Description
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewThis book is a total joy to read. Thi Nguyen's energy radiates from every page -- the prose is truly delightful, with all sorts of poetic turns of phrase enlivening the arguments and a whole world of games vibrantly described in rich detail. Indeed, if you're sceptical that games could be art, it may be because your game playing is limited to the likes of chess and gin rummy, and you are totally unaware, as I was until reading this book, of the incredible richness of the world of games. * Gwen Bradford, Mind Association *
Nguyen's stunning book is philosophically deep, playful and incredibly readable. It changed how I think about games and art and (ultimately) life. * Aaron Meskin, Professor and Head of Philosophy, University of Georgia *
Nguyen's book is simultaneously a field-defining treatment of the aesthetics of games, a deep (and very cool) move in ethics and theory of agency, and the strongest, mostexciting work I've seen on practical reasoning since the mid-2000s * Elijah Millgram, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, University of Utah *
Nguyen (philosophy, Univ. of Utah) analyzes games as aesthetic creations engaging the "art of agency," whose ultimate higher-order goals include the development of a "library of agencies"—the discovery (or creation) and practice of modes of achieving goals in general. Despite the obvious (and acknowledged) debt to Bernard Suits's The Grasshopper (1978), this is no mere echo or defense of Suits's view of play, but rather a sophisticated and updated elaboration thereof, with many carefully chosen examples to support a variety of nuanced theses. ... This work significantly advances the philosophy of games, and will be a rewarding read for anyone interested in the other fields mentioned above, regardless of their level of experience. * S. E. Forschler, CHOICE *
Table of ContentsChapter 1: Agency as art PART I: GAMES AND AGENCY Chapter 2: The possibility of striving play Chapter 3: Layers of agency Chapter 4: Games and autonomy PART II: AGENCY AND ART Chapter 5: The aesthetics of agency Chapter 6: Framed agency Chapter 7: The distance in the game PART III: SOCIAL AND MORAL TRANSFORMATIONS Chapter 8: Games as social transformation Chapter 9: Gamification and value capture Chapter 10: The value of striving
