What’s In a Game?

Josh Landy
Are games just a waste of time?

Ray Briggs
Can they equip us with important life skills?

Josh Landy
Or do games make us more anti-social?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you from our respective shelters in place via the studios of KALW San Francisco.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where Ray teaches philosophy and I direct the philosophy and literature initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today, we’re asking what’s in a game.

Josh Landy
I love games, Ray—they are such a great diversion from the fate of the world. Plus, they’re really important for kids. I think about all those social skills a five year old picks up just by playing hide and seek with their friends.

Ray Briggs
But we’re not kids. For adults like us, games are a waste of time. Grownups should be out doing good and building stuff. Not sitting on their couch playing Nintendo.

Josh Landy
Hashtag not all games, right? We grownups can learn stuff, too.

Ray Briggs
Oh, like what? Like how to shoot birds into pigs?

Josh Landy
Isn’t that a useful skill? But seriously, commodity games like that can improve your hand to eye coordination.

Ray Briggs
Right, they increase your ability to like, crush candy faster. Whoop dee doo. I’m sure that’s a skill that will serve you well later in life.

Josh Landy
All right, but maybe my candy crush skills don’t carry over. But my Tetris skills might I mean, maybe they could make me better at packing my car when I go on a camping trip.

Ray Briggs
Oh, please, when do you ever go camping, Josh? You’re kidding yourself if you think that video games are good for your physical skills. The fact is, you’re sitting on your couch all day playing virtual soccer, when you could be out on the actual field.

Josh Landy
Well, even if that were true, there are still benefits for the brain. Plenty of games teach us spatial reasoning, vocabulary, problem solving skills.

Ray Briggs
You’re just teaching yourself to be distracted. That rots your brain.

Josh Landy
I don’t know. I think there are games out there that challenge you and give you real stuff to chew on. They get you to think hard about real moral issues. I think those games are good for us.

Ray Briggs
Three words, Josh: Grand Theft Auto.

Josh Landy
Okay, fair enough. But I think you’re being too narrow about what games are. I mean, most people aren’t just playing alone in their room. They’re out on the basketball court with their friends. They’re playing Mahjong, with their family, even when they’re on a computer. They’re doing multiplayer role playing games with people all over the world.

Ray Briggs
Great. So now 20 people are wasting their lives.

Josh Landy
No, they’re collaborating. They’re gaining important skills of cooperation, deliberation, collective action, compromise.

Ray Briggs
Compromise? Have you seen what actually happens in sports? When Jeff Gillooly tried to break Nancy Kerrigan’s leg, that did not look like compromise. That was like Don Corleone “compromising” with the Tattaglias

Josh Landy
Okay, that was bad, I admit. But thankfully, that kind of thing is pretty rare. I mean, most of the time in sports like that we learned to respect your opponents like like Federer and Nadal or ever in the battle over. I think that’s an amazing benefit. That imagine thinking of your rival as a worthy foe, helping you to raise your game.

Ray Briggs
Okay, fine. But that’s, that’s just sports. Most games are a waste of time, people sitting around a table pretending to be barbarians and wizards, slaying imaginary monsters with fake enchanted swords.

Josh Landy
On behalf of the entire Dungeons and Dragons community, I take offense at those remarks fray. That’s a game that that involves a ton of creativity. If you’re the Dungeon Master, it’s a real workout your imagination.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, but what are they poured all that imaginative energy into actually helping the world? I guess they’re not hurting anybody. But what they’re doing is still pretty pointless.

Josh Landy
Even if that were true, would that really be so bad? The philosopher Theodor Adorno had that great line about useless activities pushing back against the tyranny of our profit obsessed world. Let’s fight the man by having fun.

Ray Briggs
Well, at least our discussion is going to be fun. We’ve got a great guest, Thi Nguyen from the University of Utah, author of “Games: Agency as Art.” Maybe we can ask him about the boardgame Pandemic, which, perhaps not surprisingly, is hugely popular right now.

Josh Landy
Or we can ask about Monopoly, which has been popular since the dawn of time. We sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Holly J. McDede, on a quest to find out the origins of monopoly and what it was originally meant to teach us. She files this report.

The Simpsons
Why don’t we play Monopoly!

Holly McDede
You know something is popular when it makes it into the Simpsons

The Simpsons
Which version? We’ve got Star Wars Monopoly, Rasta Monopoly, Galipolopoly, Edna Krabappoly…

Holly McDede
In this one the family sits down to play Monopoly, a game where the goal is to force competitors into bankruptcy by buying and developing pieces of property.

Homer Simpson
That’s it, baby—welcome to Marvin Gardens. We’ll see about that. 1, 2, 3, doh!

Holly McDede
Things get out of hand pretty quickly. Maggie stuffs houses in her cheeks, Bart makes hotels out of Legos, and so on. We all know Monopoly can go on for days and end in tears. Needless to say, Monopoly does not always bring out the best in people, as shown in a trailer for motion picture based on the game.

Monopoly
Do not pass ‘go’. You need to pay the luxury tax—you’re going to jail. Do not collect $200. It’s just a game. This game never ends.

Mary Pilon
Let it be known that you can spend years of your life writing a book about Monopoly but your family will still like question whether you have the rules right or not.

Holly McDede
Like zillions of kids, Mary Pilon grew up playing Monopoly. She was a Wall Street Journal reporter after the 2008 financial crash.

Mary Pilon
And I kept thinking of the version of the Monopoly origin story that was tucked into my board game and so many others, that it was invented during you know, the 1930s by this guy who was down on his luck.

Holly McDede
Pilon searched the internet looking for more details, but she kept hitting dead ends. Instead, she learned about an economics professor named Ralph Ansphach.Iin the 70s he had become locked in a trademark fight for the right to sell his own game called Anti-Monopoly. So she called him up thinking he might know something.

Mary Pilon
He immediately got back to me and was like, oh, yeah, we did 40 years for someone to ask me about this. It’s you know, the history is really complicated. And it wasn’t invented by a guy in the Great Depression, it was invented by this woman.

Holly McDede
And that’s how Pilon learned about the real mastermind behind Monopoly. Elizabeth Magie—a game designer before women had the right to vote,

Mary Pilon
She was a very outspoken advocate for women’s rights. She had written poetry and short stories. She worked as a stenographer and also had patented kind of typewriting gadget.

Holly McDede
And Magie was obsessed with the political economist Henry George.

Mary Pilon
And I won’t get wildly into single tax theory here.

Holly McDede
The idea behind single tax theory is to tax land and only land so that the burden of taxes falls on wealthy landlords. Magie taught these ideas after work, but wanted to reach more people. So she created what she called The Landlord’s game to communicate these ideas with the masses.

Mary Pilon
You know, she’s really interested in national conversation about income inequality. And there’s, when you read the newspapers of the time, there’s a lot of talk of the monopolist. So you think about the railroad barons, oil barons.

Holly McDede
In the Landlord’s Game, when players landed at an “absolute necessity space,” like bread, coal or shelter, players have to pay $5 into the public treasury. And this game includes two sets of rules: in one the goal is to crush opponents, and in the other everyone is rewarded when wealth is created. As gamers make their way around the board, they perform labor and earn wages and eventually get to retire. It’s meant to show a more egalitarian version of the world can exist. Magie patented the Landlord’s Game in 1904.

Mary Pilon
And it’s played by this who’s who have left wing America for 30 plus years. Upton Sinclair, author of “The Jungle” plays the game. Some the early founders of the ACLU play the game. It’s played at Harvard, it’s played at Columbia.

Holly McDede
But the monopolistic rules were more popular. And that’s the version Charles Darrow played, adopted, and sold to Parker Brothers, making a fortune during the Great Depression. It sold like wildfire at a time when people were losing their homes and banks were collapsing.

Mary Pilon
You know, board games are their cultural artifacts, but they’re also theater. They’re also role playing. And so I think that monopoly is an incredibly powerful game at that time, because people could be rich, they could, you know, own property, they could do these things that maybe in real life were not necessarily as accessible as they had thought.

Holly McDede
Darrow became the first millionaire game designer in history and was credited as the inventor of monopoly for a long time.

Mary Pilon
That’s how the history was told until this economist in the 1970s gets, you know, basically a cease and desist. He was making a game called Anti-Monopoly. And he goes, Wait a minute, how can someone have a monopoly on Monopol? And that kicks off his 10 year long legal battle.

Holly McDede
It’s largely because of this legal battle that we know this history at all. When Hasbro, the company that now sells Monopoly, released Ms. Monopoly, Jimmy Kimmel and many others ridiculed it.

Jimmy Kimmel
Women get $1,900 to start with. The men get $1,500 and women get $240 when they pass Go, men only get $200 when they pass Go. Sounds like a good way to make your son hate your daughter, really.

Holly McDede
When Hasbro released Ms. Monopoly, they didn’t mention Magie. She had died in obscurity. One of her last jobs was with the US Office of Education. She developed a reputation as an elderly typist with a lot to say about making games.

The Simpsons
These hotels are made of Legos. Bart, you’re cheating!

Holly McDede
When it comes to Monopoly, the best among us often lose. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly J. McDede

Josh Landy
Thanks for that great report. Holly. Gosh, such a bitter irony that Lizzie McGee ended up having her anti capitalist game stolen and sold for a fortune. I’m Josh Landy, with me is my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs, and today we’re thinking about what’s in a game.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Thi Nguyen, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah and author of “Games: Agency as Art.” Welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Thi Nguyen
Hello, hello, thank you. I’m coming to you from my little basement closet, which is the only child free zone in the house right now.

Josh Landy
I’m glad you’re in a safe space. You’re an expert on the philosophy of games, but I suspect your interest isn’t entirely theoretical. What’s a game you’re most excited about right now?

Thi Nguyen
So since I wrote this book about games as an art form, people always ask me like, do you mean like fancy graphics, and I think like, actually, the game that best expresses what I’m excited about is this live action role playing game called sign where you reenact as a group, the historical moment, in which a bunch of Guatemalan sorry Nicaraguan deaf schoolchildren invented their own sign language in the game. It’s something you play in total silence, where you have to make up a new language of new signs with each other so that you communicate with each other. That’s the kind of thing I love.

Ray Briggs
So earlier, Josh, and I were arguing about the value of games. And he was saying that they do important things for us. And I was giving them a hard time and saying games are pointless. So Thi, who’s right?

Thi Nguyen
I’m going to do the lame thing and say that you’re both right. Games can be incredibly valuable, they do something completely unique. And we often miss out because what they do is totally different from other art forms. They like shape, action, they sculpt action, they can make what we do in our decisions, beautiful, when they’re good games. But I also believed you know, Theodore sturgeons rule that like 90% of everything is crap. Like, he was a science fiction writer. And people would say, like, well, the science fiction, I read his crap. And he’s like, Yeah, but 90% of everything is crap. And I think that’s true of games, too. Most games are pointless, boring mechanical diversions, but that’s also true of most novels, and most movies. Most of it is horrible, addictive, corporate crap. So I mean, if you’ve only played Monopoly, and you hate it, that’s probably because you have good taste in games. And like you’ve been registering that everything you’ve been playing as crap your whole life. But there are good games out there.

Ray Briggs
Is there a quick way to summarize the difference between the games that are crap and the games that are not crap? Yes,

Thi Nguyen
this the equivalent question like, is there a quick way to summarize what literature is good and what literature is bad, but right now, I think a lot of the games that that I find crappy Are these like, boring, repetitive grind that get you to do one thing over and over again, and just like feed you a simple stream of points to make you feel good, like there are these like, constructs just to feed your addiction. And the good games are games that let you experience like totally new ways of being like new ways of thinking, or games offer these stages for like, rich invention and creativity and not just like, clicking on a button to kill endless mice to get more experience points. This is this is this is speaking from experience as a as like a recovering addict.

Josh Landy
Mouse killer. Yeah, yeah. recidivists mouse killer. So, I love this idea about good games, giving us the opportunity to explore different modes of being a moment ago, you talked about sculpting agency, can you explain what that is? What does it mean for a good game to sculpt agency?

Thi Nguyen
Right, one of the reasons I got into thinking about games, it’s I mean, I’ve been playing games my entire life, from computer games to tabletop role playing games, to like board games. And I started reading the stuff where like, philosophers and cultural critics were defending games. And they kept talking about stuff that I didn’t recognize at all they talked about, they were like, they were like, offered interesting intellectual criticisms, or like, they’re, they offer good stories, but they would like not talk about the thing that I cared the most about games, which is the experience of like, in a good game. You’re doing something interesting. You’re inventing interesting ideas, you’re inventing interesting moves, you’re responding in elegant ways. And so For a lot of people out there say something like game designers are amazing because they create worlds or game designers tell stories. And I think that all under race it, game designers tell you who to be in the game. They tell you what your abilities are. But most importantly, so my favorite German board game designer Reiner lutea says that the most important tool in his toolbox is the scores because they set the motivations. So a game designer is telling you, the person you’re going to be in the game, they’re telling you what to care about. And that I think is like the central like weird magic of game design. And like, the art form of games,

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about what’s in a game with Thi Nguyen from the University of Utah, author of “Games: Agency as Art.”

Ray Briggs
Do you play any video games, board games or sports? What difference do they make in your life? Are there any games that people shouldn’t play?

Josh Landy
The games afoot! More about serious play—plus comments and questions from our listeners, when Philosophy Talk continues.

The Gorgia Satellites
La-da-da-da-da, la-da-da-da-dee, I’m talking about you and me, and the games people play.

Ray Briggs
Could the games people play actually do us some good? I’m Ray Briggs and this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy, and we’re asking what’s in a gmae with Thi Nguyen from the University of Utah, author of “Games: Agency as Art.”

Ray Briggs
Since COVID is no game, we’re using our home field advantage to pre record this episode. So unfortunately, we can’t take your phone calls. But you can always email us comments@philosophytalk.org. Or you can comment on our website where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Josh Landy
So Thi, there’s lots of good pastimes out there and lots of things that spark our imagination and cultivate our skills like my favorite thing literature. So what makes games special?

Thi Nguyen
One of the things I think, really helped me understand the specialists of games is the great American philosopher John Dewey talking about what art was. And he thinks that like Dewey has this theory that like every art is the crystallization of like a different part of daily life. Like fiction crystallizes, like the event of your life and painting crystallizes, like looking around and seeing stuff. And I think games crystallize action, like they shape our doings and our deciding things and our thinkings. And that’s just a completely different art form, right, like literature is about seeing things from other people’s perspectives in games is about jumping into a different way of being practical and acting from inside of it.

Ray Briggs
We have an email from Quinn, who asks, Is Animal Crossing a colonizer fantasy? I think it is. If so, is it harmful to engage with. So Animal Crossing is a video game for Nintendo. And you play a human who moves on to an island village that’s populated by sort of animal characters and you’re given a loan to buy a house which you’re then supposed to pay back, basically by gathering items from the island like fish and plants and selling them for in game currency which you can also use to buy things.

Thi Nguyen
Animal Crossing, maybe a colonizer fantasy, but that’s we don’t need to stretch that far. There are plenty of games that are actual literal colonizer fantasies, where you actually play a colonizer like the game Puerto Rico, like a super popular board game where you play someone who’s setting up a plantation. And if you actually think of it, it’s like, really worrying and nasty. I mean, maybe the game simulates doing something terrible. But there’s a background question here about like, whether it’s actually terrible to engage in a game in which it simulates you doing something terrible. And I’m not sure it’s any worse than like watching The Sopranos Right? Or watching Breaking Bad. Like we have the capacity to distance ourselves with these things.

Josh Landy
I think that’s a really interesting question. It’s something I’ve thought a lot about with things like the sopranos, Mafia movies, cases in Film and Literature. You know, as a kid, I played a game, a Lord of the Rings game, where one player had to be sovereign. Yeah. So at some point, it’s your turn. You’re the bad guy. And maybe you do maybe don’t want to do that. But is it automatically harmful? I think some people would say it’s automatically harmful, harmful. Some people say it’s neutral. I think some people would say it’s beneficial because you get to know your enemy better, or something like that. For that optimism,

Thi Nguyen
yeah, I mean, a lot of one of the things that games do is they let you experience different practical modes, you’re going to learn them from a lot of different ways. Like I think, I mean, here’s something that you might enjoy knowing. I’m a philosopher, but when I started philos To be a really crappy philosopher, I mean, I was terrible, like I had deep interest. But no, I mean, the thing that philosophers can do where they, they think ahead and anticipate, like I didn’t do that I was like this sloppy, romantic, cushy kid. And then I played chess, and chess, like, concentrate to you, because it’s such a focused environment, it concentrates you and forces you to do this look ahead thing. And I think like one of the things that’s interesting about games is they offer these really precise slices of being practical, and they force you into and you can learn that mode to like, I learned how to survive graduate school, from chess. And I also think like, I mean, it’s not just for your own use, like you can use it to see me. I mean, this is maybe maybe you’ll think this is kind of a weak defense. But I played some pretty nasty Machiavellian games, where I play like an evil capitalist overlord. And then like, that mode is actually totally usable to me, like in life to simulate, like people that are trying to destroy my department, right? The Business School is trying to defund the philosophy department. I know how they’re thinking, because I’ve simulated them in a game. Right?

Ray Briggs
Right. So this suggests that like, one of the benefits of games is that they allow you to practice skills in this like, really targeted way. And then you could recast the question about whether there are games that you shouldn’t play as, like, Are there skills that are bad to practice? Like, is it is it sometimes bad to practice thinking in a Machiavellian way? Are there other skills that you just like, maybe first person shooters, like maybe I shouldn’t practice shooting people?

Thi Nguyen
I mean, a lot of people say that you practice skills in games. But I think that’s actually kind of a weaker way to put it. Because games just don’t make you do something they make you adopt a different goal. So it’s not just a skill, it’s like a package of practicing a skill inside a certain goal, like the board game diplomacy is the package of the skill of speech, and political manipulation against like, putting into the background goal of like, trying to get people to do what you want, right? And like that package. I mean, that’s actually why it’s particularly dangerous, because you’re actually stepping into a mode where you think like, right, my goal here is to beat everybody else.

Josh Landy
I love that. That’s, I mean, of course, that’s a morally neutral goal. Right, best, right. But, but it strikes me there are a lot of habits or capacities that I think are just good that it could plausibly get from games I, I think of improv, you know, I, I do some improv sometimes very badly. And that seems like a space where you’re practicing risk taking teamwork and tolerating failure, and creativity. I want to ask you a broader question about skills from games. What do you think about that? So there’s a famous Dutch historian, Johan Holzinger, who, of course, you cite in your book, at the great theorist of games, who says that when you’re playing a game, one is always knower and Dupit? What’s so you’re, you’re, you know, you’re sort of absorbed in the game you’re taking really seriously, but you also have one foot firmly outside? Do you think that’s an important mental capacity? And that’s something we’re practicing from a super early age, right? These games that make believe that children play, do you think that could potentially cultivate in us a really important psychological capacity to step back from our own beliefs or harsh beliefs?

Thi Nguyen
Yeah, I mean, the super interesting thing to me about games is that in games, you have to enter into an alternate mode of being where you focus on a different goal and focus on different abilities. And if you play a lot of games, I think you actually get practice stepping in to these like focus dates, and then stepping back from them. And I think that’s actually like, one of the most valuable things that like a life with games can give you is this kind of fluidity with your cares and fluidity with your focuses. So in normal life, I think like, we’re just constantly surrounded by our values are really unclear. Our values are like rich and subtle. And then suddenly, in a game, we know exactly what we’re doing and exactly what we’re trying to do. And we know exactly how we’re done. Because the game tells us how many points we made. And that’s like, really satisfying. But it tells and it’s something we actually need in daily life. Like, I mean, I think a lot of people like they put on a Fitbit, because the Fitbit gets them to do something because they know exactly what they’re doing. But it’s also really important to be able to step back from it. And I think one thing a game can get you to practice is leaping into this very narrow, very precise way of looking at the world, and then stepping back from it and assessing it in a much richer way.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re asking what’s in a game with Thi Nguyen win from the University of Utah, author of “Games: Agency as Art.”

Ray Briggs
So Thi, I’m wondering when you talk about sort of the value of gaining flexibility by adopting new goals and sort of being able to focus yourself down on achieving them. I wondering if the value that comes from like the game is helping you to do a good thing in your life. Apart from the aesthetic value of a game, so I remember actually learning to touch type with these, like touch typing games that were extremely good at teaching me a skill. And were also really crappy as games like they were super boring. I think I learned to Mavis Beacon. She was awful.

Thi Nguyen
Yeah, I mean, interestingly, like a lot of people, when they talk about games and have this kind of moralistic and social worry, the thing they most want to say is, what can I learn from the game? But I think that’s for people that study other parts of like, I think, for people that study literature and movie, if your first question is, what’s the educational value you’ve missed? Like a huge amount of it. I think, this idea that games shape action points. So one of the ways that games are really a really unique artistically. So what the game often does is it creates a practical scenario that makes it really likely that your own actions are going to be beautiful, or graceful, or elegant, or thrilling, or even funny, right? So games are this really unique kind of art, where, instead of the artists making an object, and you look at the object, and you’re like, oh, that object is beautiful. The game gets you to do certain things. And then you are the one that’s beautiful, like you are the ones that elegant, it draws those beauties out of you and like sculpts your scenario so that your own actions, inventions can be rich and thrilling. And I think like that’s, that’s, I mean, there are these beauties who are practical action. That’s around surround our lives. I mean, I think I bet you that a lot of us are in philosophy and philosophy precisely because you have these moments where suddenly like, all the ideas snap into focus, and everything is super elegant and super beautiful. Or like, I remember this moment where a car careened into my lane, and I’ve just like dodged around it and I just had this feel at that moment that just like, everything about my reactions was happening perfectly. But that almost never happens in life, because the world is crap. And we barely fit it. And the whole point about games, is that in games, a designer can create who you are and what you want, and your environment to match. So that games can concentrate the possibility of these moments of your own elegance.

Josh Landy
I love this. So I want to agree with you. But then I also want to read an email that challenges both of our optimism, right, so So my agreement is, you know, he’s gonna go says into the confusion of life, a game brings a temporary limited perfection, I think it’s lovely that he goes along with what you’re saying, right? That, that these magic circle of gameplay is a kind of glimpse of utopia. It’s like a moment of order, a moment where you have the skills, and what you do is beautiful and elegant. And, and it’s a, it’s a space of sociability, where you’re in harmony with your opponent, you’re grateful to your opponent for for trying to be you and, and values is so clear. And I agree with all of that. But here’s the email. It’s from Maurice, who sent us a comment that philosophy talked about O R G. And he says, I love games, I enjoy playing them and watching them. However, games have become a powerful metaphor in our society that’s helped to erode the complexity of our moral thinking. The moral conditions of life are too nuanced to allow game metaphors to dominate our social and political thinking. What do you think about that potential dark side to games?

Thi Nguyen
I totally think that’s right. I mean, so a lot of people worry about whether games will make people more violent. And I think there’s actually plenty of psychological evidence that that doesn’t happen. And one of the reasons that happens is because the violence in the game is fictional. And most of us have the capacity to screen off fictional acts like it’s the same reason why we don’t get violent from watching the Sopranos. But I think there’s something so Jesper jewel, who’s a really good game scholar, whose way of putting it is that he says games are half real. So if I headshot you in a first person shooter and the game fictionally, I’ve killed you. But in reality, I have scored over you and scored points on you. And the thing that I think the real thing, the thing that we might export, is this, the sensation of the mean, in games, it’s so glorious, because you know exactly what you’re doing. And you can feel those points coming in. And the real thing I’m worried about is exporting that attitude, outside of games. In the book, I think like, the great ending slogan to the book is like, I’m not worried about games, making serial killers. I’m worried about games, making Wall Street bankers. super worried that, like you’ll, if the bad effects of games is that you’ll export this expectation to the world be crisp and clear and quantified, and suddenly you’ll walk out and instead of like, deciding for yourself, like what you really care about, you will immediately being attracted to institutions that just feed you points, like capitalism, or if you’re an academic suddenly get obsessed with citation rates, or if you’re on Twitter, and you’ll just get obsessed with like, math. surmising your likes and follows like, that’s the attitude that I’m worried about. And part of the reason I worry about it is because in games, you get to have this moment where because there’s such secluded spaces, it’s okay to just go all out and use everything in the game to achieve that one purpose. But if you export that attitude to like Twitter, you will help to destroy the world.

Ray Briggs
We have a question from Miles in San Francisco. Miles asks, is it ever permissible to play to lose like letting a child when choosing the most beautiful move instead of the winning one, or tanking out of defiance or protest? Maybe that’s a solution to our previous problem. Didn’t give you seriously?

Thi Nguyen
Yeah, that’s a great question. It’s interesting, because it’s not all games. But I think some games, the games only work if everyone is genuinely trying to win, but it’s not like there’s only one way to play a game, right? Like, what’s really interesting to me is a lot of games, I think we actually are all playing to lose in a really complicated way. So this is like there’s the the most important thing moment in the book philosophically, for me, is this moment where I’m trying to figure out like, what the purpose is for playing games. And I think there are two different approaches to playing games. One is called achievement play. And achievement plays when you’re playing for the value of winning, and one is called striving play. And striving play in is when you’re temporarily taking an interest in winning. For the fun or the interest of the struggle, you don’t really care about winning, but you just pretend to deepen your heart, you care about winning temporarily, just so you can be involved in the struggle. So a lot of people don’t actually think this is real. And here’s my argument that it’s real. Consider the following category. Stupid games. So stupid game is a game where the fun part is failing. But it’s only fun if you’re actually trying to win. So examples of stupid games are like Twister, the children’s game of telephone, a lot of drinking games, right? So think about Twister. The part that’s great. The part you that you want is when you fall because that’s what’s funny, right? But it’s only funny because it’s a failure. And it’s only a failure if you’re actually trying to win. So I think we actually do this really weird thing, where we are actually, in some sense, playing to lose. But the only way that it’s like, fun to lose is if we like make ourselves so absorbed in the attempt to win that we kind of forget that we’re trying to lose. So but then when we lose, we’re like, yeah, that was the point. And then we laugh. And that’s also like, most good drinking games.

Josh Landy
That is fantastic. I’ll drink to that. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about what’s in a game with Thi Nguyen from the University of Utah, author of “Games: Agency as Art.”

Ray Briggs
Have you made exercise into a game? Did it help? Shouldn’t games take over more of our lives? Or should we grownups just put away childish things?

Josh Landy
Your life as a game—plus commentary from Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Uncle Vic
Space invaders, his brain is cooked.

Josh Landy
Even if Space Invaders just cooks your brain, maybe other games have more to offer. I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Thi Nguyen from the University of Utah, and we’re asking what’s in a game?

Josh Landy
So Thi, we’ve been talking a lot about the benefits of existing games, but what are the games go from here? If you were writing a game, what would you want it to look like?

Thi Nguyen
I see both like a truly amazing thing that games can do, and like a hellscape, that games can bring us. So you’re gonna decide when you you want to talk about like looking at the games world right now games are. So I keep seeing new games that are incredibly innovative. By the way, I just want to be clear, a lot of the AAA video games that I’ve been seeing are really boring, they just seem to get you to do the same kinds of actions. But with fancier and fancier graphics, the games that seem really interesting to me, there’s parts of the board game world and parts of the role playing world that just are spitting out these brilliant, innovative designs that create like new kinds of sociality. They create, like new ways of relating to each other and collaborate each other. And those are amazing. The thing that I’m most afraid of is corporations, gaming activities. Because I think if you actually understand why games are good, then you’ll see that gamification is actually like the most terrifying thing coming down the pike.

Ray Briggs
Do you think that this has not already happened with social media?

Thi Nguyen
Oh, my God, okay. Yes, I think it’s kind of funny because a lot of people will say to me, Oh, you work on games. Do you think games are good? You must love gamification. And I’m like, Look, if there’s anything I understand about games, it teaches me that Twitter is like one of the most dangerous things like in human existence. And the reason is what makes games so wonderful is you get this experience of of being absolutely dedicated to a goal and not having to worry about everything else. And you get that because there’s such a simple scoring mechanism. And all you have to do is care about that. So when you go over to Twitter, right, what Twitter does is, you get that gamified trickle, where you keep keeping up points. And like you make something and you see, like, more people are liking it, it feels so good. But it really feels good if you care about those points. But those points aren’t the same as like the rich value of communication, right? Those points are a really, really, really narrow goal. They’re just the goal of popularity. I think the more Twitter get to talks on us, the more it’s going to change what we value, and change what we care about communication for,

Josh Landy
You know, for fear of us going down the dark path. And let me come back to some of the more positive thoughts we’ve had a moment ago, you were talking about the potential for, for games to choose the happy path of new forms of sociability. So I wanted to ask you a bit about that. Because it seems to me that when people talk about the morally positive outcomes of games, they’re talking about three things, right. One is, games are trying to teach us lessons. And monopoly of course, did that. Unfortunately, it seems like it backfires on all the time. And then there’s the kind of simulation right, I get to kind of learn the mind of the enemy. We were talking about that in relation to diplomacy and stuff like that. But then there’s also I think, most importantly, the the social aspect, we aren’t just playing by ourselves, usually, we’re playing at least with one person such as multiple people, and, and we get together and we collaborate. And so do you think that the games that exist currently in the games on the horizon, are doing it right? They’re encouraging healthy forms of sociability? What do you think?

Thi Nguyen
Totally depends on the game. There are a lot that I think create these very simplified relationships. But there are other ones especially the indie tabletop role playing world is full of these fascinating games. Like there’s a game called the quiet year, into the quiet year, your some of you are collectively playing the entire citizenry and world of a small village surviving after the apocalypse. And you play like thematic elements. So one of you might for a while play like VR, and another one of you might play, like, a pandemic coming through and you together like draw a map, where you put in different outposts and events and emotional moods in the world. And when you do this, when you like, play a township together, like you get this completely different relationship to other people than you would if you were just trying to shoot each other points or something like that. It’s those games, the game that I think you should be most interested in, is the game microscope. So microscope was a game built on the role playing world for people to collaboratively create the history of the world they were going to play in. And it is incredible game where you where you start putting events in the history. And then you start drilling down and asking questions about how they connect. And when you ask such a question, all of you have to invent roles, and act for a while until you find out what happened in history. And that the experience of that is like it’s not like any other relationship I’ve had with people before the ability to like, collaboratively create a whole historical epoch together,

Ray Briggs
I wanted to ask about games that are sort of meta or do commentary on themselves as games. So you kept talking about sort of boring games that have you do the same action over and over again. And that made me think of the Flash game, loved from 2010, which is deliberately bought. So you have a character whose graphics are not that fancy. And the character basically, you get you get asked, like, for an option, like I think I think you could ask, So are you a boy or a girl, and then whichever one you decide, it decides, oh, I’m going to make you the other one. And then it periodically says, like, mean things to you as you try to navigate yourself over these spikes. And actually, I’ve played it, it feels terrible, but it’s sort of terrible, this interesting way that that is sort of about what it would be like to be treated that way by other human beings. So that’s a really, so is there something to be said about games that are like from inside are really unpleasant, but from outside, teach you some bigger thing and are sort of aesthetically interesting.

Thi Nguyen
There are plenty of games that are profoundly unpleasant most of the way through, but are interesting. These are precisely the games that academics and cultural critics seize on, because it’s really easy to point out like the literary meaning, but they’re often really boring to play, generally, right? They’re really they’re not making decisions and like, one of the things actually got me into the games project was there are all these people that seem to want games to be serious and the way they It was they made them more like movies or more like texts. And the way they did that was to strip out most of the options and make it so fixed that they couldn’t load meaning into it in the way that we’re used to loading meaning into movies and texts. And it works. And it’s recognizable. But I kind of think it’s like, artistically cheap. I mean, I actually, I should be careful, I haven’t played the game you’re talking about. But I’ve seen a lot of games like this, that, you know, cultural critics and scholars would be like, Oh, that’s really interesting. I can say lots of things about it. But I think a lot of the times, it’s harder to say things about games that are really innovative in their mechanics and agency, partially because we don’t have the critical language for it’s so unique. It’s hard for people reared like I was on literary and film criticism and philosophical criticism, to have something to say. But does that make sense? Yeah, totally.

Josh Landy
I, I think it’s great strength of your approach that doesn’t totally depend on a game, having these this sort of built in moral architecture or something. I’m curious about games like The Walking Dead, where they’re superficially fun, but they also like they, they give you options, and they tell you later, what choices you made and make you feel bad about yourself. So I think there are some cases like that. But I want to Can I come back a little bit to the wonderful thing you were saying right before the break, you raise some lovely powered, delicious paradoxes, about the way human beings relate to games, right? One of which you cited before about how the fun is in failing, but you can’t fail unless you try to succeed in the silly games. There’s also the you know, if you try too hard, you ruin the game. But if you don’t try, you also ruin the game. And then the one I really wanted to ask you about, which is sort of paradox of, of of activity, what counts is the activity, but you wouldn’t have the activity. And so you have the goal, right? What counts is the journey, but there’s no journeyman of destination. Right? Can you say a little bit more about that? Like, what’s the paradox there?

Thi Nguyen
So it’s super, I mean, I think the stuff you’re, you’re referring to comes from Bernard suit. So bird suit is incredible. Philosopher who’s who was kind of misunderstood in this time, he wrote in the 70s, his book called The grasshopper, which is like, it’s a philosophical kind of games. And he has his definition of a game. And the quick version of it is that games are taking on voluntarily, unnecessary obstacles, to create the experience of trying to overcome them. And it’s incredible. I mean, so much of the stuff I’ve thought about games comes from this analysis. And what he’s saying is basically, like, Look, if you’re running a marathon, the point of running the marathon is not just to get to that location in space and time where the finish line is, because there’s so many easier ways to get there, you gotta like hire a taxi, right call a lift, you’ll get there really easily, the point of running the marathon is to do it under your own steam. So one way the philosophical he puts it is, is close what you’re saying. The goal of the game is actually partially constituted by the obstacles that you have to take on. So in other words, the constraint of making it hard for yourself, you’re deliberately making it hard for yourself. So this is big question about like, why would you ever do that? And some people have the answer? Oh, it’s because doing anything hard is worthwhile? And I have the answer that, oh, it’s because by putting on constraints, you’re sculpting a different kind of action. And that action can be like, you can push things into a really beautiful space like, here’s, I’m a rock climber. Here’s a interesting example. So rock climbing, a lot of the most kinds of rock climbing, are called the or half an hour called free climbing, and what free climbing is, it’s not the same as free soloing, which a lot of people confuse it with. free climbing is when you ascend the rock, using only your hands and feet on features of the rock without pulling on the rope. And like beginners will often say like, Oh, my God, what a stupid constraint, why can’t I just pull on the rope and just go up more easily? And the answer is actually, if you pull on the rope, then every rock climb is the same motion, it’s really boring. But if you forbid yourself from pulling on the rope, then every set of rock features pushes you to do and invent different kinds of motion. It forces you into all kinds of very specific, inventive, flowing, sensitive problem solving. So I think like that makes sense. I think the constraints are there. And part of the reason that constraints are there is to make you do a certain kind of activity to sculpt that activity to push you in to a form of moving or thinking that you wouldn’t normally do otherwise.

Josh Landy
Thi, this has been amazingly educational but also a lot of fun. So thanks so much for joining us today. Thank you. Our guest has been Tina when Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah and author of games agency as our survey what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
So I know at the beginning of the show, I’m made fun of games. But actually, I think that even simple games have hidden depths. There are the depths that he was talking about with agency. But there are also mathematical depths to games. And I’ve been revisiting Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Games columns from Scientific American, which are republished in a series of books. And he writes about games that include tic tac toe, chess, tangrams, mazes, all this stuff I really enjoyed playing with as a kid. And he uses them to explain really interesting mathematical concepts. And so learning the rules of those games is easy, but then those rules turn out to have consequences that are beautiful and surprising.

Josh Landy
You know, I love those games, I used to play the with my dad who’s a mathematician, and we have the best nerdy fun. Thank you so much for for reminding me of them. I have to go back to those. We’re gonna put links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our website philosophy talked about our G, where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comments@philosophytalk.org and we might feature it on the blog. Now, it’s a race against the clock for Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… I’ve always liked games, not sports, but games, played them all my life, never had any mixed feelings about them, unless I was losing. I suppose you could consider games a waste of time, but depending on your perspective, what isn’t? Eating is time spent away from sex, sex is time spent not working, working is a fool’s game, but without fool’s games how would you part a fool from his money, which makes the world go round. Trouble comes up when we think that life itself is like a game, when in fact, games only provide fleeting metaphors for MOMENTS in our lives, metaphors like 52 pick up, Risk, 3D chess, busted flush, draw to an inside straight, choke at bat, knock out a homer, strike out, feed the kitty, raise the bar, sit this one out, see, pass, raise, toss the dice, bet the farm, throw in the deck, cash in your chips, do not pass go. Life can be like a game, but only in flashes, and we don’t know the rules. Only games have rules. Also, if agency is assigned to your avatar, it’s a game. In other words, bishops go diagonally, rooks go right angles, queens go anywhere, ditto kings, but only one square are a time. Unlike life, you never ever leave the board. And you know how many spaces you can go. You know what stands in your way. You know your turn. And always remember, your avatar has no feelings. And neither should you. The poker face hides your tells. The point is, foolish or not, we often bring that game playing energy to life. And some of that is fine. We can certainly add the playing of games to the list of pleasures life offers. Without pinochle, my days would have been diminished. The slapping of cards on a table can be as eloquent as a conversation. A good way to get to know children is to play a game with them. Parties can be more fun with Twister, Charades, Murder, Spin the Bottle. And, as Lewis Carroll wrote, kings and queens are nothing but a pack of cards– as are we all! How ironic that playing cards exist to provide us with metaphors, free on demand! And we can thank our lucky stars we have Parcheesi, to give us hope that winning means we end where we began. Back when I worked for a videogame company I used to amuse myself in my cubicle wondering what life would be like if it WAS more like a game? I could have branched out. I could have stopped in Nevada on my way to California, lived my days as a dealer in high end poker games, married a Keno girl, then a show girl, then a bitter divorcee like me, had five kids among us, lived gingerly on tips and bribes, all without showing my face outside the cubicle at the videogame company where I was wondering what life would be like as a game. If it was all a dream, I would not be here now. With my luck, I’d be on the last episode of Forensic Files before you hit the sack. Absurd, unlike games, which have designers around who think a lot about what a game should be. Is there winning? Even if not, you can be sure designers always have an endgame in mind, final boss or not, failure is all on you. Some phenomena recently seem determined to convert life into a game. I’m thinking of Q Anon, the weird yet massive online thingie that passes along cryptic messages from Q, a secret government guy, and has birthed a massive secret parallel world that has conspiracies, a living JFK Junior, pedophilia, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump as the secret savior of the world. It’s all coming down soon, apparently, because Trump will either be gone or reelected, and either way time is running out for this passle of nonsense. You watch the show. Solve the clues. But, as in a game, you just sit there. You win Q Anon by watching. So what is a game? If the box says, “game,” there’s one sign. If the box says, “Life,” on the other hand, well, what kind of game is that? It’s a game by Milton Bradley, silly. You pick up children and money and throw it all in a car, and drive until you hit Nevada, then you throw it all away, get a job as a poker dealer, go in debt, and wake up from your nap in the cubicle at the videogame company, saying, “Whew, that was close.” I gotta go.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2020.

Ray Briggs
Our executive producer is Tina Pamintuan.

Josh Landy
The Senior Producer is Devin Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research. Cindy Prince Baum is our Director of Marketing.

Ray Briggs
Thanks also to Merle Kessler, Angela Johnston and Lauren Schecter.

Josh Landy
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University and from the partners at our online Community of Thinkers.

Ray Briggs
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program did not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Josh Landy
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you too can become a partner in our community of thinkers. I’m Josh Landy

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.