How to Game Reality

Games can serve as an escape from reality—but they can also shape our understanding of trust, collaboration, and what might be possible IRL. Megan Garber talks with C. Thi Nguyen, an associate philosophy professor at the University of Utah, to better understand how games can help us safely explore our current reality and shape new realities, too.

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The following transcript was edited for clarity:

Andrea Valdez: For my eighth-grade graduation gift, Megan, I asked for and received from my lovely parents the Franklin Mint edition of Monopoly, which, if you haven’t seen it, it’s this extremely baroquely designed Monopoly board that’s made of wood, and it has these drawers. It’s where you store your money, and the houses and hotels are plated in gold and silver. I had seen it on the back of a Reader’s Digest magazine, and I just had to have it.

Megan Garber: Well, first of all, this totally verifies my hunch that all the best things in the world come from the back pages of Reader’s Digest. Yes, of course.

Valdez: I mean, I still have this board game, and when I play it, I just feel so fancy.

Garber: You’re making me think now of all the games I played as a kid and what they would look like with Franklin Mint–edition fanciness. What would the Mint Edition of Twister be like?

Valdez: Oh my God, play Twister in a ball gown?

Garber: Yeah, that’s right: Twister in a tux, just as Milton Bradley intended.

Valdez: I’m Andrea Valdez. I’m an editor at The Atlantic.

Garber: And I’m Megan Garber, a writer at The Atlantic.

Valdez: And this is How to Know What’s Real.

Valdez: Games like Monopoly and Twister, they’re pretty basic compared to some of the games we have now with very complex rules. And of course, video games, they’ve evolved to have these, you know, extremely realistic designs and high-tech capabilities. Even as games have evolved over time, this desire for play, it’s an age-old thing. You know, consider the game Go. It’s this board game that we still play today, but it was invented more than 2,500 years ago. Games are just one of the most fundamental activities that humans have. Yeah.

Garber: They’re almost primal. And because of that, they can, I think, connect us not just to each other in the moment and to each other across cultures, really, but just like you said, to the humans of the past and the cultures of the past. And, you know, I’m not really a chess player, for example, but one thing I do love about it when I play is the knowledge of how many other people across time have played that same game and negotiated the same board with those same pieces and same options for moves. There’s something, I think, almost beautiful about that, really.

Valdez: Right. I mean, and transportive, like you said, across time, but they’re transportive for us when we’re playing them; you get lost in these games, and they actually bring out all sorts of different aspects of yourself and your personality when you’re playing them.

Garber: I think also games capture so many of the ideas we’ve been talking about this season overall. You know, the lines between reality and fantasy and the way even the things we tend to think about as escapism can have these really profound lessons for the way we live our everyday lives. So I talked to C. Thi Nguyen, who is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Utah and basically a philosopher of games. He thinks really deeply and really creatively about how games interact with the wider world.

Garber: Could you tell me about a game that’s been especially important in your life?

C. Thi Nguyen: So, I mean, this will already give you a hint of how big I think the category of games are. I grew up playing games, but the game that saved my soul and life during graduate school was rock climbing. For me, rock climbing is intense, but the main experience of it is of this, like, altered mental state where you’re so focused on the particularities of the rock and so focused on your body that everything else falls away. There’s this very intense feedback system. Godfrey Devereux, who’s one of my favorite yoga writers, has this line where he says, “The point of yoga is actually to give you feedback on your mind wandering.” If you’re meditating and your mind wanders, you won’t notice sometimes. But if you’re in a yoga pose, a hard one, and your mind wanders, you’ll wobble, and that’s a feedback. And I think rock climbing kind of exaggerates this. Like, this is a thing I think is really deep in a lot of games. Like, rock climbing gives you feedback that slaps you in the face. So, like, if you’re climbing and your mind drifts, you’re gonna fall 10 feet. I think it’s a meditation tool.

Garber: You’re talking about rock climbing as a game. So then, of course, I have to ask, how do you define a game? What are the constraints that we’re actually talking about right now?

Nguyen: There are some philosophers who think that you can’t define a game at all, that it’s one of these fuzzy things. But then I was given this book, the book that changed the course of my life. It’s a book from a philosopher named Bernard Suits called The Grasshopper. He had this view about games, and his definition of a game is that to play a game is to voluntarily take on unnecessary obstacles to create the possibility of struggling to overcome them. Playing a game is voluntarily—and this is really crucial; if someone forces obstacles on you, that’s not a game—voluntarily taking on unnecessary obstacles to create the activity of struggling to overcome them. One way I like to put it is that in games, you’re trying to do something, but you’re just not trying to get the thing itself independently. So, if you’re running a marathon, you’re trying to get to this spot in space, this finish line. But the point of the marathon is just not to be at the finish line, because if you just wanted that, you would do it in the most efficient way possible, which would be a bicycle, or an Uber, or a shortcut, right? The way that Suits would put it is that the end goal in a game is partially constituted by the constraints on how you got it, right? If you took a taxi, it wouldn’t count as crossing the finish line, right? You only count as crossing the finish line if you did it inside the constraints. So whatever the value of game playing is, it’s essentially arising from the relationship to these artificial constraints. It must be that you can’t get the thing you want unless you did it via the constraints. In normal life, you go through the means for the sake of the ends. You go through all the struggle because you want this independent object. And the only way to get that money, to get that job, to get that car is to do this other crappy stuff. In games, you take on the goal for the sake of the struggle.

Garber: So I wonder how that idea of constraint fits into the fact that so many games involve these more traditional forms of art—you know, narrative and versions of fiction and fantasy, which are things that I usually think of as kind of rejecting constraint, right? And the interactive elements, especially, of games seem really powerful there. So could you tell me a little bit more about that?

Nguyen: I think our theories for art are so used to stable objects—

Garber: Yeah—

Nguyen: —that everyone can experience similarly, and so we try to cram in games that are as close to stable objects as possible. Where I think, for me, a lot of the most amazing games—I mean, board games like Go, classics like Hold’em Poker, and then new-school games like Dota and Starcraft—but for me, like, a lot of my love is for these incredibly fascinating games coming out of the modern indie board-game scene and the modern indie role-playing-game scene, where they create these rules where just, like, you start playing them and then magic happens and then suddenly five people are creating a story or five people are locked into a complex incentive-manipulation struggle and having interactions with each other that never would have existed outside the game. So, when I was starting this work, the dominant paradigm was something like “Games are art if they’re kind of a movie, they’re kind of an interactive movie.” And I think another way to put it is “Games are an art government.”

Garber: Mmm, say more about that, yeah.

Nguyen: Games are a rule system that conditions and shapes people’s reaction.

Garber: Yes.

Nguyen: That’s what governments are. I mean, governments are trying to shape us to make us not kill each other. And games are trying to shape us. To make us have a beautiful, interesting time; to get interesting interactions out of us.

Garber: What’s a game that, to you, captures that idea, that games are an art of government?

Nguyen: So the most interesting game to me right now that’s come out in the last few years is Cole Wehrle’s Root. You can learn pretty easily and play over and over again. It looks like little woodland creatures, but it’s the same. So one of the factions is the Marquis de Kats. They are the bourgeois industrialists, whose goal is to build up their factory network, build up their logistical roads, and make more money. Another force is the Woodland Alliance. They are the communists, and their goal is to destroy the industrialist network. This game is fascinating, because each side has completely different roles, a completely different political alignment, and a completely different way of working and thinking. And when you play the game multiple times, you shift through the roles, and so you can experience the game from different angles; you can experience a conflict from completely different political angles and reexperience how it looks from each side, which I think is what games are made for.

Valdez: Megan, Professor Nguyen said games are partially defined by their constraints, that we’re playing within a set of rules. And a fundamental part of games is not breaking those rules. Games help us learn to make executive decisions and understand boundaries. So games, they’re providing this mechanism to practice play as a sort of proxy for practicing reality. But without the mortal consequence of, say, rock climbing.

Garber: Hopefully. And that consequence-free element, too, is so important here, I think. I really love the way you put that, that games are ways to practice reality. And it’s making me think, too, of an idea from the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, who wrote in the first half of the 20th century and did a lot of similar work, I think, to what we’ve been talking about with Professor Nguyen. One of Huizinga’s insights was that games create this temporary experimental space that’s almost sacred in its way. So games turn spaces, whether they’re card tables or soccer fields or screens, into what Heisinger called a “consecrated spot,” where people can come together and explore these really profound questions of what it means to be human and what it means to find alternate ways of being human together. And later philosophers—people who were thinking about games, and virtual spaces in particular—compared that kind of experimentation to magic. And they coined the idea of game spaces as quote, unquote “magic circles.”

Valdez: Oh, I love that. Because games do feel magical. They feel otherworldly.

Garber: Yeah.

Valdez: I think in part because games allow for this really immersive form of role-playing. I mean, they’re literally called RPGs, or “role-playing games,” in game terminology. And in many of these RPGs, lots of the main characters, they’re the hero—Mario saves the princess, Link and Zelda save the kingdom—but we’ve actually seen some really infamous antiheroes crop up in games. I’m thinking of Grand Theft Auto specifically. It’s the video game where you play this main character who can steal cars, who deals drugs, who shoots people and blows things up, but it’s not just video games where you can be the villain. In sports, we create these narratives about underdogs and champions, and in board games, people can gang up on a player who maybe is taking things way too seriously and decide that they’re going to go after all her Monopoly money or whatever.

Garber: Or you’re going to be the person who is ganged up on for not taking Monopoly seriously enough.

Valdez: Ah, yes. I wonder who that might be, Megan.

Garber: I have no idea. No idea at all. But those different roles, whether you’re cast in them by a game designer or by fellow players, that’s something I discussed with Professor Nguyen as well.

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Nguyen: So Reiner Knizia—one of my favorite board-game designers; he’s a German board-game designer—people call him the Mozart of German board-game design. He’s made hundreds of incredible games. And I heard this talk he gave at the Game Developers Conference. And he says, “The most important tool in my game-designer tool kit is the point system, because the point system tells the players what to desire.” And if you’re a game player, like a board-game player, this makes total sense. You open up a board game, and it literally tells you whether you’re cooperating or competing, or whether you’re trying to optimize your efficient monies for efficiency, or you’re trying to kill each other. But the philosopher in me was like, Oh my God, I’ve never heard this before. Philosophers and a lot of people, I think, in other kinds of theory, like economic theory, rational-choice theory, tend to assume that desires are pretty stable. And what Reiner Knizia was telling me was that you can just open up a game, and it tells you what to desire, and you just do it. You can just plunge yourself into this alternate desire.

Garber: Well, could you tell me more about a game like that?

Nguyen: Let me tell you about one of my favorite games, which is genuinely evil. This will make you think much less of me.

Garber: Go for it. Go for it.

Nguyen: It’s called Imperial. It’s a board game. It’s an incredibly interesting board game. It’s World War I. The six great powers are facing off against each other in World War I. And you don’t play them. You play the shadowy investors changing investments in the countries and controlling their fate for profit.

Garber: Wow.

Nguyen: It’s, yeah, it’s evil. It’s definitely an evil game. It simulates evil. But if you step into this game, the perspective it gives you is—so, in Imperial, one time when I first understood how the game really was supposed to work, I was heavily invested in England, and the player that was heavily invested in Germany was clearly gearing up for war with England. And I was gearing up to fight, and then I realized, Oh no, all I need to do is let them get some cheap stock in England too. Now we’re co-invested. Now they’re not going to attack me. So the game is not a war game. It’s a game about manipulating shared incentives. And literally this game teaches me how to negotiate in business settings.

Garber: Interesting. So you’ve literally used the lessons of the game in your own life?

Nguyen: Yeah. I mean, I want to be cautious here, ’cause I think games are valuable for their own sake, but also they’re valuable developmentally. I always feel bad because everyone wants to justify games, ’cause they help you learn things. But I also think it’s just play, it’s just important, but also they’re valuable developmentally. And when you put the perspective that you learned from Imperial on, you don’t think, We’re fighting other places. You think, How can I possibly make the incentives shared such that our fates are partially intertwined? And it’s not like this is the only way to learn things. You can learn this stuff in other ways too. I mean, you can also learn emotional perspectives from other sources—novels. But games are a quick and fast way that we have figured out to encode different mental states and practical styles in a rule set, so you can just pick them up, and just like you can experience other people’s lives from novels, you can experience the world from completely different practical mindsets in games. That’s what makes them special.

Garber: So that makes me wonder about the difference in the kind of games you’re talking about between the player and the person. So what’s the line between the you who plays a game and the broader you who exists in real life?

Nguyen: Yeah, this is so interesting to me because there’s this assumption that a lot of people have that whatever you do in a game, that’s what you’ll be like in real life. Like, if you play Imperial, you’ll turn into an asshole.

Garber: The opposite of agency.

Nguyen: I’m worried about that in some cases, but I think that underrates our ability to be flexible. No one thinks if you watch The Sopranos, you’re going to become a Mafia lord, right? Human beings have the capacity to entertain other forms of life and other ways of thinking without being sucked in. I’m worried about being sucked in, but we have that ability. And I think one of the interesting things about games is they cue us to step back.

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Garber: So, Andrea, this conversation with a philosopher of games reminded me, actually, of a game that’s a work of philosophy in its way. It’s called Train, and it’s a game that in this really striking way does, I think, a version of what Professor Nguyen is talking about: encouraging us to step back and question each other and question ourselves.

Valdez: I don’t actually think I’ve ever heard of this game.

Garber: Yeah. No, I hadn’t either just until recently, but Train is this fascinating thing in part because I think it’s so deceptive, and it’s not a game in a traditional sense, which is probably why we hadn’t heard of it. It’s actually an art piece in the guise of a classic resource-management board game. So, along the lines of Settlers of Catan. But the difference is that Train is not something you or I could play, because there’s only one version of it that exists. And it’s actually part of a series of pieces that the designer Brenda Romero created to explore how games can manipulate emotions. So in Train, players compete to build pieces of infrastructure—in this case, a railway system. But Train has, basically, a plot twist at the end, and a really big one, because it turns out that the particular railway system the game is building is connected to a Nazi concentration camp.

Valdez: Oh my gosh.

Garber: Yes. So, yeah, very much not a game in a traditional sense, but it takes what might seem like this dull premise and transforms it into this really galling and gutting exploration of complicity, and really what complicity feels like, because the better you are at following the rules of this particular game, the worse you become, basically, about following the rules of being a person.

Valdez: Oh my gosh, yeah, that sounds very intense. It doesn’t sound at all like the fun diversion that you associate with the word game, actually.

Garber: Yeah, no, the opposite in so many ways. But, then, all the things that would make Train terrible as a player experience are also the things that, at least to me, make it so powerful as an act of art, because the game in so many ways does exactly what Professor Nguyen was talking about, I think, when he was describing how the interactive elements of games can help players to learn about themselves as individuals. So you don’t have to play Train to do the questioning it’s asking its players to do; to ask, How would I react if I were playing this game? What would it take for me to stop playing?

Valdez: This feels like it aligns with some of the interest and research in recent years trying to understand if video games could engender empathy. So there was this one study where researchers had people play a game where they were a character that experienced racial bias. The findings in that study indicated that some players of that particular game fostered “perspective taking” of the character they were playing. I mean, it’s a really complicated area of research right now. And that particular study I referenced, it was small, but it does speak to the power of games and how we use them in cognitive and empathetic development.

Garber: Professor Nguyen, I’d love to dig a little more deeply into the idea of games as these value systems in miniature. And I’m especially interested in how games negotiate complexity: these stark rules on the one hand, but on the other, these ever-changing possibilities. So how can games become lessons, I guess, in nuance?

Nguyen: Simplicity and clarity, I think, is the greatest virtue and the greatest danger of games. In life, values are incredibly complicated. It’s so much to figure out. There’s so much to talk about. There are so many different values. Each value in and of itself is hard to judge. Like, I want to be a good educator. I want to be a good parent. Have I succeeded? How do I know? And then you have to measure off—

Garber: What are the metrics?

Nguyen: —right, exactly. And it’s hard to compare them against each other. And then a game comes along and says, Here you go. Here’s all that matters for a little bit of time. You know exactly what matters. Everyone shares a sense of exactly what matters, and everyone knows exactly what counts as success. So games give you value clarity.

Garber: Mmm. And then how do we—okay, so I’m imagining a scenario where I’m playing a game and I’m loving that clarity and there’s something I can totally see for myself; even as not a gamer, I would appreciate that clarity so much. But then I go back into my own life, which is not clear in many ways, and there’s so much complication. How do you think about that kind of transition from one world to the other? Would cynicism be a result of that? What is that relationship?

Nguyen: I think a lot of it is up to how an individual takes the game. And there’s two paths I can imagine. So let me give you—there’s a bad way and a good way. The good way is to treat the game as a practice of stepping in and out of oversimplified value systems.

Garber: Hmm. Interesting.

Nguyen: To play with, to step into a value. So I think the good way you could take a game, take the world of games, is to play games and then step back. And then ask yourself if the game was worth it. And what you’re practicing is using temporarily simplified value systems and then asking afterwards if they really are getting you what you want. The bad way to take games is to just immediately be over-attached to the idea that values are simple and quantified. And then to leave the game and to start looking for value systems that are already simplified and already quantified and just attach yourself to them.

Garber: I’m thinking about how games kind of align with fiction and science fiction, not in the direct sense of genre, but I guess in the broader sense of the art of the possible. Games as ways to improve reality and think about reality and as ways to imagine what the world could look like and how it could be better.

Nguyen: John Stuart Mill said that we needed experiments in living. So what he said was, we had these different conceptions. People would invent new conceptions of the good. New ways, like, are we living for community? Are we living for creativity? Are we living for artistic collaboration? We would come up with new ideas of what we were living for. And you couldn’t figure out from just sitting behind a desk whether they were the right idea of good; you’d experiment. And what he said was that the way we figured out how we should be in the future was we needed experiments in living, which for him were like small-scale communes or people going off with a bunch of other people into the woods and starting a new way of life and trying to try out a little mini-society under a new conception of the good.

Garber: Oh my goodness.

Nguyen: What are games but experiments in spending some time with other people under an alternate conception of the good, and where that alternate conception of the good is specified by the point system in the game?

Garber: Oh, I love that. I love that. And so along those lines, when you’re talking to someone who doesn’t get games, who kind of has this older framework paradigm of what the game is, what do you say to them to just make your quick case that games are serious and worthy?

Nguyen: I almost want to say, what I really want to say is that games are worthy and not serious. I think if you really understand games, you understand that the goals of the game are artificial, and the point is the pure joy of process, and I think what they show us is what’s unreal is these points that the world is forcing on us, and what’s real is the pure joy of acting and being for its own sake.

Valdez: Megan, I just lost the game.

Garber: I’m sorry, but also, what game?

Valdez: I just learned about this game. Our producer, Natalie, was telling me about it. So now that I know, you have to know. Especially because I think it really illuminates a lot of what we’re talking about here. So there’s this concept called the game.

Garber: Okay.

Valdez: But the idea is it’s a mind game, and the objective of the game is to not think about the game. So anytime you think about the game, you have to announce, “I just lost the game.” And anyone around you who hears you say this is also reminded that they’re playing the game, and inherently, they have also just lost the game.

Garber: Okay, so, I just lost the game.

Valdez: Yes. But besides the fact that the objective of this game is nearly impossible, what I’m really interested in is actually the idea of the opposite of the game. I think we should always be thinking about the game, and not literally that actual game that I was just talking about. But the way that our society has become so gamified through ratings, through likes,making experiences a competition. There’s this obsession with winning, with trying to game the system. And I actually think it helps if we can acknowledge this and say it out loud, to be able to try and create some distance between us and the gamification.

Garber: Yeah. And sure, there can be benefit to trying to inject the fun of gameplay into the work of life. But just like you said, when life is treated as a game by default, it can be worth reminding ourselves who exactly is the game designer, and are the rules of this particular game rules that we want to be following?

Valdez: Yes, and awareness of that is actually probably the thing that we should value.

Garber: Yeah, yeah, and games, too, I think, allow us to try on different possibilities without committing to them, and that, too, is a kind of awareness; games aren’t just a series of rules. They are also a series of options, and so they can help us not only to clarify the world as it is, but also to consider the world as it might be. And I think that’s such a powerful thing, because so much of life in this winner-take-all culture also encourages people to live in the moment, right? To expect instant gratification and to have this very narrow mindset about life itself. But games in so many ways encourage the opposite. They require us to think ahead to the next move and the move after that, and so they might help us to do something that is really simple but also really difficult and then also really crucial, which is, I think, to take a more holistic view of the future.

Valdez: I don’t know, Megan; sounds like we just won the game.

Garber: That’s all for this episode of How to Know What’s Real. This episode was hosted by Andrea Valdez and me, Megan Garber. Our producer is Natalie Brennan. Our editors are Claudine Ebeid and Jocelyn Frank. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Our engineer is Rob Smierciak. Rob also composed some of the music for this show. The executive producer of audio is Claudine Ebeid, and the managing editor of audio is Andrea Valdez.

Valdez: Next time on How to Know What’s Real:

Garber: What we can learn about the changing relationship between the digital world and the eternal. We’ll be back with you on Monday.