacles. As Bernard Suits observed in The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia, “playing a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.” We are not always looking for the most efficient manner of reaching particular goals. Because the joy is in the struggle. For instance, we would not choose to reach a marathon’s finish line by taxi or forgo a mountain climb by riding a helicopter.

Goals of games can also be different from our purpose in playing those games. Sometimes, goals and purposes can overlap. For most Olympic athletes, winning would be the goal and purpose. On the other hand, in a party game, you just want to have fun. And you might have as much fun even if you lose. Games like Twister or Chinese Whispers would fall into this category.

In Olympic games, the players are achievement players – they are playing to win. But Marathon runners can be considered striving players – who pursue the goal “for the sake of the activity of struggling for it.” In other words, striving players choose the struggle.

Games Foster an Experience of Harmony

Games can also foster a sense of harmony that is rarely achieved in real life – when your abilities match the skill required of the game. Often, in life, our abilities fall short – we may not have the resources to cope with some situations that come our way. Or we don’t have the right level of challenges – so our jobs become boring or monotonous. But many everyday tasks can also become as pleasurable as games when our abilities meet the requirement, and when we enjoy the challenge thrown at us – like fixing a pipe, repairing a car, managing a household or an enterprise. All these can be aesthetic experiences too.

John Dewey said that arts are the crystallization of ordinary human experience. Stories crystallize happenings, paintings crystallize observations, music crystallizes sounds. Similarly games crystallize “practicality.” Games make actions beautiful. As Thi Nguyen puts it, game designers create aesthetically rich struggles.

“A game’s goals tell us what to care about during the game.” Game designers have control over what we care about, how we play, what obstacles we might overcome and the environment in which we struggle.

Games As A Refuge From the Real World

Games can also be a refuge in an inhospitable world. “In games, we are given not only the right kind of abilities,” that are matched with an appropriate level of struggle, they are “interesting, exciting and pleasurable” in the way that other life experiences may not always be. “Games can be an existential balm for our practical unease with the world.”

In real life, opponents and enemies cause real distress. In games, it’s a distress we choose to inhabit. Besides, in games, goals are simplified. When you are playing tennis, you don’t care about your opponent’s political views or social standing. “It is not that we are co-operating, exactly – but we are motivationally coherent to one another.” This is “the great promise and the great threat of games.”

Dangers Posed by Games

The problem is that we might return to the world with a set of unrealistic expectations “that values should be clear, well-delineated, and uniform in all circumstances.” It’s their very seduction that can also threaten our lives: “Games might threaten our autonomy if we do not properly manage the transition back to non-game life.”

Moreover, in over-gamifying everything we do in life, we are also susceptible to another danger. To impose quantitative measures to every activity and hence narrowing the value we might gain from those efforts. For instance, if you are a Professor and are trying to impart knowledge to your students, gamifying your job might entail paying too much attention to student ratings, peer reviews or publications, rather than the immeasurable satisfaction of sparking someone’s imagination.

References

Thi Nguyen, C., Games: Agency As Art, Oxford University Press, 2020