the philosophy of games
According to C. Thi Nguyen1, games are miniature contexts that we temporarily immerse ourselves in. He explains that when we play games, we put on an agential skeleton, where we inhabit specific goals, abilities, and values. These make it possible to reach specific ends within specific conditions. There is a special harmony between the obstacles we face and our abilities; a sort of goldilocks zone where you are just capable enough to win, but not too skilled which makes winning easy and boring. It is in this struggle, the strive towards winning, that our desire in playing games lies.
In gameplay, we take the world and its attached values deadly seriously, though this is only temporary. Once the game is over, these values and goals are disposed of. You do not care about collecting the digital gold coins after you’re done playing (Except for crypto bros, they seemed to have missed the memo). These agential skeletons create layers of agencies that we hold at once. The temporary agency that is a part of the game is dead set on winning, but our main agency is only concerned with winning as long as it fulfills some other goal: having fun, developing a skill, exercising, fostering or maintaining social bonds, and so on. Nguyen claims that the allure of games is exactly in the temporary, simple, and disposable nature of games. While the real world is a dumpster fire filled with complexities, the game world is simple, and we have clear and concise values and goals, which makes engaging in this world highly satisfying. This is what he calls value clarity. Not only is it highly satisfying, but when you enter a flow state, this could be seen as an art form. Where in more traditional arts, there is a concrete object that has these aesthetic qualities (like for instance a painting), it is the gameplayer themself that inhabits this beauty in games; It is here that agency becomes art.
I think this idea of games is very applicable to certain technologies. When using specific apps and tools, there is an agential skeleton provided that gives its users a set of goals, abilities, and values. It is reminiscent of the Mcluhanian notion that the medium decides how and when we engage, and also what we engage with and why we care about it. Though, unlike McLuhan, Nguyen says that these values shape the engagement in a fundamental way2.
Nguyen argues that restriction is not inherently negative, and can instead give birth to new and richer options. We can develop skills, and gain useful perspectives by only operating within certain parameters, it weeds out noise, and most importantly, it can be fun and aesthetically pleasing to do so. Free play is good, but there is also beauty and value to be found in games within limited spaces.
Take, for instance, making an entertaining video that lasts only six seconds. Here, the restrictions that Vine posed brought about a new genre of entertainment. Sure some of it sucked, but I believe certain Vines lingered in the lexicon of millennials for a reason. A more contemporary example, that is perhaps more controversial, is Twitter. There are certain times when being on Twitter feels like incidentally looking up during a meteor shower. The infamous Oscar slap earlier this year perfectly encapsulated this. The exact moment it happened, along with the few moments right after, being on Twitter was actually very fun, which anyone native to the platform know is a rare occurrence. the riffing, the meme callbacks, the real-time reactions, the shock, the drama, the you-just-had-to-be-there of it all. It is very hard to deny how exciting it is to be on Twitter at such moments. Your entire timeline witnessing something at the same time and scrambling to make jokes about it seems to fit tremendously well with Twitter as a medium that gamifies discourse. One can even claim there is a certain harmony and beauty to it.
functional beauty
What drew me into the tech industry in the first place was my curiosity about the things around me. I loved watching “How It’s Made” on Discovery Channel as a kid, seeing how much care and thought is put into mundane everyday objects. Later, after taking programming courses, I loved learning about the technologies around me through the knowledge of how they work. I still annoy my friends with my observations, like commenting on how unintuitive an ordering app is when we’re eating out. I fondly remember seeing my classmates solve problems in clever ways, all of us ooh-ing and ah-ing like we’ve seen someone do a sick kickflip.
In An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, David Hume discusses the pleasing nature of utility. The text is about morals of course, but the material examples he uses to build up to this are noteworthy:
In common life, we may observe, that the circumstance of utility is always appealed to (...) What praise, even of an inanimate form, if the regularity and elegance of its parts destroy not its fitness for any useful purpose! And how satisfactory an apology for any disproportion or seeming deformity, if we can show the necessity of that particular construction for the use intended. (…) A building, whose doors and windows were exact squares, would hurt the eye by that very proportion; as ill adapted to the figure of a human creature, for whose service the fabric was intended.
In navigating the world, it is taken for granted how everything we build is uniquely tailored to us. Everything around us mirrors how we move through the world; The size of doors, the shape of chairs, the weight of cooking pans, the carpet underneath your chair that prevents scraping the floor when you get up. The marriage between utility and beauty is all around us, readily observable.
It might not be immediately obvious, this marriage of utility and aesthetic, but we are always intuitively drawn to it. It can be found in nature as well, seen in beavers and the intricate dams they build, or in bees and their production of honey. Seamless interactions with the objects around us create a certain harmony. I believe this is in part due to the fact that they are an extension of us. They house our desires and intentions, and they exist to fulfill them and to make them as good as they can be. I believe modern technology, especially social media, illuminates this. We express our thoughts, feelings, fears, desires, the things we love and what we hate. How could it be denied then, that parts of our very being reside in them?3
The beauty is not only found in the object (or the technology) itself, nor in the end that they are supposed to serve. It is also found in the process of us using them, and the event of moving us closer to the end we are continuously striving for.
collective striving
In her interview with Lex Fridman, Grimes points out how art is essentially a conversation with every artist that came before you. I’ll leave the actual statement to those more concerned with art to debate, though the sentiment reminded me a lot about how as techies, we are constantly building on top of what someone else has created. What we create presupposes everything that came before it.
While I was working as a software developer, I remember once having to add functionality to some old legacy system, spending hours trying to understand how it worked and how I was to integrate the functionality I was tasked to make. When I finally moved on to the testing phase, using the appended test classes, I saw that the previous developer that created them used names from Star Wars for the placeholders. It made me smile and share it with my colleagues, who also found it charming.
Software developers leaving little traces of themselves in code is a well-known phenomenon; A tally showing the number of hours wasted trying to fix a wonky solution, like a cemetery of junior developers' naivety. The stern warning to leave a line of code alone, and not to be fooled by its seemingly useless appearance. The humble apology for a highly convoluted function. The indirect cursing of bureaucracy and stubborn product managers. There are entire threads solely dedicated to sharing such funny and peculiar comments. Here are a few of my favorites from Reddit and StackOverflow:
Developing is not a solitary act. Part of the beauty is in the striving towards quality, along with everyone else that came before you, and everyone that will come after. We become connected not because we encounter these traces of each other, but in how we’re involved in the same pursuit towards quality. Note how the comments above are mainly about trying to optimize or polish a piece of code, or not wanting to be associated with wonky and convoluted code. This collective striving is what makes it natural to offer people you have never and will probably never meet relief in terms of a little pun or advice.
the dangers of value clarity and restriction
Ours is a progressively technical civilization: by this Ellul means that the ever-expanding and irreversible rule of technique is extended to all domains of life. It is a civilization committed to the quest for continually improved means to carelessly examined ends. Indeed, technique transforms ends into means.
In games, we can take on temporary ends to enjoy the means by which we achieve them. Though unlike games, the ends we pursue in the engagement within technology are not temporary.
While pursuing functional beauty, it is easy to lose sight of the bigger picture; whether this utility makes sense in the larger context it takes place in, wether it is additive or detrimental. The concern for technology that solely exists to justify its own existence and that scolds any critique that threatens its constant maintenance, was chiefly addressed by the french philosopher Jacques Ellul. In his acclaimed book The Technological Society, Ellul warns about the dangers of what he calls humanized technology, which serves its own needs instead of ours4. The means, as we have seen, are beautiful and valuable, but when they stop serving the ends, or alter them to justify their own existence, they can potentially become dangerous:
Ellul understood that what mattered most about modern technology was not any one artifact or system, but rather a way of being in the world. This form of life or fundamental disposition precedes, sustains, and is reinforced by the material technological order (...) The technician thereupon tackles the problem as he would any other. But he considers man only as an object of technique and only to the degree that man interferes with the proper function of the technique.
Bringing back the oscar slap, the fun that was had on Twitter was short-lived. It died the second people tried to address the potential seriousness of the situation by bringing up the morality of violence, toxic masculinity, ableism, and how blackness pertains to it all. I’m not undermining the importance of such conversations5, but that having them on Twitter is a losing game. Literally. As Nguyen points out in his paper, any attempt at nuance is immediately tainted by the medium’s proclivity to simplify values and gamify discourse. The issue here does not lie with the users, as wanting to discuss these issues is wholly reasonable. It is Twitter that has created a compelling illusion of being a space that can house nuanced discourse; this by allowing us to point and allude to nuance, but not actually being able to house the full and undistilled version of it.
I believe this illuminates what I think to be the inverse of functional beauty. Technological ugliness is self-serving; it statically perpetuates its own existence at the cost of the ends it was originally meant to serve. These technologies cannibalize on the agencies they create in order to sustain themselves; resulting in our striving becoming less beautiful, and our ends becoming corrupted.
When we play games, we know what we sign up for. There is no obfuscated aspect of UNO that the general public does not have access to, and that has a greater negative effect on us that we are unaware of. In order to keep our autonomy intact, we must be fully informed of the restrictions of the medium, its underlying values, and the consequences that the combination of these poses. If it does not take the bigger picture into consideration, if it doesn’t act in support of our intentions and desires and our general well-being, and most importantly: if all of this is irreversible, and changing these technologies to be more in line with our essence is impossible without ruining the technology itself, then they’re not worth saving. In other words:
if the technology corrupts our attention span, effectively robbing us of our autonomy, throw it in the trash.
if the technology makes workers pee in water bottles, throw it in the trash.
If the technology undermines democracies, kill it with fire.
I tried very hard not to make this entire essay into a love letter dedicated to the elegant and delightful framework of games made by this man. Through some arm wrestling, I managed to condense it somewhat, but it still resulted in this essay being my longest one yet. Nevertheless, the section serves well as an introduction I think, and it presents just enough to make the rest of the piece make sense. Still, I implore anyone who hasn’t read Nguyen’s work to do so. It has had a profound effect on the way I think about technology. I’ll even provide some links: here, and here, and here’s his book and his website. This enthusiasm isn’t incentivized by anything else but the fact that I have developed a parasocial relationship with a philosophy professor from Utah.
A good breakdown of McLuhan and his disregard for values is found in this piece by Clinton Ignatov on Default Wisdom.
a compelling and thorough argument for our souls residing within technology can be found in this video essay by CJ The X. It is a canonical text within its genre, and their work has also been highly formative in my thinking and writing. If you are unfamiliar and I had to make a catchy clickbaity description for it, I would say it’s HyperNormalisation for Gen z’ers, but that doesn’t do it justice at all just watch it it’s amazing I promise
The technological society (and Elluls work in general) is explored more deeply by L. M. Sacasas, here’s a piece he wrote a while back. If you look closely enough you can see that he’s another big influence of mine.
Here is a video essay by F.D Signifier where he discusses these things in a way that is both eloquent and deeply moving, which is in part made possible because the medium he is using allows for these long-form discussions to be had.