A Life-Changing Philosophy of Games

Published on 2023-01-30

🎧 The Ezra Klein Show - A Philosophy of Games That Is Really a Philosophy of Life

I recently listened to this excellent episode of the always interesting Ezra Klein Show and took some notes. This relates to the note I wrote about games that I’m addicted to but are bad for me¹ and to the effects of social media in our lives (which want to write about). Just listen to it and thank me later.

• C. Thi Nguyen is a philosopher whose work focuses on games, Twitter, echo chambers and the nature of truth.
• Interesting definition: games are a form of art that manipulates our agency, the same way music manipulates what we hear and painting manipulates what we see.
• Points systems inform how we act in a game, they tell us what to care about. Increasingly, companies, institutions and governments utilize game-like points systems to influence how we act in their own interests (good or bad). One problem is that these interests not always align with our own, we end up playing a game we don’t want to play. A bigger problem is when we don’t even know we are playing a game.
• Points systems simplify complex interactions and dynamics into one-dimensional metrics such as Likes on Twitter² or the Tomato-meter on Rotten Tomatoes³.
• My experience with university is an example of a game in which the point system didn’t align with my interests (grades vs. actual learning).
• My experience with social media, mainly Twitter, is an example of a game I don’t even want to be playing.

The world is an existential hellscape with too many values and games offer a temporary relief from that.

• C. Thi Nguyen

• Nguyen won me over in the first minute of speaking when he quoted Reinier Knizia, quite possibly the GOAT of board game design.
• Nguyen captures perfectly the joy of a good game:

And the more I thought about this, the more I thought it revealed what makes the experience of games so compelling, and so beautiful, and so dangerous, which is that they simplify the value landscape. I’m trying to live a good life and all the values that are out there for me are really complicated and really weird. Like, I am trying to parent, and be a researcher, and participate in the teaching community, and keep myself happy and not melt down during the pandemic. And it’s hard to know how to measure these values off against each other. And it’s hard to know how well I’m doing.

But games give you this one moment where instead of the nausea of a billion different values and you have no idea how well you’re doing— games give you a moment where you know exactly what you’re doing because there are points. And you know exactly how well you’ve done, right? You know exactly how you’re succeeding, because the points have clear explicit mechanical rules to tell you how to get them. And that’s not true of parenting, or research, or— I don’t know— being a spouse.

• C. Thi Nguyen

• The beauty of games lies in how they change the way you think. You don’t play a game to win against your friends, you play a game because their point systems change your behaviour in a fun/pleasurable/interesting way.
• Sometimes we lose sight of the importance of activities and focus too much on their outcomes. This is another version of outcome-oriented vs. process-oriented.

To play a game is to voluntarily take on unnecessary obstacles for the sake of making possible the activity of overcoming them.

• Bernard Suits - The Grasshopper

• For Bernard Suits, the interesting thing about games is that you have this finish line, but reaching it doesn’t count unless you did it under specific constraints. This resonates with me and explains why I’m a Barcelona fan. Playing the game loses value if you didn’t do it passing your way into the opponent’s goal.
• I have to play Baba Is You now.

In the world, our goals and our abilities and the world— a lot of the times they don’t align. You do what you want. And to get what you want, you have to do something incredibly boring and repetitive. Or you face problems that are way beyond you.

But in games, because the game designer manipulates what you want to do and the abilities and the obstacles, the game designer can create harmonious action. They can create these possibilities where the obstacles you face and your abilities just match perfectly. So this is the weird sense in which I feel like games are like an existential balm for the horror of life. A lot of life is you don’t fit. You have to do things. And it sucks and it’s horrible and it’s boring.

And in games, for once in your life, you know exactly what you’re doing and you know exactly that you can do it. And then you have just the right amount of ability to do it. It’s a feeling of concentrated, crystallized action.

• C. Thi Nguyen

I’m more worried about games breeding more Wall Street profiteers than I am about their breeding serial killers.

• C. Thi Nguyen

• I’ve literally felt this. I grew up playing violent games before their recommended age and never felt the urge to kill anyone. But for years of my life I’ve felt lost in a world where I don’t have a clear goal, my skills are not well suited to the obstacles I find and there are no easy dungeons to grind XP in. Klein sums it up perfectly:

A lot of people think that kids playing a lot of games in which you end up shooting folks are going to think about shooting folks. That doesn’t appear to be true. What might be true is if you spend all your time in point-scoring environments, you will become used to life being about scoring points.

• Ezra Klein

When I play board games and video games, I play one and then I step back and I ask myself— not in the terms of the game itself— I don’t ask myself, did I make points? What I ask myself was, was that fun? Was that worthwhile? Was that interesting? But when you pervasively gamify something like Twitter, you don’t. You get stuck. You don’t step back. You don’t tour a million things. You’re just in an agential straitjacket. C. Thi Nguyen

• Nguyen compares consipiracy theories to games. We live in a hyper-specialised world where you have to trust experts beyond your understanding in order to reach “the truth”. I know that climate change is real, but I can’t explain all the science that proves it. This is a frustrating experience that, much like games, conspiracy theories offer a solution to. They offer little worlds where you can understand and manage everything. Sometimes they even offer a community of peers that support you, understand you and even respect you. They offer intellectual agency. Thinking about it like that makes it harder to blame anyone for seeking that.
• Klein asks how to develop a sensitivity to these game-like systems around us, how to develop game mindfulness. Nguyen talks about how he developed a sense of suspicion for highly pleasurable activities:

So if someone out there was trying to create a belief system to get you onto it using game-like design theory to get you into this exciting usable space, then you should expect it to just feel really good when you adopt that belief system. And I think this is one of the markers, right? The real world is extremely frustrating, extremely difficult, full of things that you don’t want to believe, full of things that are hard to understand.

And sometimes someone will present me with a system of belief. And as I adopt it, it just gives me everything I want. The world seems to start to make sense. I feel empowered. I feel good. Everything’s falling into place. And I’m not saying that’s necessarily false, because sometimes that’s what it feels like to really figure things out. But I’m saying sometimes you just need to be suspicious.

• C. Thi Nguyen

• Apply this to games, social media apps, ideologies, processed food…

So in the book, I end up distinguishing between two kinds of aesthetics— object aesthetics and process aesthetics. So object aesthetics is like when an artist makes a thing like a painting. And you look at the thing and the thing is beautiful. And process aesthetics is where games fit for me. The artist makes a thing. And you interact with the thing and you’re beautiful. Your actions are beautiful, or comic, or thrilling. And I think there’s actually all this process aesthetics elsewhere in the world that a lot of us who have been trained to be hyper-oriented towards just the measurable output miss out.

• C. Thi Nguyen

• Nguyen then gives a great example: when people review cooking books, they talk about how good the dishes were in the end. They never talk about how fun the process of cooking them was. Hyper-focusing on the result makes you miss all the pleasures of the process.