[00:00:01.620] - Wesley
You're listening to Journal Entries, a podcast about philosophy and cognitive science, where researchers open up about the articles they publish. I'm Wesley Buckwalter. In this episode, Thi Nguyen talks about his paper Games and the Art of Agency published in Philosophical Review in 2019. Thi's an associate professor of philosophy at Utah Valley University, and starting this July, the University of Utah, where he conducts research on trust, art, games, community and agency. 

[00:00:33.380] - Thi
The basic idea of the paper is that games the art form that work in the medium of agency, the game designer designs the motivations and the abilities of the in-game agent.

[00:00:42.840] 
And then when a player plays the game, they temporarily slip into that agency and adopt this alternate temporary sculpted agency. That's the main idea.

[00:00:52.080] 
My account spends a lot of time on Bernard Suit'  incredible account of a game. Bernard Suit has this book called The Grasshopper and his we'll get into the details. But the quick version of it is that when you play a game, you take on temporary obstacles for the sake of the activity they make possible. So the game designer designates the obstacles and the goals and the ability. Like what a game is, is it creates a artificial goal using artificial constraints and specifies it specifies a goal and it specifies a way to get there.

[00:01:23.160] 
And that is actually in common across all games. And so that, I mean, I think that does give us a way to think about what a game designer is doing in the most general level. So Reinhard Mítya, my favorite German board game designer somewhere he says, like the most important thing in the game designers' tool box is the point system because that sets the player's motivations.

[00:01:44.640] 
I think reading that while reading the Suits was like, oh, that's it. That's what I like. That's what all game designers are doing in common, right? They're designing agency. They're also designing other things like environmental features, virtual environments. But the one thing that's in common across all these genres, the uber-genre, is agency design. 

[00:02:03.120] 
This leads to my view about the artistic medium of games. So game designers don't just create environments or just stories, they create motivations and abilities, what they're shaping as a temporary agency. And we have the ability to slip into that agency.

[00:02:15.330] 
It seems like a radical way to put it. But if you actually I mean, I think when describing the most abstract level, it feels radical. If you think about the experience of a game, you've no idea what you're doing. You open up the game and the games is like, OK, you're all competing for gold now or OK, you're all cooperating to like get across the dungeon or and you just find out what you should care about during this game and then you just do it like it seems weird, but we actually just manage to do it. Literally I'll open up a board game and not know whether it's a cooperative or competitive one. And then the game just tells us and then we're like, okay, here's what we're doing. I've been playing games my entire life. I've also been I mean, I'm involved with a lot of the arts, and I think I spent a lot of time in my life thinking like, you know, if I had it, if I could be anywhere, I wish I was like alive in the 50s writing about jazz as a jazz critic is that art form was booming. I think a few things happened.

[00:03:10.730] 
At one point I realized like. If there's an art form that's exploding right now, it's games. It's not just video games like board games, Role-Playing Games, collectible card games. All of them are seeing these incredible explosions of innovation. I mean, I watch the world and most excited about is this world of indie tabletop role playing games.

[00:03:30.990] 
And in my lifetime, I saw people start with the background that was Dungeons Dragons, which had a very particular set of presumptions about how you're supposed to play just to kill things and get gold and get experience. I watched a bunch of people get bored of it and then collide with like improv theater thinking and then generate these incredibly interesting games. Like there's this game. One of my favorite rules in a game ever is this from this indie role-playing game called Lady Blackbird.

[00:03:58.620] 
And the rule is something like you have stamina and you lose stamina, you run out of energy. And the way you get it back is you have a refreshment scene with another player character where you invent shared backstory. And so like that's seeing rules like that, just like I'm just like that innovation. That's exciting. So I start wanting to write about it. And I was actually spending a lot of time on a site called Boardgame Geek doing kind of like trying.

[00:04:23.010] 
Now, it strikes me as I was trying to develop an aesthetic critical language, not in a scholarly setting, just on a forum, kind of describe by games are good. And then years later after this, I was teaching aesthetics classes and doing some case studies and I was teaching general aesthetics. And I tried a case study on are games art and I read a lot of the stuff. And I I the thing I talked about, if you really, there's is history in the history of art. You keep seeing new mediums arise and people misunderstand them by trying to make them like old medium. Like there's a really interesting example in the early days of photography. A lot of people who wanted to make photography art thought to make it art they had to make it look like paintings. And so they would blur it and put Vaseline on the lens and scratch it up to look like an impressionist painting. And I was kind of worried that like theoretical work was doing the same thing to games Like to in the anxiety to show they were art they are pushing the parts of them that resembled fictions. And for me, what this felt like as a game player was I was playing more and more computer games. Read had less and less freedom there, more or more cut scenes. And the cinematography was good and it made it feel like a movie.

[00:05:32.860] 
But like people were very impressed, like, oh, this is a serious game. It has like really good pre-scripted characters. I was like, what? But it's missing something crucial about gameness. I was reading a lot of academic work on games, and it didn't register to like standard talk of game players and game designers, like it just didn't it didn't like emphasize the same like game designers and and game players talk about I want interesting decisions. I want a fun time. I want like to do cool stuff. And that wasn't showing up in a lot of the academic dialogue. So one of things I thought was if you use the Suitian background, that and you use that as a background for an aesthetic theory that suddenly like brings you into alignment with stuff you see from game designer talk. I think a lot in it in the book version I have a lot more time to explore still about this, but I love the ideas in the book are like me getting them from reading game designer diaries and me like, oh, I see what's going on here and then using the aesthetic theory to actually be able to formalize it and make it a little bit clearer. But a lot of the stuff is I think me just reporting and philosophizing about like the practice as I find it in the world. 

[00:06:49.850] 
A lot of the key of the paper is about this odd state in which in playing a game, a lot of the times the point of playing the game is not to win. Not always been meant for many players. The point is not to win, but in order to get the various pleasures and satisfactions involved with the game you have to temporally focus on winning. I think this is actually the most important thing in the paper games reveal and especially Suit's analysis of games reveals that there's this really interesting, possible motivational state. So in the paper, I distinguishing two kinds of motivational states you could take towards games, achievement, play in striving play.

[00:07:27.160] 
So achievement play is playing for the value of winning and striving play is temporarily taking on an interest in winning for the value of going through the struggle to win or the activity of trying to win. So you're an acheivment player if you win win, you're striving player if you're trying to win for the sake of fun or beauty or relaxation or something like that. Right, something that comes from the activity itself. Another way to put it is in the background achievement play is a very straightforward motivational structure. What you're aiming at achieving in the game is actually what you value or care about. Striving play i s this weirdly bifurcated motivational structure where the thing you aim at in the game is not actually the thing you care about at all.

[00:08:11.320] 
So you know, if striving play is possible, we need to strongly disagree between the goal that you pursue in an activity and then the purpose for which you undertake that activity. So one of the things that's really interesting is to give this distinction and a lot of people who are game players are just like, of course, obviously there's such a thing as a striving play and achievement play. I mean, really simply a lot of the times the goal in play to win. But the purpose in play is to have fun. And one of the ways we know this is if I had a board game night with my friends and I did not win, I'm not like, holy crap, that was a failure. I wasted my time. I'm like, I had a good time. Right. That's not true of all game playing. But this is the really interesting part of gameplay for me. I also think it helps us understand why, like certain kinds of uncomfortable over competitiveness may come once an achievement player is pursuing achievement play in a striving play group or a striving play context.

[00:09:02.410] 
But then there are doubters. One of the interesting things is a lot of philosophy of sport, and a lot of people have written in the space like Tom Harkin and Gwen Bradford have this very achievement oriented view and I think a lot of it involved in the background denying the possibility of striving play. So I ended up having to generate an argument for striving play. That striving play was possible. And here are two. And I think this is in some ways philosophically the most important part of the paper.

[00:09:26.650] 
One, even though during a game I'm pursuing winning a lot of the times outside of the game I don't actually care about how much I win. And we can tell this, by the way, in which I will manipulate my ability to win outside the game. So simple example. So my wife and I play a lot of games and sometimes we'll find a board game where we're perfectly matched. And it's really interesting. And then late at night, I like I'm like surfing on the Internet and I find a strategy guide to that board game. And I know my wife would never read strategy guides. That's just not the things she would do. So if achievement play was the only reasonable form of play, I should read the strategy guide and I should win even if it made me so much better that it would make the game boring. But I don't right in a lot of these cases. I hold off because I know that would unbalance the game and it would make the struggle less interesting. And that shows that I'm a striving player, right?

[00:10:18.520] 
Even though I'm pursuing the win during the game outside of the game I'm actually taking actions that avoid my actually winning. So that's one argument. The other argument is the existence of stupid games. So a stupid game, this is my my coinage. So this is what I've given the philosophical world the term stupid games.

[00:10:40.440] 
A stupid game is a game where one the fun part is failing, but two failing is only fun if you're actually trying to win and absorbed in the win.

[00:10:50.730] 
So some examples of stupid games are like Twister. The children's game of telephone which is, you know, and kids it around and like try to pass a phrase around it. Like it's totally garbled. Of course, if you're trying to garbled a phrase, it wouldn't be funny at all. It's only funny twister's only funny when you fall if you're actually trying to not fall, because what's funny is failure and it's not failure unless you were genuinely trying to win. So if stupid games exist, then striving play is possible. 

[00:11:20.360] 
One thing that I think is useful is to distinguish the striving achievement distinction from the intrinsic extrinsic distinction. A lot of people, I think in the space collapse these two and they think like striving play's intrinsically valuable play and achievement play's extrinsic.

[00:11:33.900] 
That's I think that's not right at all. So there skew and here's a way to put it. You could be an intrinsic achievement player playing just for the value of the win itself. Or you could be an extrinsic achievement player playing for the goods follow from winning like glory or money poker player. Right. You'd be an intrinsic striving player and play just for the good of the activity, whatever those are. Right. Or you could be an extrinsic striving player and play for the goods that follow from engaging the activity.

[00:12:01.730] 
So I think fitness is one of these. Right. So in order to get fit in the marathon, you have to try to win. But in the end, it doesn't matter if you want or not, you get fitter. And I think probably I play games to get closer to people. Right. Is makes it an intrinsic striving. That's an extra that's an extrinsic striving orientation. For me, a lot of the cases, I mean, and this may just be I think this is true of a lot of game design. Not all, but a lot. But it may just reflect the kinds of games that I'm interested in. A lot of my play I would describe as intrinsic striving play for a aesthetic qualities and struggling. I mean, it's like I'm a rock climber. I play like really serious, intense board games. That's only one approach, right? I think a lot of other games, a lot of other games, especially like social drinking games like you might think there's some intrinsic striving value in like the hilarity of the experience. But you might also think a lot of it's just a social value, right. Like relaxing, chilling out with each other. That's also extrinsic striving. 

[00:13:06.160] 
So the main suggestion I have for games is that games are extremely different from a lot of traditional of traditional artworks because of where the aesthetic properties occur. I think in traditional artworks there's something a designer makes and the aesthetic properties adhere in the thing the designer makes. So the painter makes a painting. It's the painting that's beautiful or dramatic.

[00:13:29.440] 
The the the movie team makes a movie and it's a movie that's interesting or funny. There's us there's a separation in games and in mode. Not not every game, but in many striving games. It seems like the game is designed to create an activity in the player and then the aesthetic qualities emerge in the player's activity.

[00:13:55.480] 
So so when climber's climb, they claim to feel graceful in themselves for beautiful movement. Right. When chess players play chess, they play chess because of like that the beautiful feeling of their mind unlocking a puzzle. So I think one of the I mean, one of the ways in which I think applying traditional art paradigms to games misses is if you apply a paradigm that says that the aesthetic properties need to be exactly in the stable object that the artist made, that you're going to go looking in the game itself or the aesthetic properties that will make you think about things like fixed scripts or or graphics or something like that. I mean, it's slightly more complicated. But you'll look to the game itself. I think actually, if you pay a lot of attention to the talk of game players and game designers, what they're really interested in is designing the experience where various forms of fun, interesting choices, thrill, beauty emerge in the player's actions and decisions. And that that I think makes games a radically different aesthetic category than a lot of traditional works. I don't think they're alone in this category, but I think games are like a really clear exemplar of it.

[00:15:09.010] 
I'd really I don't want to fuss too much with exactly what a aesthetic property is. I'm just to talk about some things that most people agree or aesthetic properties like beauty and grace and harmony. So what kind of beauties are there in games? So I lean a lot on some stuff about functional beauty. There's a really interesting conversation about functional beauty. There's been some stuff written about it by Jane Forsee, Allan Carlson and Glenn Parsons. And functional beauty is the beauty of seeing something elegantly perform its function. And I think a lot. Not all, but a lot of the aesthetic qualities that happen in games are experiencing functional beauty in yourself. And one of the interesting things is I think one of the key ways you get functional beauty is a sense of like harmony when you're actually just precisely fits what the situation is demanding of you or even when your total abilities precisely fit. I think that's actually something we occasionally get in life, but it's really rare. Right. Most of the time life is really boring or most the time life is like overwhelmingly hard and we don't get this harmony often. And I think games because they work in the media of agency what a game designer does is they give you a goal and then they give you a set of abilities and then they give you a practical environment where they all kind of fit.

[00:16:27.010] 
Right, like Super Mario Brothers. You are a thing that jumps in the world is full of like things that are just barely enough for you to jump and you just fit. And I think, like that's that's something that that happens precisely because the game designer is manipulating is not just designing the world, but designing who you are to fit that world. The medium of agency is a short way to put what the way to put it, the full way to put it is that that was common for game designers across all kinds of games is they specify goals, they specify abilities and they specify the practical environment, the goal that those goals and abilities will meet. So that together is what I'm calling the medium of agency. 

[00:17:15.260] 
By studying games, we actually learn all kinds of weird stuff about our agency, our ability to inhabit our agency and our fluency, our fluidity with our agency. And there's this larger theme that runs throughout the paper. That's basically like philosophers have spent a lot of time analyzing, like moral life and political life, which is very much like it agentially linear. And when you study things like play agency get's weird and games are kind of a crystallization play.

[00:17:40.470] 
I think almost all our activities and artistic media are like that we engage in regularly are like deep reflections of like central parts of our capacities and like the big picture behind this project always been like philosophy just ignores games and play. And it's it's something that we do constantly and it's I mean, it's like I always think about John Dewy's idea that like art forms, like, crystallized a kind of ability and experience from somewhere else. I do think like games crystalise this kind of really common, natural everyday agency shifting and they like formalized and then they make it writable down.

[00:18:15.630] 
Right. But the agency that can switch between games I think is a more formalized model of the agency we often take up where we're like we change focuses and affordances out. Like sometimes I mean analytic philosophy mode and sometimes I'm in teacher mode and sometimes I'm I'm in like empathetic mentor mode. I think that that's something we do like. That's games formalize our ability to like shift agencies all the time. 

[00:18:43.540] 
I think another important point for me is that it's not just that we enter into a temporary agency. It's a really important way we have to occlude or blot out our standard agency. So there's this just really interesting point that a philosopher of Christopher York brought up in a Q&A very early in this project that shifted my whole thinking about this. And what he was saying was like, look, if you are if you're engaged in striving play and the point is for you to be playing, should you throw the game like if you're if you're about to win. Right. Shouldn't you be like, oh, crap, if I win, we have to be over. So if I'm a striving player, that'll end the struggle.

[00:19:21.610] 
So don't do it right. And that I was like, that's really funky, because if you did that, it seems clear to me that there is striving play. But also if you constantly were thinking like that, you couldn't be fully absorbed in gameplay. Right? If you're currently thinking like, oh crap, if I'm going to win, right. You're going to be you get a lot of the good of gameplay, you've to be totally focused on the win.

[00:19:42.430] 
So that leads me to think is not that, oh, striving play is impossible. But this shows that we have another capacity which is to absorb ourselves in the design sub agency to forget for the moment what our larger purpose is. I think that's actually kind of common. So a lot of times we just do things like we're like, oh my God, I'm stressed out. I'm just gonna go hike up this mountain. Right? And if I think the whole time oh my god I'm hiking up this mountain in order to get less stressed out, I'm not going to get less stressed out. So you have this ability to occulde our larger purpose.

[00:20:10.330] 
So that what that tells me is that we have this I mean, here's the complex capacity we have. We can see a temporary agency absorb ourselves into it and absorb ourselves into it so much that we occlude the background agency. But it's not totally occluded because I mean, basically if we were playing games for fun. Most of me is all out trying to win and to have fun, but it all starts crying. I'll just stop. Right?

[00:20:40.860] 
I can just pop out of the inner layer. So whatever we have is a super complex, multi-layered capacity to setup a agential layers and move between them and kind of like run one in the background. I think I often have like a field like windows to me, like there's something running in the background, there's something running in the foreground.

[00:20:59.820] 
I think this actually gives us I think this barely comes up in the paper, in the book, which expands a lot of the weirder things in the paper, like the big thing one of the big things we learned from here is that, I mean, different media are ways for recording different things, like stories that record like, you know, fiction lets us record narratives and painting, let us record visual images. I think games let us record forms of agency and styles of agency and we can learn them from games.

[00:21:30.510] 
I mean, I mean, there's like quite literally, like, I'm not a great analytic philosopher. I was one of these people who came in like super like romantic and big and like sketchy and but wasn't very good at like the nitty gritty. And I actually learned the mental mood for the nitty gritty from chess, like chess is very much like that. Right. And I think like so. I think maybe the weirdest and coolest part of the book is it takes the game, the paper, and it spins out this idea that all our games are actually our library of agencies.

[00:22:02.160] 
It's like how we write that different modes and refine them and then learn about them by by experiencing them in these recorded media. We like expand our inventory of agencies by just like I mean Martha Nussbaum thinks that we learn about different emotional perspectives by reading fiction and experiencing them from the inside. And I think we also can learn about different forms of agency by experiencing them from the inside by playing a game. 

[00:22:34.100] 
In the background, there's this not particularly theoretical or academic thought, but you find kind of all over the place and people talking about games and the view is something like games with specific rules and specific goals are really like primitive. Those are like lesser games. And the reason is like A) competition is supposed to be bad somehow and B) like you're not free or creative.

[00:22:57.650] 
And a lot of people a lot of people have a view that looks something like look, something Miguel Sicart has this book where he says something like, look. The highest form is like when you're completely free and creative and then you want something like sandbox games that don't tell you what to do. They don't really put any constraints on you when you do whatever you like. That's real art or whatever. That's what that's the highest form of games.

[00:23:21.380] 
This other stuff is just like kid stuff. I tend to think that like free-form toys where you don't have a structured goal or a very different category from games with structured goals, structure goals and structured agencies. And the medium of agency is supposed to tell you that stuff, right? Sandbox games are giving you an environment, but they're not designing an agency for you. So they're not engaging this thing where you're communicating in a agential mode or agential style.

[00:23:49.160] 
So one thing I end up saying. It's something like, look. Right. If you believe in this library of agency stuff, what you what you should think is so basically the standard view in the play literature is to become more free games need to leave us to be totally free. What I'm saying is this other funky thing, which is to become autonomous and free, you need to learn different modes of agency. And the way you learn different modes of agency is participating in these very narrow, strictly confined games.

[00:24:18.230] 
And there's this question of like, is that a contradiction? And the yoga stuff is just supposed to be an analogy where it says, look. Totally not. You know what this is like in yoga? You become more flexible precisely by accepting specific directions about specific postures to take. For temporary parts of time, and part of the idea is, I mean. Basically, the idea that if you're left, you'll be most free if you're completely left to your own devices is I think, based on this weird optimism that doesn't take into account how habitual and how habitual we are and how many our actions come from habit. I think one of the main thoughts from yoga is something like, look, your body and your posture has very specific habits and you always come back to them.

[00:25:02.370] 
And the reason that yoga postures are so strict is they force you out of your habits to move into this other space. And I think that's exactly what's going on with games. Right. You may have habitual a general postures and games by saying you must think this way, you must do this, force you into a different one. And if you get stuck there, that's bad. Right? But. But if you're using it to learn about different possible agential postures and then stepping back and integrating them, then that helps you become autonomous. So games are agency yoga. 

[00:25:38.050] 
So one worry you might have is that, you know, games are supposed to be fun and rules are the opposite of fun. So is there a tension here? I mean, there are few ways around this one. Games just illustrate that there's something wrong with a principle that rules the opposite of fun. Because are all kinds of ridiculous games where you have to follow the rules in order to have fun.

[00:26:02.460] 
I think behind this, the idea that fun is the opposite of constraint is really weird. I think it helps to think that all art is heavily normatively bound, like there's so many norms behind every form of art. So for example, novels think of all the norms involved in novels to expect a novel. You don't eat it, you don't smell it, you read it and you read the words in order. And imagine someone saying, Oh, you're telling me Terry Pratchett is funny, but that's a novel and the experience a novel. I have to read that there's this rule that I've read the words in order, like, how could I ever have fun if I'm constrained by this? This just seems ridiculous, right. But I think you can actually see something else, which is I mean. The rules create the activity in the activity. The creation of the activity through constraints like fun emerges can emerge in a sculpted activity. So I think a really good example is like one of my favorite incredibly idiotic games is it's called one legged wrestling.

[00:27:01.420] 
And the way you do it is if we weren't, you and I were going to play one right leg wrestling. We grab right hands and with each of our left hands, we pick up our left foot. So each of us are standing on our right foot, holding our right hands and holding our left foot in the other person's in our own left hand. And then the point is we kind of jerk each other's hand and push and pull each other.

[00:27:21.520] 
And the first person either fall over or let go of their foot. Loses. This is hysterically fun, and the whole reason it's hysterically fun is it's such an awkward and weird activity, and the whole reason it's awkward and weird is that you've been forced to hold your left hand and your left foot right. So it's the constraints sculpt activities and the sculpted activities can be fun. 

[00:27:46.870] 
Okay, so you know, I've been stuck in this house for three weeks with a toddler and we're holding a lot of online chats with friends. In some ways, online chats get really, really awkward sometimes. Like it's not the same as hanging out with him over cocktails. And one of the things we found is actually playing a board game where we've actually been playing a lot of online tabletop Role-Playing Games with our friends. I think there's a reason this works. So one of possibly the weirdest. So this isn't in the paper at all, but this is in the book. The book is called Games Agency and Art. It basically expands this paper into a massive thing and talks a lot more about the aesthetics and the social side. That was actually supposed to be shipping right now, but is not because it is on a pallet in a warehouse that's been shut down because of the pandemic. So one of the weirder suggestions I make is like so I've been talking about design agencies and about your singular agency. But multiplayer games, if you think about it through agency design, they can create like social design. Right. You're creating a particular network of social relationships through the agencies. In the book, the goofy way I put it for philosophers is that , so Mill thought we should do these things called experiments in living where we experientially explore alternate values by living in societies under those values, and that's what he thought communes were. And I kind of think games are like the quick sketch version of that. You are having a micro little society under an alternate conception of the good, which is just the goal for the game at the moment. But so games are not de structured. Agencies could also be structured social relationships.

[00:29:24.500] 
You actually see this work when you play a game online, right? You can see the fact the rules, people that like it, it's kind of weird. Zoom's is kind of awkward. You're trying to hang out with some couple of your friends. But when we play a role playing game because it's so structured, the design social relationship just like comes into place and it helps you find that relationship. Like the fact that it's so designed and that the rules are easy to follow and to a specific and put you in a direction. I think it actually like can really help people socialize when they don't quite know how to do it. I mean, I think this is a reason why a lot of philosophers are super awkward and then like to play board games because it offers you a structured thing where you know what you're supposed to be doing.

[00:30:08.760] 
Ok I'm going to recommend a couple games. So really good party game that's easy and really easy to play as a game called Spyfall. So Spyfall is a group game where seven like you might play with like a somewhere between like four and eight people. If they're eight people, 7 of you will find out, seven of you will find out that you're in a team together and you'll find out your location like a submarine. And then one of you will find out like that you're the spy.

[00:30:31.750] 
And so the spy player is playing against the team players, but the team players don't know who the spy is. Right. The cards are dealt out randomly. So the team players goal is figure out who the spy is. And the spies goal is to figure out the location. And they do it by asking each other questions. So you'll be like, oh, when you get here this morning, would you eat for breakfast news like trying to catch out the spy.

[00:30:49.480] 
But you don't want to be too specific because the spy you asked you if you're like, so when do you report for duty and how long have you been up like this? We'll figure it out. So it's it's like a really interesting game. 

[00:31:00.850] 
There's another game called Imperial, which I think is like my favorite board game. It's completely evil in theme. It's World War One. It looks like risk. There are like six nations on the board. And you don't play the nations. You play these shadowy bankers trading stocks and bonds and the nations controlling the nations that get the most profit out of the war. And it's like there's really complex like incentivization through stock portfolio game. 

[00:31:25.700] 
Maybe the most interesting board game right now is route a woodland game of might and right. And Root is an asymmetric game where each of you plays a side with a totally different goal and a totally different mechanism. And one of you plays the Marquise de cat who's like an industrialist, who's game is to build in like economic infrastructure.

[00:31:45.040] 
And another one of you plays that with an alliance which are basically the underground rebels for trying to overthrow and they move totally differently. And another one of you plays like an arms dealer who's like trading with the other side to make money. And it's actually like different agencies locked into each other. 

[00:32:00.870] 
And then like the indie Role-Playing Games scene is amazing. Like look at games like Apocalypse World, which completely rewrite how the metaphysics of Role-Playing works or like the rules are made to that when players take actions and ask questions the world gets invented around them. And it's it's incredible ruleset for collaborative storytelling. 

[00:32:24.200] - Wesley
That's it for today's episode. Visit our web site at journal entries dot  fireside dot fm for more information about Thi Nguyen, his work and some of the resources mentioned in this episode.