The Power of Focus with C. Thi Nguyen

A conversation with philosopher and author C. Thi Nguyen about the power of focus, the precision of puzzles, the dangers and delights of games and play and the distinction between them.

We talk about his recent book Games, Agency as Art and well as his popular articles Echo Chambers and Epistemic Bubbles and How Twitter gamifies communication.


Some of the books and people mentioned are:

Mary Poovey, History of the Modern Fact

Theodore Porter, Trust in Numbers

Bernard Suits definition of games

Jerry Levinson, Moral Outrage Porn

Basho: even in Kyoto / when I hear a cuckoo cry / I long for Kyoto

Feminist philosophy of art by Anne Eaton

Annette Baier, Trust and Anti-Trust


Transcript:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Love and Philosophy Beyond Dichotomies. Today, we're  📍 talking to C. Thi Nguyen. Mostly about his book Games ,Agency as Art but also about many other things....about love, how is it related to games? Thi is a kind of philosopher's philosopher, so it's a little surprising to hear him say that philosophy was his backup career that he actually wanted to be a novelist.  But when you hear how much pleasure he takes in Kant's formula of humanity, I think you'll also imagine he's always been a philosopher as well....we turn back and forth and shift around like a Rubik's cube. Art. Porn. Focus. Vulnerability. We talk a lot about trust...

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Transcript

The Power of Focus & the precision of puzzles

Andrea: [00:00:00] Hello, everyone. Welcome to Love and Philosophy Beyond Dichotomies. Today, we're talking to C. Thi Nguyen. Mostly about his book Games Agency as Art but also about many other things. Of course about love. How is it related to games? Thi is a kind of philosopher's philosopher. So it's a little surprising to hear him say that philosophy was his backup career that he actually wanted to be a novelist. But when you hear how much pleasure he takes in Kant's formula of humanity, I think like me, you will also imagine he's always been a philosopher as well. And he is a very good writer. And that that can sometimes be a trouble in the philosophical world. Sometimes it's a little suspect. A lot of people we think of as writers like Nietzsche or Camus. Or Hannah Arendt who herself said, she's not a [00:01:00] philosopher sort of. Um, as a way of addressing this exact issue. uh are not really considered real philosophers in some very particular analytic circles, but of course, in other circles, they are. So it really just matters where you're coming from, but still it it's an interesting little puzzle. That we do turn back and forth and shift around like a Rubik's cube. Art porn. Focus vulnerability. We talk a lot about trust as that's another topic that Thi writes about a lot. And we do talk about these boundaries of the academic and artistic voice. Um, Are games and art about the attitude one brings to them or the object itself. Does being an agent mean we have an experience of agency? How gamified have our lives become? How aware are we of the stakes of that? Agency that's being set for us either by game makers or coders or. What does a game really? And how is it different from play? [00:02:00] Uh, Thi helps me understand that a bit. Rather offhandedly. He gives me maybe one of the best definitions. I've ever heard. A casual sort of definition about. What a philosopher is really doing we're talking about neutrality. And he says, something about how in his own life, this, the richness that he's gotten from philosophers is not from thinking of philosophers as some standpoint -free neutral observer, but rather it's been understanding philosophers as people questioning. And I think he says thinking and talking out of themselves, I really liked this phrase. Out of themselves. Because it can mean, you know, from within, , from one's own path and trajectory and experience, and it can also mean sort of moving beyond that. Into different, agential agent bases or perspectives. Which is all stuff I'm really interested in, in my own research. And. Thi he gives sheds, a lot of light on that. He's really good at pulling these kinds of threads apart. Of things that [00:03:00] we assume go together. For example, virtual reality spaces and gaming, not always the same thing. Of course you can play games in virtual reality spaces. Uh, but it's easy to assume as I do some times that all of that is a kind of play. Also the social media spaces that we're in, we also talk a lot about focus and the power of it. The power of focus for both good and bad, of course, depending on how you might want to use it. And we talk about this terrifying vulnerability. of how entangled we all really are. And the trust that is required not only to play games, but just to experience any form of art or connection, to live really. So love might be the opposite of games because it's non-disposable, as he says, it's non fungible. Uh, but also you can love games and we should enjoy them, as we're playing them. So. enjoy this conversation and read Thi's work if you haven't already. It's interesting timely. He's someone who [00:04:00] loves art and film, and you get to experience that in his writing. I learned a lot here. Uh, even about rock climbers, and the percentage of mathematicians and, uh, Analytic philosophers that happen to do it. Makes a lot of sense, the logic of it, but I hadn't thought of it before. anyway. Okay. I hope you enjoy this. Here we go.

Andrea: Hi Thi thank you for being on the show today. 

C. Thi Nguyen: It's great to be here. 

Andrea: So, this is about love and philosophy, which can be a little daunting, those words together, but I want to start with language, because you're a very good writer, and I've also heard you speak, and you're a very good speaker, and I have a friend who used to say that, you can't be a good speaker and a good writer, I don't know why he says that, but, I'm just wondering, have you always been articulate? How did you, tell me about your entry into the landscape of language. 

C. Thi Nguyen: I mean, [00:05:00] philosophy was my, second backup career. I was supposed to be a novelist. 

Andrea: There we go. I thought you wrote about food though. This is getting 

C. Thi Nguyen: confusing. That was also a side gig. I was supposed to be a novelist.

I'm a failed novelist. I took tons of creative writing classes through college. I think my first professional journalism was like, I was like 15 and there was this contest in the local newspaper to be the teenage reviewer and then they gave it to two of us and I think they were expecting us to 

be the excitable teenagers, but if you get like an essay contest for 15 year olds, you're going to get the two most pretentious fucking asshole who just want to talk about like Polish art movies and Robert Altman or shit like that. So, yeah, so I was, I always thought I was a writer. I did fiction stuff.

Weirdly, I kind of did philosophy as a backup career. I've always cared about writing. It's very hard for me to separate. For a lot of [00:06:00] philosophers There's this I think academic tone that you learn and I I've always been kind of allergic to it I had to learn it to get through graduate school 

Andrea: you can do it when you have to do it 

C. Thi Nguyen: But I I learned and got programmed to do this academic tone, and I had to talk my way out of it, but it was like finding my way back to like my actual writing style. I was part of this literary magazine in undergrad years, and it was anonymous submission.

Where were 

Andrea: you by the way?

C. Thi Nguyen: I was an immigrant scholarship kid at Harvard. playing on the lit mag with all these fancy New York types, but you had to submit anonymously and Whenever I would submit something, people would find me afterwards, like, that was yours. That was like, how did you know? And they're like, it sounds exactly like you.

I could tell from the first sentence that it sounds exactly like you. And I felt like grad school kind of beat that out of me. And then I had to like, refine, refind through my own like nervousness and [00:07:00] sorrow, like 18.

Andrea: That's really interesting to me it's not a dichotomy exactly, but there is this weird thing between serious writing and literary writing and you know, bloggish kind of writing, but all that's getting confused now too.

So yeah, how do you think that serves a purpose in a way? It sounds like you're kind of resisting it, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 

C. Thi Nguyen: I mean, there's, it's funny. I've just been reading. Yeah. I think there's a history of professionalism or what it is to be a professional. is to efface your personality and operate by the rules of your institution.

So I've been reading this incredible book, uh, kind of a classic outside of philosophy, uh, called for Mary Poovey called History of the Modern Fact she's, she's part of the science and technology studies world. And she thinks that the foundation of kind of the attitude of the sciences and modern [00:08:00] professionalism starts with double entry bookkeeping in the 1600s and double entry bookkeeping.

She thinks it's a, is like the first major system. In which you create, you kind of architect a reliable system and if everyone follows it and enters information in the same way, then it all becomes like interactive and portable and all interconnects really easily, but it only works if people are following these standardized.

Rules, so I mean philosophy used to be less like this I think the scientists have moved. I mean Poovey thinks that the sciences starting with people like Bacon and Boyle that the sciences were openly admiring of double entry bookkeeping and Openly thinking like look we are not Rhetoricians or, you know, artists, what we're doing is we're trying to be kind of universal witnesses without particular standpoints or personalities who enter information in a [00:09:00] way that has nothing to do with our individuality.

Andrea: That's really fascinating too, to think about bookkeeping and then computers, like the first, the real way that word is you. is a kind of a, not even parallel path, but entangled paths. 

C. Thi Nguyen: Yeah. I mean, this is, so this shows up in, um, so there's this great moment in Theodore Porter's Trust in Numbers, a book I've been reading a lot and I just taught, and he distinguishes between a two, a few different notions of objectivity.

He thinks one of them is, he calls it professional objectivity, where you act out of your role and not your individuality. Yeah. There's a lot of reason for that, right? I mean, I think about this a lot as a teacher. I used to be like, scorn professional roles, and the more I think about it, the more, like, I think, when I'm a teacher, I should not, I'm, there are certain parts of my personality suppressed.

 There are certain students you naturally like, and certain students you naturally dislike as a person, and you have to get rid of all that shit, right? You are interacting with them as a professional, [00:10:00] um, and, 

Andrea: but I also think You have to take on a kind of role. You have 

C. Thi Nguyen: to take on a kind of role and remove certain parts of your personality. So he says there's professional objectivity, there's like objectivity as like removing bias, and there's just something he calls mechanical objectivity. And mechanical objectivity is repeatable by anybody, right?

Anyone can follow the rule system. Okay. Uh, so, I, I think there's... Sounds like a game a little bit. There's, there's a lot of reason to think that a lot of what's going on is quite game like. Anyway, so, for your original question, I think there's a lot of institutional reasons, especially in the sciences,, to create this kind of, Non personal voice because we are trying to enter data by a particular system And there's this question about whether something like philosophy should be like that.

Are we kind of neutral scholars who are entering? Standpoint free information [00:11:00] and I don't I don't I don't that's not what philosophy has been for me it's been people thinking and talking out of themselves 

Andrea: Yeah, a lot of the philosophers that become sort of, I don't know how to say I'm thinking of someone like Nietzsche or something, or even people who get called philosophers, but no one who's, or most people in academic philosophy wouldn't consider a philosopher or something. It gets tricky, doesn't it? when you're studying philosophy academically. Sometimes you can't even say you like those writers in a way, and you certainly can't really sound like them, at least not at a certain, certain time point. But I wonder, what was it like when you were a student, and now that you're a teacher, do you get annoyed when you see that in your students, ever?

C. Thi Nguyen: Um, I mean, it's really complicated. I, as a graduate student, had, in creative writing, I'd carefully learned. To write in a way that sounded like me. This is hard. Like it's, it's kind of, it's, it's a developed [00:12:00] skill to have 

Andrea: my fatality. Definitely. It's very hard to write in a way that seems very easy, which you're, you're writing is like that.

It's very easy. It flows. People don't feel like they're working to read it. That's a hard thing to do. It's definitely a skill. 

C. Thi Nguyen: Thank you. Uh, by the way, I thank you for noticing. I worked so fucking hard on this shit. Um, like I think there is an assumption among people that don't. Spend a lot of time writing that if it's easy to read, it was easy to write the opposite.

Andrea: That's why I asked you about your language, because you can speak well, too, and those are also difficult skills, but you don't usually learn one and then get the other for free. 

C. Thi Nguyen: Yeah, no, they were, both of them were kind of learned skills. Uh, the writing, I mean, it's so much, like, I'll finish an argument.

And then I'll do about 20 or 30 more drafts to get the writing right and just play with sentences change around ordering shift examples and like through like pain [00:13:00] and suffering and polishing, like it eventually emerges into something kind of clean and simple. I remember a moment in writing my games book where I had

I had this like, 15 pages of very technical argument to prove a particular point. It had like, quantifiers. I couldn't do it in any way that didn't have like, formal logic in it. And then I finally figured out how to do it in three sentences through a simple example and no complex argument, and I was so happy.

And it took like, months to get that, and now it just feels like nothing. 

Andrea: Yeah, that's how it is. That's how it is. But do you think, I was going to ask you about this critical thinking thing, too, because I think it can go the other way around, too. I think you can have beautiful writing in academic philosophy.

You are an example. It's hard, though. So it can also go the other way around, where someone can sort of be articulate and write, but they don't do the critical thinking and the argumentation, um, too. Because [00:14:00] there is, there is something about forcing yourself to go into that logic and That was hard for me, for example, especially if you're kind of more inclined towards the bigger picture, like learning those details. I think you also had an experience a little bit early on with logic, or did you? 

C. Thi Nguyen: I mean, I was always more on the romantic, poetic side of the thing, and it took me a while to slow down and be careful. I don't know, maybe I can say this, um, I think people that concentrate on making their writing pleasing and don't have to worry about getting the arguments right have an advantage in popularity and in...

Convincing people like if you concentrate on nothing but charismatic rhetoric, you're going to be a specialist in that, especially if you're not loyal to like the difficult stuff. So I think for those of us who have some kind of loyalty to [00:15:00] getting the ideas right and being careful and. Making it clear and presentable, like, I don't know what to say, it's, it's hard as shit.

It is really hard, and nobody notices. So 

Andrea: much work, and no one notices. But that gets us to the love a little bit. It's a difficult word, because why do you do it, you know? Um. I don't know if you've ever thought of it in connection to that word, and of course that word is overused, and also we could talk about love of wisdom, it can go a lot of different ways, but just in this one sense, you know, it is really hard.

It is really hard to learn arguments, to think critically, it's really hard in this little small community of philosophers to get some respect, because you have to know so much and you have to talk the language and then also to write well. So that's a lot of work, so, what's motivating that? Uh, 

C. Thi Nguyen: idiosyncratic pleasure, I think one of the things that gets you into being a philosopher is you love a good distinction, you love a good argument, I can say, I mean, I don't know, like, [00:16:00] taught Kant's formula of humanity, like for 20 years, and when I'm rearing up to make the argument again, I'm just like, fucking excited and like getting like loving a good distinction or a cool argument.

I think that's part of it. And then there's just, you know, I think What makes you attracted to a medium a lot of it's about the kind of fussy shit you love like so I love music But I can never play music and I part of what I realize is I just have no affection for scales Like the hard grind of being a musician I don't enjoy on the other hand there's a lot of the academic job that sucks but for me if you give me a sentence and you're like Fine tune this sentence just make it sing I'm just happy I like doing it I love change the comma shift this word slightly earlier. How does it feel like that just, and I, [00:17:00] so I think for a lot of us, um, one of the things we're drawn to is things where the basics mechanics of the medium are appealing to us.

And. We're, I mean, it's really important that people are different. By the way, it's funny. So I just want to give a caution. Sometimes I talk about this stuff and people say that like, Oh T, you're trying to force everyone, even people who don't want to write to like, and I'm like, no, like what we should have in our profession is a diversity of personalities.

Some people have no interest in writing. And all their interest is in argument or scholarship. That's great. Um, but for those few of us in the profession who really like writing, like it would be nice to encourage that instead of my experience, which was having it kind of roughly beaten out of me sternly.

Andrea: Yeah. People, people are suspicious of it, I guess, in the, in the field. But once you can do it, then you can [00:18:00] communicate much more widely. With a lot of people, which, you also eventually got to that point to where it paid off or is paying off. Hopefully. So this, does this relate to the game?

 You write a lot about games, and I'm trying to figure out where is the philosophy that's that part of you that really likes to solve the problem to get the sentence right? Does that connect to this? the interest in games. Do you see a connection there? Of course, it's you so it's continuous, but 

C. Thi Nguyen: I mean, yeah One thing I'll note I've noticed is so I I mean but not all games, right?

but for me the games I like are continuous with the other things I like like I mean, I Try for example, I tried running Running never did anything for me. And it was when I found rock climbing. And what rock climbing is, is precision puzzle solving with your body. Oh yeah, that's a great way to say it.

It's like ecstatic physical problem [00:19:00] solving. So like, uh, I've noticed people... People, sometimes, I've had people complain that rock climbing is like a fad among philosophers. it's like this weird, yeah, there are a lot of rock climber philosophers. There's also a lot of mathematician, uh, rock climbers. Um, I think in the early, someone did a survey of the first generation of rock climbers and they were overwhelmingly either gymnasts or mathematicians or both.

Yeah, no, there's something really, but like, I think the thing that appeals to you about puzzle precision, puzzle solving, um, is something that appeals to me across the games I play and the profession I have. So I think there's a, there's a deep similarity, but often that similarity is like, I don't know, not where people think the core of the activity is, but that's what I like.

Andrea: But it seems to be in the pattern or in the [00:20:00] way of the progression or something. There's two things right? I want to talk to you about specifications and this kind of thing of knowledge, because I think it, this connects, but also, um, agency. So, something like rock climbing, you consider a game, something like chess, you consider a game.

Yeah. And you say, this is a form of art. Yes, Because it lets us experience different agency. Is that right? 

C. Thi Nguyen: Let me be a fussy for a second. Yeah, please. So. The definition of games I'm using in the book is Suits definition of games. So Suits says that what it is to play, yeah, what it is to play a game is to voluntarily take on unnecessary obstacles to create the possibility of the activity of struggling to overcome them, right?

So, for Suits, inefficiencies, constraints, and obstacles. Are part of the key constituent of the game. Um, and it's kind of hidden [00:21:00] in that little definition, but he makes clear in his full definition that part of how you create obstacles and struggles is by specifying goals by specifying points, right? So anything in which you specify the goal and then you specify constraints for the goal.

That are necessary to hit that goal. That's a game and you do it in order to construct a particular kind of activity. By the way, I should just say, I don't think he, his version, his definition of a game quite captures our natural language of game. But that's the thing that I think it's a clear part of human life, these artificial goals and constraints.

 So the way, what I was trying to say is to use Suits to ground an aesthetic theory of games. To say that Suits is pointing to the center of games. So let's talk about the art form of that, because there, there've been plenty of people, I think, who have been praising games and talking about them is incredibly valuable, important, but they tend to assimilate them to more familiar forms.

They tend to say things like, Oh, games are like movies. So they're really good when they have narrative and [00:22:00] dialogue and script, they tend not to pay attention to like,, I think a lot of what game players and game designers pay attention to, which is how these kind of mechanical features construct particular activities.

So one of the things I say in the book is that if you take Suits and you look at it, what you see is that what makes games distinctive as an art form is they manipulate our agency. They manipulate what we can do. The obstacles are against and our goals. Like this was the key for me. Games set goals. They tell us what to want, and then we can kind of just occupy it what's distinctive about games is that they work in the medium of agency. I just want to be really clear about this because, uh, you said something a little. Different, which a lot of people tend to think I'm saying, which is the experience of games is always an experience of agency. That's not the same thing.

The medium, it being the medium is not the same thing as it being the core focus. So, for [00:23:00] example so, like, poetry. Words are the medium of poetry is the experience of words, the aesthetic experience of poetry, not always some poetry draws your attention to the poetry, but other poetry like haiku, I think, so haiku classically draws your attention to the world, right?

Like what haiku, a good haiku. Um, so one of my favorite, uh, haiku from Basho is even in Kyoto, when I hear the cuckoos cry. I long for Kyoto, and I think that kind of haiku pushes your attention towards thoughts about nostalgia, loss, movement, it points, it uses words to point to the world, where other poetry, especially a lot of modernist European poetry, draws your attention to the surface of the medium.

Similarly, some film, I think, really draws your attention directly to its use of the medium, the cuts are really obvious, you think about the use of the medium, [00:24:00] and other film is transparent, right? You like... The thing, the medium is skillful use and you just are lost in thinking about this character or the story.

So games, I think are really similar. Some games draw your attention to the agency, but other games like, like when I'm playing, uh, limit poker, all of my attention is on other players motivations and actions and their informational states. So, it's not really drawing my attention to my agency, it's like using a agential medium to push my attention somewhere else.

Andrea: The game matters. You talk about environment, you talk about constraints as the medium, and, um, all of that makes sense. So it depends what game you're playing, and it depends, does it depend also the awareness or the intention which, with which you're playing the game?

I mean, you could play the game so as to... X, you know, like increase to all 

C. Thi Nguyen: of that, but this is totally this, I think this is not distinctive of games. So I think some movies [00:25:00] are really transparent to the characters. I think of,, so I feel like, you know, if you're watching a Tarantino film like that, you're super drawn to the surfaces of the film.

It's editing choices. It's so filmy, right? When I watch something like, I don't know, an Ozu movie, like some kind of really character based thing, my natural inclination is to pay attention to the characters and their inner lives. But I can also, if I'm thinking about it, kind of push my attention to how the cuts are working, but that's not where this film kind of naturally sends my attention, but I can take that attentive mode.

Similarly, I feel like... When I was studying to write, I would take writing, it was super transparent, where the point was the writing was self effacing, and I could force myself to be like, no, I'm going to study this as a writer. How are they making this so good? Sometimes I think there are a lot of games where the gameness kind of disappears, but when we take them apart in my game design class, we send our attention to the rules, [00:26:00] even if the rules are designed to disappear from your consciousness.

So a lot of this is. Freeform. Uh, sorry. A lot of this is up to the player, but I think games are distinctive because there is more up to the player. Different players can play in such radically different ways. There's more space for agency and more space for freedom in the construction of the play experience.

And that's one of the reasons I think traditional artistic theory has had a really difficult time coping with games because the particular, there's a lot of variation between different people's experience of a novel, but the basic sequence of events in a novel will be the same and the words will be the same.

But there's so much variation. Especially for, I mean, not just computer games, but if you think about something like tabletop role playing, different groups will have totally different stories, totally different personalities, totally different, um, interactions. Although the game kind of colors and shapes them in a subtle way, [00:27:00] pushes them towards a particular kind of experience, the, the path to the particular sequence of events in the play experience is so much more participatory that they're a really deeply different kind of object.

Andrea: Did Suits think of games as an artwork at all? What'd you think? He 

C. Thi Nguyen: didn't talk, he didn't talk about it explicitly. Okay. So 

Andrea: I still wonder, I think games can be art. Um, can they also not be art? Are they always art? Oh, 

C. Thi Nguyen: that's, that's a great question. 

Andrea: Um, in the same sense that you were just describing.

Yeah. 

C. Thi Nguyen: So, so let, let me, so here's something I didn't say in the book. I've been thinking about a lot. So in the book, what I mostly said was, you know. Art is basically a Value term that's worth paying attention to. I think since then I figured something out. I think one of my favorite accounts of what art is come from this debate, uh, about, [00:28:00] uh, the difference between art and porn.

Um, and. 

Andrea: Another subject you've written somewhat about yeah, 

C. Thi Nguyen: it's it's super. It's super interesting. It's a super interesting debate 

Andrea: To me it gets back to this awareness intention thing too, but go ahead. Yeah. 

C. Thi Nguyen: No, this is this is where it's going So there's this great moment The feminist philosopher of art Anne Eaton has this passage that totally like shifted how I think about these things where she said Older definitions in feminism of what it is to be porn say porn is Representations that are demeaning and objectifying to women and Eaton's response was well, there's actually a lot of high art That's really demeaning and objectifying to women, but it's also Recognizable as art even though it's misogynistic so that can't be exactly the difference What's the difference a lot of people have taken a stab at it, but two I really appreciate There's one line of thinking that says something like Porn is part of an older category called sentimental art, and sentimental art is something that like, works on you [00:29:00] mechanistically, rather than giving you freedom to experience So, um, yeah.

That's it. It has to experience it in the way that you want, right? In this way, I think people in this vein think that like porn is something like, you know, hallmark tearjerker, right? You just 

Andrea: want one reaction. Stimulating in 

C. Thi Nguyen: certain ways. Yeah, stimulating. It's a stimulating specific reaction. Yeah.

Another way that some people put it, um, is that Jerry Levinson puts it this way. With porn, we don't care how it gets, does the job. We just want the job done with art. We care about the technique and how the medium was manipulated to get the effect. And so if you buy this, then I think for every medium.

Not all film is art. Some film is art and some film is porn, right? Some novels are, and some novels are porn slash sentimental slash whatever. Same with games, I think, right? Like in either definition you take, some games are going [00:30:00] to be. Open spots for us to take what we want from and other ones will kind of push us to a mechanically I think actually the category of addictive game actually is it's weird relationship to sentimentality and porn because it's just the someone made a product for to jerk our chain in a particular way.

Yes. 

Andrea: That connects to things you've written about gamification, and Twitter, and social media, and that whole addiction stimulation. This is really hard to talk about, but I want to get into it a little bit because when you were talking about, um, film, you obviously seem to know a lot about film.

I also love all those people you were talking about, or we could talk about, there's all these different styles, but we're coming at it. Our, We have a reference. We've watched a lot of film. We've thought about how they're different. That's so our sensory experience of it is going to be different.

It has a lot to do with awareness and intention, but also just every film we've seen up till this point, right? Whereas someone else [00:31:00] who maybe has never thought about film and they've watched films, but never thought about film as an art form will watch a film and have a sensory experience that's different, and both are legitimate, but there, , there's some kind of difference there, and I feel like doesn't that, that happens with games too, it can happen with social media, there's some kind of weird way in which the more you're interacting with the thing as a medium, knowing it's a medium, it's changing, or I don't 

C. Thi Nguyen: know. Yeah, I mean, this is, this is really hard to put our finger on, and there's been, in the philosophy, in various aesthetic theories, there's been various rebellions against the elitism of the high arts. I think people have lost what, the thing you're talking about. So, I do think there's a deep difference between approaching something as an art or with an aesthetic attitude and not, that's completely unrelated. To its highness or lowness or pop culturiness or not, right? I [00:32:00] think you can approach the fanciest film this way, but you can also approach like, you know, Often culturally denigrated forms like comics and rap and games. Yeah, or even 

Andrea: porn. I mean, you know, We could think of porn as art if we really want to look at it in some weird way from some weird angle.

Yes 

C. Thi Nguyen: So this is so one of the interesting things In philosophy of art is that there, there are a set of theories that think what makes art different is the object itself. And another set of theories that think what makes art different is actually the attitude we bring to it. And then you can flip back and forth. Stolnitz, who is loosely Kantian thinks something like when you come to practical objects, you come to them with a narrow focus. You're like, here's what I want out of it. And you only pay attention to the features in it. That give you the thing you thought you wanted. This sounds a lot like the sentimental art porn stuff, right?

Like, here's the reaction I want. I'm going to watch this movie. It's going to make me cry. Done. Bargain 

Andrea: seals. For the release. [00:33:00] Whatever. Yeah. 

C. Thi Nguyen: Yes. For the release of whatever. Exactly. Um, every time I talk about this stuff, especially at school, I have to like, you have to be careful not to get fired. 

Andrea: But I mean, it's, it really is true.

We do use games and art as ways to. Release feelings or tensions or, I mean, we have to talk about all of that is, it is messy, isn't it? It 

C. Thi Nguyen: is.

It's super messy. Um, but so the, in, in this theory, like what it is to approach something aesthetically, one way you put it is you come to it open about what it could give you. And how it could get there, right? And that, that, if, if Eatonian theory is right, then the difference isn't necessarily in the work.

It's in the viewer, whether we come to it being like, okay, I just want this feeling. If I get it, awesome. If I don't, it's bad. And a different attitude, a more open attitude that looks to the thing to see what the [00:34:00] thing could give us that's open to different experiences. From the thing. And I think you can have, you can have both those attitudes towards the game.

You can, , you can see this in reviews. You can see people saying like, look, what I want from a game is Some list like lose myself or something. Yeah. Or I wanna, I wanna get caught in the addictive loop of crafting and this game gives it to me.

It's great if that game doesn't not right. That's mm-hmm. , that's the sentimental pointing attitude. Or you can have a different attitude. That's, you know, I think if you combine the two things we said that's open to what the thing and give you, and really interested in the, the relationship between the details of the thing and the overall experience.

And you have a totally different attitude and relationship. 

Andrea: Yeah. And it's similar to the one we were talking about with the writing and the way you craft it and then you get into a kind of a flow. And there's this very strange thing about thinking about what you're doing and how that changes what you're doing.

But just to stay with games, I was just thinking [00:35:00] last night, my husband really loves , uh, sports. And, we live in the Netherlands, he's European, so it's mostly football, right? and American football was on yesterday and I. I'm from the States and I remember these games, um, college football

where people just go completely mad, like completely lose themselves in this group. We were seeing it on TV and I was thinking, could I do that anymore? I think there was a time when I could just go to a football match maybe when I was 17 and just be in that weird spirit and now I think I would be way too aware of myself in this strange atmosphere and all these people 

C. Thi Nguyen: well, I mean, do you, is it, you can't do that or that your circumstances have changed? I mean, for me, I've never been able to get to that state. Yeah. In a football stadium. But at the right dance environment, I can be, it's, it's different. It's not, but I can be lost in this.

Andrea: Yeah, that's actually a good point because I never, football was never really the thing. I do think [00:36:00] there's a way you can come back to it and be free in that sense and know you're free and it's even more enjoyable. Dance is a good, a good example of that. And I do think that's very, very wonderful, right?

And that actually has to do with that. Uh, writing too, when you have learned the craft and you've, and then you come back to it and then something very exciting happens. You're , in that flow. But it becomes, uh, hard to think about in terms of agency, I think, because this is such a big word and, and agent isn't agency, right?

Do those, those seem to get confused sometimes, like when we think about games, because in your work you show that this is, It has a very big resonance in, uh, society and the way we interact. Your very premise in your book about, like, the games, the person who's making the game is setting your agency for you in a way, and I know I'm not saying it right, you can correct me, but this has very high stakes, doesn't it?

Um. 

C. Thi Nguyen: This is high stakes in both directions. I mean, setting, setting an agency is, that's the right way to put it. Like I think a game designer [00:37:00] specifies your desires in the game and you just take it on. , this is for me, as a game player, this just makes sense, right? I mean, I play a lot of board games with my spouse and we open the rules and then the rules just tell us whether we're cooperating or competing.

And we just like, it's funny that you walk in, you open the game and sometimes like, you can not know. Whether you're going to be trying to kill each other, or out compete each other, or cooperating to stop, like And the game just tells you, and then you want that, right? So there's this found fluidity, and I do think they get shaped, right?

 Like, some games, you get plunged into a competitive agency. Some games, you get plunged into a cooperative agency. Some games, you get plunged into an agency where you're hyper calculating little statistics about, like, resource efficiency.

Other games, you get plunged into an agency... Where you're like trying to tell jokes as quickly as possible, right? These are different goals and different actions you can take towards those [00:38:00] goals. That's all that the claim is now. I think it's, I mean, there's a question about whether this is dangerous or not.

I think there's some people that think. It's always dangerous, right? Agency shaping is always dangerous. I think other people think, how could you possibly worry about this? But I think one way to put it is that if we understand any medium, artistic medium, we can see that it's incredibly powerful. I mean, it's not weird to think.

That narratives are emotionally potent, and that's how they can be used for good or ill, right? That a narrative can let you explore different emotional experiences, but it can also be used for, like, fascist propaganda. That's, that's not surprising at all. And all I think I'm saying is, look, what makes games powerful is that they manipulate agency.

You can use it for good or ill. What it's like to use it for ill is to use it to trap people in a pre specified [00:39:00] agency with no autonomy or freedom. Mm hmm. 

Andrea: And that relates to that, what we were saying, if you don't know your environment and constraints are being set, that you're, that the game is being set for you, that's very different stakes of agency.

And when you start, because you have written about something like Twitter, and we do all live in a more gamified world now, and you've written about that, but, when you're writing a book, or a novel Isn't that also giving you a chance to sort of be within the constraints and environment of a different agency?

 I feel like all of our endeavors in a way, when it comes to creativity at their best, we're sort of trying to share. Our perspective from this space time trajectory that we can't get out of that's always a little different than everyone else and at its best, whether it's film or movies or books, we get what you might call a pipeline, , I think you have this beautiful thing where you say it's like opening pipelines between two cognitive perspectives. there's this trust, right?

 That happens and, and you connect in that and that's what you're enjoying in the movie, in the book, in the [00:40:00] game, but I don't know. how are games different than these other forms of art? 

C. Thi Nguyen: I mean, there are so many forms of human expression where you're trying to communicate one perspective through some fixed medium and yeah, but they're what the medium is, is different.

I mean, of course, every artist has agency and makes decisions. The difference with games is that's what the medium is. That's what's being transmitted, right? Like with words. With a novel, what you're shaping is a sequence of words, that shapes a sequence of events, that shapes an emotional perspective, that someone can step into. Maybe it'll, I mean, I just think. The saying that they're, the art form of agency is just shorthand for saying the thing I said before, which I think is distinctive about games. They give you desires and they give you abilities, and then they tell you to do something that's different.

That's what they, that's what, that's the key of the theory, like the a, the saying that the art of agency is just a shorthand handle for that. That's what makes games distinctive. 

Andrea: Mm hmm. That's [00:41:00] wonderful. I just, I want to push a little more because as we were saying, it depends what kind of game and the stakes depend on the game and all of this. So a board game or something, it's very clear to me, you know, what you say, that's how it's designed. But if it's become something like augmented reality or virtual reality where you can forget you're in there 

or even a space like social media, where we might be kind of living in these game spaces or mental spaces or different kinds of space, then. We normally think of as like, You know physical um

I want to ask these bigger questions about are we trying to start to, can we start to understand this in a way that might be, um, beneficial? I know this gets really tricky philosophically and everything, but is there something about games that can help us better understand each other?

Or is it just, should we just think of it as a n activity that's not necessarily going to kind of change who you are deep in your soul, the way a book might, or art, or. [00:42:00] 

C. Thi Nguyen: Let me, let me start with a quick caveat. I don't think all VR environments are games. This is why I think the Suits definition is a little different. From a lot of the colloquial use. So first, first there has to be a specified goal, otherwise it doesn't count as a game. I think there are a lot of objects we have that colloquially call video games that aren't quite that like so old school Minecraft.

Right. It's a, I think of that as a virtual environment. And a virtual sandbox that doesn't have a specific game attached. People can make it into a game. You can use, you can decide your own game, but I mean, my kid plays it. And some days he wants to do survival game with zombies and other days he wants to build the biggest tower.

And what he's doing is using a virtual environment with a preset toolbox to come up with different games. And I think like, something like World of Warcraft is going to be really complicated because I do think people, [00:43:00] it's a virtual environment that has a few pre established games, but people will shift between them, right?

There's a max out points game, but there's also a, you know, a virtual reality role playing experience that can be very non game like. And one of the things about virtual reality is, I mean, it's funny because I, I, sometimes I get, Request from journalists to talk about virtual reality. And I'm like, I know nothing about virtual reality and like what it is to be a virtual reality is very distinct from what it is to be a game. So first caveat, that's good. You say that all things to that are going on in virtual reality aren't suiting games, and so they're not, they're different objects. Um, you can play games in them. So 

Andrea: it feels like play, I think is the problem. Yeah. To see play, you know, this is where it gets very easy.

It's easy to blur. Play 

C. Thi Nguyen: is a different concept from games. Suits was really clear on this. He has this great essay where he says that, [00:44:00] He says play and games overlap sometimes, but not always. So he had this funky definition of play that I'm not sure I believe in. Uh, he said that what play was, was wasting normally instrumental resources for autotelic reasons.

That is taking things that were normally useful and then just doing it for the pure pleasure of it. Like playing with your food, playing around and these examples, he was like, look, a lot of games we enter into or playing pretend, there's not the game like structure, but it is play.

And he said also, look, if you are a professional boxer who hates it, but you're making money for it and you need to support your family, that's work, not play, but it is a game. So I think a lot of VR spaces are playful. But, I mean, maybe, here, here's, here's something useful. A lot of, some people in this space distinguish between toys and games, and the difference is that games have a goal, and toys don't, they're more freeform, but they're both forms of play.

Andrea: Yeah, this gets really confusing [00:45:00] because, you know, you have the verb, you have the noun. Yeah. But sometimes a game is a verb. Is it, is it that, um, there's something about the game itself that's more, like, more easily manipulated, uh, or more obviously manipulated or 

C. Thi Nguyen: something?

Yeah, I mean, first, I want to have, like, one caution. When a lot of people, when people think about games, they tend to be looking for one value or one function they have, and I just think this is, this is why I like medium analyses. It's like... No one thinks that novels can only do one thing. Like a novel is something that uses words and events, and then you can do a billion different things with novels, uh, games.

Use agency and you can do a billion things with them. You can use games to get healthy. You can use games for brain training. You can use games for free productivity. You can use games to relax, right? There's a billion different things. Right, so they don't 

Andrea: always have to [00:46:00] have a goal 

C. Thi Nguyen: then. No, so they have a goal.

But I mean, what's really important is that for a game, a Suitsian game, there's a difference between the goal and the purpose. So the goal, the goal is what you pursue in the game, and the purpose is why you do it. So, for example, classic example, party games, the goal is to win, the purpose is to have fun.

And we can tell because the If we lost, we don't think our evening is wasted, right? If you lost and had fun, you're just as happy if you're, you know, not a terrible person with a party game. If you had a great time with your friends and you lost, you think that it was time well spent. So what I'm talking about is games fulfill totally different purposes.

And in fact, the same game, I mean, think about running a marathon, right? There's one goal that everyone shares to cross that finish line quickly. What are the purposes? Some people do it, uh, to get healthier. Some people do it because they want to be the best. Some people do it for money. [00:47:00] Some people do it because it's going to make them like, uh, Zen out and gives them this pure experience of calm and relax, right?

So there's so many different purposes that different people can bring. To the same game and pursuit of a goal by a particular constraint is often really flexible about what you can get out of it. Like I rock climb because it shuts up the voices in my head. That's the main, it's aesthetically beautiful and it makes me stop thinking for a bit.

Like it's, I can't stop thinking unless I have something that intent. And that's the main reason everyone does it. Uh, no writing is giving into the voices in my head. 

Andrea: Okay. 

C. Thi Nguyen: Does game. Um. Totally depends on the game. I think one of the reasons I, I feel like I spend most of my life hyperverbal and, uh, games like tabletop role playing, are extensions of that, which are super fun for me, but don't refresh that part of me [00:48:00] where rock climbing.

And I've been fly fishing a lot lately. These are totally nonverbal, totally physical, wordless experiences. And I find them incredibly good for departures from. 

Andrea: Is that close to what you've talked about as a transition zone or something like that? I mean What's happening in that moment are you just you're not at rest necessarily or are you just yeah There 

C. Thi Nguyen: it's really funky.

Like maybe some people just rest. I don't rest. No, 

Andrea: it's weird It's like you were so active that it's restful or I don't know 

C. Thi Nguyen: But I mean it's related to what games are games are often artificial hyper focuses on one part of your agency and I feel like What it can do is, so fly fishing is very much about visual attention to the water.

It's a very, like, I think, and I do my best when all the words are gone. Rock climbing is about intense attention to your balance [00:49:00] and body posture. And again, words get in the way, right? So I feel like it often, it helps you achieve, it helps you rest. Maybe some people can just rest, but for me, resting the verbal part of my brain, It really helps to have a hyper focus on a fully...

Nonverbal activity. This is why I find like, I also tie flies. I was talking with some people about how it's so similar in pleasure to crocheting. And I think like part of the similarity is I, I'm absorbed in the act of precise physical detailed movement with my hands. And it's like, it's all feel and it's all like tension and movement and flow.

And there are no words, words mostly get in the way. I mean, one way to put it is I've always thought that games plunge you into one aspect of your agency and give you this totalizing experience. And that often has, and that often is an opportunity to, [00:50:00] or encourages you to shut off other parts of your agency, which is really dang--

I mean, I think when you export this, the dangerous version of this is make as much money as you can and don't worry about anything else. But, it deployed as a temporary measure. I think it's great that I have something that I can reliably do that lets me not use words for hours at a time. 

Andrea: Mm hmm. It reminds me of walking.

That's what I do. I find, there's something about, too, what you're describing and walking, and that there's something about the continuity of it, and that you're not doing the same exact thing over and over, but there's a pattern, a recognizable pattern, that does kind of, it doesn't lull you necessarily, but. And I think that actually speaks also in, if we go to the dangerous side of something like Twitter or something like this kind of addiction that can come when real life is gamified too, because there's also something about that that can, like, you feel like you don't have to think or listen to the, [00:51:00] the words.

Yes. That can be peaceful, too, in a similar way. Right.

C. Thi Nguyen: So, maybe one way to put it is that games are focusing, and focus is most powerful and dangerous. What it is to focus is to pay attention to certain things and ignore other things. A useful way to play games is to play a lot of different games. And what that is, it's focusing on different things serially.

That's great. Right. That means you, so I think I never really saw rocks deeply. Until I started rock climbing. I never 

Andrea: saw you see the yeah, you see it so differently like you do. Do you climb? I'm not a climber, it's more I'm walking and this a similar thing happens right when you're really looking at the environment everything comes alive in a different way. The textures, you start to realize things aren't solid. It's very weird in a way. 

C. Thi Nguyen: But yeah, no, so I mean, having [00:52:00] games heightening your attention and focus to a series of different things over your lifetime, I think that's a broadening experience, spending your entire life on Twitter and focused only on the things that will get you more likes or retweets.

Is, I think, narrowing if you don't step back from it. I mean, it's, focus is powerful and both abusable and usable. Like, and games are tools for a kind of focus. 

Andrea: Right, and this is an important point because that is a huge leap, right? Being taken by something, having your attention taken or participating in a game not knowing you're participating in a game there's a big leap between that and what we're just what we're talking about now and like how do we open that space? This relates also to knowledge, right? Is there any connection there between? Pursuit of knowledge [00:53:00] or sharing knowledge or yeah, I 

C. Thi Nguyen: mean this is so this is what makes games potent and dangerous Like with a game you're stepping into a different sculpted agent And it's I mean and one of the things is if the good part is that it might teach you something You don't already know that's also the danger because like playing a game is a jump into the unknown, but that's the same with other arts, right?

Like having an 

Andrea: aesthetic experience. You can't go back. You can't unplay, unsee, unhear. 

C. Thi Nguyen: And like sometimes. , you don't know what's there, you open yourself up to it, you're letting yourself enter an emotional perspective, sometimes you learn something, and sometimes you watch a fucking Darren Aronofsky film, and you have like, like, you know, foulness trapped in your brain forever that you can never get rid of.

Um, 

Andrea: I know exactly what you mean. There's some things that are, I mean, violent is the right word. I think where you [00:54:00] don't know you're about to be changed, but you can't go back once it changes you. And it is art, you know? Yeah. 

C. Thi Nguyen: And, but that's also like, that's what makes it powerful.

Right. The whole point you might, that's 

Andrea: why people gravitate toward it even, 

C. Thi Nguyen: right. I mean, I don't like fluidity can be good and bad. Having new when art in general. Welds new parts of souls to you, like hope, hope you don't get something shitty, but also it's hard to know what, like, you know.

I mean, sometimes we know ahead of time, um, like, there are clues

Andrea: I guess what I'm trying to push a little bit is that Um, We are designing games for each other in a way, do you think games are only, um, With the rules laid out so that you can read them in the way that you will, and then you leave it behind. Have things blurred a little bit now where we're creating games, playing games sometimes. Learning that life is a game and not able to [00:55:00] get our awareness and attention out of that long enough to change it. 

C. Thi Nguyen: Yeah, I mean, okay. One thing I should be clear about. The idea that you can open up a game and put, enter into the end for a while and step back from it.

That's not guaranteed. That is a learned skill. Yeah. That people may or may not have. But also like, I mean. It's also a skill that we learn and teach people to open up a novel, enter into another emotional perspective. And at the end, step back and be like, you know, it's, it's, I think, valuable to read a book from the perspective of, you A terrible person that was carefully constructed to be so, and then be able to pull back from it afterwards.

That's a skill we 

Andrea: learn. It's a skill, but I don't, I mean, you can, you can probably disagree, but I don't think, I think we're kidding ourselves if we think we aren't changed by... By all of that. I mean, I've read, you know, I've read a book once and I couldn't stop reading it It was awful And I literally tore the entire thing up [00:56:00] and like threw it in the trash after just to try to get rid of it I I've forgotten the name.

It was literally I was a teenager and it was about I let's not let's not go there Yeah, but I, it's still, I still feel it now and it, you know, these things change you and I have to say, I think the games we play change us too. I've, whether they're basketball, volleyball, chess, um, uh, a board game, a video game.

In my experience, they changed the way I think a little bit. They changed my sensory experience of the world. After I've been playing games, I, I'm entering, I see the world differently. Um, I don't know. I think we're kidding ourselves to say that we can open anything up and put it away and not be changed.

No, I think... It's just terrifying to realize. 

C. Thi Nguyen: That's true about everything. That's true about people and novels and schools. It's true about everything. I mean, the disposable end thing in the games book is just about the victory condition. Like, I try to win for these points. That's what I stop caring about.

But there are all kinds of ways your thinking can be habituated [00:57:00] by. At the end of the books, one of the things I worry about is I think that there are a lot of people who have worried mostly incorrectly that games might habituate you to be violent because I think their empirical research shows that that doesn't happen mostly because we know it's fiction, but I worry that playing games habituates people to expecting quantified value systems like that's a, that's not the specific goal of the game that's Something more general, let me say,

so the other thing I've written a lot about is trust. And I think, um, trust is the essential mode of being for people in this world. Right. Um, so a lot of philosophers, but we were talking about Elijah Milgram on email, but Elijah Milgram changed a lot about how I think about epistemology and philosophy by really putting words to this, like kind of inchoate thought that we are no longer in an era where we can have intellectual autonomy, that the [00:58:00] Key characteristic of our era is hyper specialization.

And that means to conduct ourselves. We're constantly having to trust, trust beyond. But we can manage. Sometimes I take my students in an epistemology class to an exercise and the exercise is just how many people have you trusted with your life in the last five minutes? At first, they're like, no one.

And they're like, oh, wait, we're trusting this building not to fall down. How many we're trusting in you? Yeah, you're trusting the drivers on the street. You're trusting the brake mechanics. You're trusting the science that they use, like how many statistics. So quickly, what you see is that. Your trust runs completely out of your control, completely out of your sight.

Your life depends on people. You have no idea who they are. And I think the experience I have of this. is vertigo, right? It's not quite terror. It's just like, holy shit. So Annette Baier, who's my favorite, one of my favorite philosophers ever, she has this paper, trust and antitrust, which I love. [00:59:00] And what she says is the core of trust is vulnerability.

What it is to trust is to put something of yourself in somebody else's power. And that's what makes it valuable, right? That we are letting, otherwise we're limited to our own powers and our own management. Like, and this is, this is true with like kind of interpersonal trust. Trusting my teachers with my kid's life, but it's also true with like, I'm on antibiotics right now.

I have no idea what's in it. I, right. I trusted somebody, um, 

Andrea: games seem like a way where you can learn how to trust, look at that trust a little bit, start to look at the patterns by which you've already since birth been trusting. 

C. Thi Nguyen: Yes. There are so many games that are about trust. There are so many tropes about how team sports do this, but it is, like, one of the things you learn is how to work as a precise coordinated unit and just trust someone absolutely.

That's also kind of dangerous in a way, but also it's something you can learn to do.[01:00:00] 

But the thing I wanted to say is, I think there's a deep trust involved in any artistic experience. Because you're opening your emotional self, you're opening yourself to transformation in ways that you can't expect. And I think without it, we don't grow, but we also let shit into our heads. And this is the terrifying vulnerability again, I mean, I think what you said is true of games, but it's true of everything.

In every friendship. Every novel, every movie can change you irrevocably. And if you refuse them all, you'll be a static being who doesn't grow. And also if you try it and you put your trust in a bad thing, it will shit in your brain and there's no way around it because you can't know ahead of time what it is exactly, you can try, you can use guides. you carefully figure out who might be a good guide about what's going to be good and what's going to shit in your brain. But in the end, you're just opening yourself over and over again. 

Andrea: Last [01:01:00] question then, um, is love ever a game? 

C. Thi Nguyen: If it is, it's a terrible one.

I mean, I think we have expressions like don't play games with my heart. I think there, I mean, actually, I think I put it in the book. I almost got it out, but there's a part where I say that what games are and what love is is opposite what games are is being able to be totally disattached to an end People to put it aside and put it away again and just use it instrumentally, right?

Yeah, it's committed devotion or something like that it's non disposable it's non fungible it's non Fluid so I think yeah, 

Andrea: it's more like that trust state, but it's also you can also start to Realize it and still Give way to it, I guess. Yeah, but 

C. Thi Nguyen: you can love a game Yeah, I love rock climbing with all my heart 

Andrea: [01:02:00] Yes, definitely in many kinds of ways as well, of course But thank you Thi you for talking and good luck with the rest of your day there Thank you 

C. Thi Nguyen: so much.

Andrea: All right. Be well