Agency, Stability, and Permeability in "Games"

Abstract

In “Games and the Art of Agency,” Thi Nguyen argues that games both highlight and foster a profound complexity in human motivation, in the form of “purposeful and managed agential disunity.”  I agree that human agency is “fluid and fleeting” rather than stable and unified; but I argue that Nguyen’s analysis itself relies on a traditional conception of selves as enduring goal-driven agents which his discussion calls into question. Without this conception, games look more like life, and both look riskier, than we might otherwise hope.