(2024-10-04) Peterson Games Agency As Art A Behavioral Scientists Book Review

Jared Peterson: Games: Agency as Art: A Behavioral Scientist’s Book Review. Well, if you find the right game, I will choose to make my life more difficult.

Games seem exempt from the most powerful rule in Behavioral Science; Richard Thaler’s advice that “If you want to get somebody to do something, make it easy.”

Games are a complete inversion of the typical motivational profile.

in games the struggle is the very thing we are hoping to experience. The means and the ends are switched. The struggle is the point.

Or so argues C. Thi Nguyen in his book Games: Agency as Art. A book which gave me much to reflect on as a behavioral scientist. It is simultaneously a love letter to the potential of games to change behavior, and also a screed against gamification.

The central premise of the book is this: When we play games, we play for the aesthetic experience of the struggle.

This isn’t to say that people don’t care about status, social cohesion, or any number of other functions that a game might serve

what Nguyen is saying is that the challenge itself has value independent of these other consequences

When you play a game to win, Nguyen calls this Achievement Play. But in Striving Play you play for the sake of the experience, and that is the hero of this story. "It's not about winning, it's about how you play the game,” is quintessentially Striving Play.

In Striving Play, adopting-the-goal-of-winning is a necessary precondition to being able to fully appreciate the game.

Consider Twister where falling down and therefore failing is what makes the game so fun. Nevertheless, if you fall down intentionally, the fun will be stolen from you.

In Striving Play, losing can still hurt, and winning is still usually fun, but the true purpose of Striving Play is the aesthetic experience one has while struggling to play well. This idea forms the heart of the book and sets up what I consider three of the most critical takeaways for behavioral scientists.

Agency as Art

Agency is an awkward word which I am loath to use, but feel I must. Agency means active and intentional action such as thinking, deciding, doing, or planning. Non-agentic actions would be things we do passively or reflexively

Nguyen builds on the concept of agency by talking about agentic modes

An agentic mode is like a “mindset” or “a way of being.”

consider the diverse mindsets and ways of being you engage in when writing a research paper

All of these modes require different capabilities, and each has a different qualitative experience to them. Being creative feels different than proofreading, which feels different than thinking rigorously about an argument you are writing. You probably have a preference for which of these modes you would rather engage in.

Nguyen argues that just as a painting captures the beauty of a sunset, games capture agentic modes.

*Games can still have other aesthetic qualities, such as beautiful imagery, a compelling story, or a great soundtrack. But in addition, games have a medium unique to themselves; human agency. Here is how Nguyen describes this in the book:

“John Dewey suggested that many of the arts are crystallizations of ordinary human experience.
Games, I claim, are the crystallization of practicality. Aesthetic experiences of action are natural and occur outside of games all the time. Fixing a broken car engine, figuring out a math proof, managing a corporation.
These experiences are wonderful — but in the wild, they are far too rare. Games can concentrate those experiences. When we design games, we can sculpt the shape of the activity to make beautiful action more likely. And games can intensify and refine those aesthetic qualities, just as a painting can intensify and refine the aesthetic qualities we find in the natural sights and sounds of the world.”*

Interestingly, rather than some object having an aesthetic quality, it is your own agency that evokes emotions of beauty, harmony, tragedy, hilarity, etc. Nguyen calls it Process Art as opposed to Object Art. Other examples of Process Art might include cooking, dancing, doing math, or even the process of making art.

My own experience of this sort of crystallization is with machine learning.
There is a particular pleasure in figuring out how to arrange data to get the results you care about.

But then I left the world of machine learning to pursue psychology, which I was far more passionate about. While it was the right choice, I began to miss the challenge. I lost the aesthetic experience that I had grown accustomed to.

But a few years ago, I stumbled across a video of this British guy having a positively sublime experience doing a Sudoku.

After a couple of weeks of playing the game, I realized it was the same aesthetic experience as building a machine learning model. Not entirely the same, but there was something about thinking through the constraints of a Sudoku that felt like thinking through the constraints of the data when building a model

In both machine learning and Sudoku, you are trying to control for all the possibilities to ensure only one possible solution, or interpretation, remains. Now if people ask me what data science is like, I tell them it is a bit like Sudoku: you play around with constraints until everything lines up and you are left with only one possible solution.

Nguyen would say that Sudoku is the crystallization of a specific agency that I will call reasoning by constraints

Together, “A collection of games can, then, constitute a library of agencies,” Nguyen says. Recorded bits of human experience ready to be taken up.

Games “are a method for inscribing forms of agency into artifactual vessels: for recording them, preserving them, and passing them around.” A way to communicate agencies from one human to another

Leveling up your agency

The idea that games are a medium through which we can share agencies brings up an intriguing possibility: can we use games to expand our repertoire of skills?

Nguyen thinks so. “Games can experientially immerse a player in an alternative agency, making that mode of agency more available to the player elsewhere in life. Games can help to build a broader menu of possible ways of being an agent.” This can, in turn, expand our freedom and autonomy as we explore alternative ways of interacting with the world

I see three ways that games might expand our agentic abilities.

For one, a game may help us grow familiar with an agentic mode that was previously strange to us.
For example, for someone who is clumsy and unfamiliar with graceful movement, taking up gymnastics

Or perhaps someone is naïve and overly trusting, in which case playing Poker may help them develop their lie-detection skills

Second, shifting between games may enable us to be more fluid in our ability to shift between ways of engaging with the world.

shifts in agentic modes are common in games. In a video game, you might be slaying a monster one moment, exploring a beautiful mountain vista the next, and then searching for mushrooms the moment after. The ability to shift between agentic modes may be a valuable trait worth pursuing for those of us who may dig in our heels a bit too long.

Lastly, a game may teach us to enjoy an agentic mode we hadn’t previously. This aspect is perhaps the most interesting to me, and so it is where I will focus.

he argues that in embodying a specific agentic mode, we can learn to appreciate the aesthetic quality of that mode.

Could someone learn to love Data Science by playing Sudoku?

Nguyen’s personal example is that he didn’t start out as a very good philosopher. His advisor said he was great with questions but didn’t have the temperament to sit down and think logically through a problem. But then Nguyen started playing chess which showed him that sitting down and thinking logically through a problem could actually be fun and have it’s own type of pleasure. Having realized that such thinking could be fun, Nguyen started to develop a knack for it.

Nguyen argues that such transformations can happen because games are right-sized for our abilities

Here is another way to think about it: how can someone learn to love the struggle of exercise if they never learn to love the struggle of a sport where they perform well? How can they learn to love the struggle of a good intellectual challenge if they never meet a challenge that is the perfect intellectual size to struggle with and solve? Perhaps games are one key, among many, to conditioning ourselves to enjoy agentic modes we had previously found boring or difficult.

Let’s rein this back for a second. I don’t think games are the key to permanently solving the intention-action gap, and Nguyen doesn’t either

But typically we think of making-behavior-fun as a strategy that should occur during the behavior by adding various elements such as points or badges (in the most basic forms of gamification). Instead, Nguyen invites us to consider the importance of learning to enjoy the struggle for its own sake

For example, the fact that I want to be a writer does not mean I want to write. The gap between wanting-to-be and wanting-to-do is quite large. But perhaps games are a bridge between the two. If we can crystallize writing and its associated agentic modes, perhaps I can learn to better appreciate the satisfaction that comes from saying something well.

perhaps through games we can learn to love the aesthetic experience of a certain form of agency; the agency of the person we want to become. And if this is true, it is worth considering whether our current methods, such as making-things-easier and gamification, may be good for changing behavior, but counterproductive for changing people.

How to actually apply this is still an open mystery. No one argues that reading Dostoyevsky once will make you a good person, and Nguyen isn’t arguing that playing Settlers of Catan will make you a good steward of resources

Nguyen merely wants to claim that the seeming arbitrariness of games may in fact serve the important function of expanding our agency. Indeed, maybe that is their evolutionary and developmental purpose.

Value capture

Anything that can shift our values has potential for good and ill — whether religion, propaganda, or even games.

the concern is that our fundamental values will be shifted and over-simplified in a process he calls Value Capture.

This process is closely related to another idea called Goodhart’s Law, an important idea in it’s own right.

imagine a teacher who feels forced to ‘teach to the test’ because test scores are the metric by which they will be judged

as the teacher feels mounting pressure to improve test scores, the teacher shifts the focus of their lessons away from ensuring the children are learning and towards ensuring the children will perform well on the test

The key difference between this example of Goodhart’s Law and Nguyen’s concern is that once the metric is taken away, the teacher will sigh a breath of relief and return to how they had originally taught. The shift in focus only endured for as long as the metric was enforced. Not so in Value Capture.

Imagine a different scenario where a school creates a competition to see which classroom can get the highest test scores. In this scenario, the teacher buys into the game and is excited by the metric. They do their best to optimize their students for test-taking

In this scenario, even once the competition and metric are taken away, the teacher may develop a taste for it and may be excited at the prospect of finding new ways to increase test scores. Worst of all, maybe they enjoy it so much that they want to apply that same maximization mindset to other areas of their life

Nguyen concludes that “We shouldn’t worry about games creating serial killers, we should worry about them creating Wall Street bankers.” People for whom finance is just a game to win, not a serious endeavor with lives at stake. Why not?

If Nguyen is right, aiming for a metric is always dangerous because metrics are a type of incentive system. There’s always the danger of not just missing the true target by aiming at an imperfect proxy (Goodhart’s Law). But also a larger danger of changing our perception of what the true target even is as we learn to enjoy pursuing the proxy (Value Capture) and the accompanying agentic mode.

Nguyen’s favorite example is Twitter, which, he argues, gamifies communication. Maybe someone joins the platform to engage with people, change minds, or stay current on the latest news. But once they are on there, the platform embeds them in a game of its own design

after a while, they become less interested in changing minds than in posting memes and dunking on their most hated politicians because that gets them the most likes and retweets.

As they pursue the metrics, the metrics de-correlate from their initial values (Goodhart’s Law), but even worse, they start to enjoy pursuing the metrics more than they care about engaging with people, changing minds

This is something Jack Dorsey has even commented on when he says he wished he had hired Behavioral Economists and Game Theorists to better understand the incentive system he and his team were creating

He who controls the point system (game rules) controls you, argues Nguyen

The nuanced values we develop throughout your life, such as the desire to connect with others, find the truth, and contribute to society, are lost to simplified metrics as social media companies gamify communication, academia gamifies knowledge production, and workplaces gamify production. (legibility)

that which matters most is the least measurable.

Perhaps one of the biggest takeaways from the book for behavioral scientists is around Value Capture. We shouldn’t think of metrics, incentives, and point systems as providing targets for people to aim at. But instead we should think of them as BF Skinnerian rewards which change who we are as people by changing how we like to engage with the world. A power that many corporations now wield.

Conclusion

Yes, there are parts I had to slog through (Striving Play is real, move on already), but for the most part the book captured me in a way that few other books ever have. Two years later and I still think it is the best non-fiction book I’ve read since graduating college.

One thing this book has made me reflect on is how my choice of games has either influenced or predicted the direction of my career. My research interest in expert intuition seems in many ways to match the types of games I like to play. And my favorite part of a project, turning a complex problem into a framework and actionable strategy, has a similar type of satisfaction as Sudoku.

This has caused me to reflect on the role of games in education and aptitude testing. We have an existing library of human agencies in the form of games. What can they tell us about who we are, what kind of ways we like to engage with the world, what kind of careers we might enjoy? Could they also help us to enjoy aspects of our career we find tedious or difficult? These questions fascinate me. I wonder how much of my career path was determined in the moment my mom brought home a brand new PlayStation and Crash Bandicoot.

It even impacted a project on Choice Overload I worked on by getting me to focus on the aesthetic experience of choice, as opposed to the number of options.