C. Thi Nguyen > Quotes

“One of the greatest pleasures games offer is a certain existential balm—a momentary shelter from the existential complexities of ordinary life. In a game, for once in my life, I know exactly what it is that I’m supposed to be doing.”
― C. Thi Nguyen, Games: Agency As Art

“In echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined. The way to break an echo chamber is not to wave “the facts” in the faces of its members. It is to attack the echo chamber at its root and repair that broken trust.”
― C. Thi Nguyen, Echo Chambers and Epistemic Bubbles

“We started our inquiry into the aesthetics of games with various accounts that tried to subsume games under more familiar forms of art - fictions, conceptual art, and the like. But, I've argued, some of the most important kin to game design are actually urban planners, and government designers. All these are attempts to cope and corral the agency of users, to achieve certain effects. Games are an artistic cousin to cities and governments. They are systems of rules and constraints for active agents. But game designers have a trick up their sleeves that the designers of cities and governments do not. They can substantially design the nature of agents who will act within them. The medium of agency is active, then, in two directions. It creates a distinctive recalcitrance - the recalcitrance of agential distance. And it offers a a distinctive sort of solution - the manipulation of agency.”
― C Thi Nguyen, Games: Agency As Art

“There is an underlying worldview implied by her salsa rage. She has assumed that left to its own devices”
― C. Thi Nguyen, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game

“Art is a game. And like a lot of games”
― C. Thi Nguyen, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game

“Games let us flirt with such seductive agencies in a protected context. Here is the hope: if you spend a lot of time engaged in aesthetic striving play, you will have plenty of practice losing yourself in, and then drawing back from, the pleasures of value clarity. You will be used to wearing your submersion a little lightly. Then when life hands you far more pressing agential modes, and value clarities with more seriousness and force behind them - when you face the calls of the crisp and clear value systems inherent in money, grades, Twitter likes, and research impact factors - you will have developed the right habits of lightness and control with your agency.”
― C Thi Nguyen, Games: Agency As Art

“If you don’t care about the truth”
― C. Thi Nguyen, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game

“A pastor recently told me that his church had become completely obsessed with baptism rates. The higher-ups had established an internal leaderboard in which the pastors competed on monthly baptism rates, and it was starting to dominate everybody’s attention. He’d found himself caring less about the long-term spiritual development of his flock and focusing more on trying to deliver popular sermons that would up his baptism rates and move him up that leaderboard.”
― C. Thi Nguyen, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game