Games: Agency as Art
Metadata
Highlights
- • A lot of times people click like because something made them laugh for a second, not because it moved them two weeks later. (View Highlight)
- • Process aesthetics: the artist makes a thing and you interact with the thing and you’re beautiful. Your actions are beautiful, or comic, or thrilling. (I think games fall under this later category) (View Highlight)
- • I feel like games are like an existential balm for the horror of life. A lot of life is you don’t fit. You have to do things. And it sucks and it’s horrible and it’s boring. And in games, for once in your life, you know exactly what you’re doing and you know exactly that you can do it. And then you have just the right amount of ability to do it. It’s a feeling of concentrated, crystallized action
• Game designers have sculpted these little action universes so that we can step into them and just have this ecstasy over and over again. (View Highlight)
- • • So I think that the body of games is a kind of library of agencies. The real promise of games, if you take them seriously, is that by playing a ton of them, you can traverse all the different possibilities of agency. (View Highlight)
title: “Games: Agency as Art”
author: “jzhao.xyz”
url: ”https://jzhao.xyz/thoughts/Games-Agency-as-Art/”
date: 2023-12-19
source: reader
tags: media/articles
Games: Agency as Art
Metadata
Highlights
- • A lot of times people click like because something made them laugh for a second, not because it moved them two weeks later. (View Highlight)
- • Process aesthetics: the artist makes a thing and you interact with the thing and you’re beautiful. Your actions are beautiful, or comic, or thrilling. (I think games fall under this later category) (View Highlight)
- • I feel like games are like an existential balm for the horror of life. A lot of life is you don’t fit. You have to do things. And it sucks and it’s horrible and it’s boring. And in games, for once in your life, you know exactly what you’re doing and you know exactly that you can do it. And then you have just the right amount of ability to do it. It’s a feeling of concentrated, crystallized action
• Game designers have sculpted these little action universes so that we can step into them and just have this ecstasy over and over again. (View Highlight)
- • • So I think that the body of games is a kind of library of agencies. The real promise of games, if you take them seriously, is that by playing a ton of them, you can traverse all the different possibilities of agency. (View Highlight)