Beyond agency : games as the aesthetics of being

Abstract

In digital game studies, approaches to the aesthetics of games have primarily focused on games’ narrative (Tavinor 2009) or sensory (Niedenthal 2009) qualities, considered the status of games as embodied action (Kirkpatrick 2011), or as structured practices (Vella 2016a), or identified a fundamental opposition between ‘gameness’, governed by unambiguous rules, a practical orientation towards goals and an orientation towards entertainment, and ‘art’, which is concerned with ambiguity, reflection, critical detachment, and meaning (Sharp 2015; Leino 2020).

C. Thi Nguyen’s Games: Agency as Art represents a major milestone in this discourse, making a crucial contribution to our understanding of games as works of art. Nguyen’s central argument is that the aesthetic matter of a game is the figure of agency or ‘agential posture’ (2020, 97), it presents, as experienced from the first-person perspective of the active player. Beyond allowing us, as players, the experience of adopting their respective agential postures and enacting their figures of agency, games, he claims, are ‘framed agency’ (ibid., 131), capturing, and presenting, this figure of our own agency within the structure of an aesthetic work.

I will begin by highlighting Nguyen’s main contributions to the game studies discourse on the aesthetics of games. I will demonstrate how, by anchoring itself in the player’s first-person experience of their own in-game activity, Nguyen’s work aligns, in important ways, with the body of work in game studies that has been labelled ‘existential ludology’. On this basis, I will make the case that an existential-ludological perspective can allow us to incorporate Nguyen’s insights on agency into a comprehensive understanding of players’ experience of being-in-the-game, expanding his conception of games as an aesthetics of agency to an understanding of games as an aesthetics of being.