Home > Work > Games: Agency as Art
1 " Games let us flirt with such seductive agencies in a protected context. 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. You will be used to wearing your submersion a little lightly. Then when life hands you far more pressing agential modes, and value clarities with more seriousness and force behind them - when you face the calls of the crisp and clear value systems inherent in money, grades, Twitter likes, and research impact factors - you will have developed the right habits of lightness and control with your agency. "
― , Games: Agency as Art
2 " We started our inquiry into the aesthetics of games with various accounts that tried to subsume games under more familiar forms of art - fictions, conceptual art, and the like. But, I've argued, some of the most important kin to game design are actually urban planners, and government designers. All these are attempts to cope and corral the agency of users, to achieve certain effects. Games are an artistic cousin to cities and governments. They are systems of rules and constraints for active agents. But game designers have a trick up their sleeves that the designers of cities and governments do not. They can substantially design the nature of agents who will act within them. The medium of agency is active, then, in two directions. It creates a distinctive recalcitrance - the recalcitrance of agential distance. And it offers a a distinctive sort of solution - the manipulation of agency. "
