My paper, Games and the art of agency, is now forthcoming at Philosophical Review. The paper argues that games are the art form of agency. Game designers don’t just create worlds, or stories. They tell us who we will be in the game. They design for us an alternative agency, which we submerge ourselves during the game. Games work in the medium of agency.

The big outcomes: first, we learn about the fluidity of our own agency. We can take on the ends of a game temporarily. We can care about things we don’t normally care about, for the sake of having the struggle. Second, games turn out to be a distinctive form of art. Game designers are sculpting forms of activity for us. They are designing structures of practicality, so that we can enter into them, and experience beauty in our own actions. And third, games turn out to be our technology for recording agencies. Narrative lets us write down stories, paintings let us record sights, and games let us record forms of agency. Games, then, let us explore new forms of agency.

This paper was the seed that grew into my forthcoming book, Games: Agency as Art. Incidentally, this paper was written first. But it turns out that the review process for a philosophy paper can be so long, that you actually might be able to expand a paper into a whole book before the original paper finally gets accepted.

The book will expand a bunch on the major themes of this paper, spending a lot more time on the aesthetic theory and my worries about gamification. The book also spends way more time on the discussion of how games let us explore alternate agencies, thus forming a library of agencies, which we can use to develop our own freedom and autonomy. The book is also written in a more accessible way, with lots of long, loving discussions of specific games.

This paper version is more compact, more scholarly, and hits a lot of the key points much faster. If you want all the ideas really fast, read the paper version. It also contains some very technical stuff that won’t appear in the book. There’s a discussion of why game desires don’t count as fictional, on Kendall Walton’s theory of fiction. And there’s a discussion of why games break certain traditional arguments that you can’t desire at will, from the literature on practical rationality. I argue that taking on a game goal temporarily is a kind of desiring at will. And games expose some crucial lacunae in traditional theories of practical reasoning. As it turns out, lots of traditional models of rationality don’t make room for play.