As soon as it was published, it received much attention from the academic world and won the 2021 American Philosophical Association Book Award.
Thi Nguyen's 『Games: The Art of Performativity』 has been published.
Uncovering the value inherent in the unique art form of games, this book offers fresh insights that shatter stereotypes about our agency, sociality, autonomy, and beauty.

If painting records vision, music records sound, and story records narrative, then games record agency.
This will help us grow to some extent.
Just as novels allow us to experience lives we've never lived before, games allow us to experience various forms of agency we might not have discovered on our own.
However, the experiences of action formed in this way are valuable in themselves.
It's like art.

When the rules of the game tell us to pursue something, we start pursuing it.
For example, some board games instruct players to focus on collecting tokens of the same color.
Some video games instruct you to focus on jumping on and stomping on little mushroom people.
Some sports instruct you to put the ball in the net.
We allow these goals to occupy our consciousness for a moment, in hopes of reaching that precious state of immersion in play.
And the fact that game designers specify the goals and abilities that players will embrace is what makes games their own art form.

The world tells us to eat and live, so we have to find a job and pretend to enjoy it.
As the world tells us to find a partner to share our affections with, we learn to be witty, or at least how to write a convincing online dating profile.
The world demands that if you want to make a living in philosophy, you grade endless student assignments, no matter how boring they are.
So we put our heads down, work, and endure.
In games, on the other hand, we shape the very kinds of practical activities we want to engage in.

In games, values ​​are clear, distinct, and equally distributed to all actors.
But this also raises significant moral hazards.
I'm talking about all games, not just games with violent graphics.
This is precisely the danger of bringing back to reality the false expectation that values ​​should be clear, distinct, and consistent in all circumstances.
In other words, games threaten us with the illusion of moral clarity.

What we've learned here is that gameplay is, in a certain sense, the opposite of love.
Love demands a direct and irreplaceable commitment to its object.
However, for aesthetically driven players, even if they can demonstrate a great deal of dedication to in-game goals on a case-by-case basis, they should generally be indifferent to those goals. (That's probably why we say "don't play games with my heart.")

To experience a conversation, you must look at it from the front.
It is not enough to just look or smell from behind.
The rule that a painting must be viewed from the front reveals something important about what a painting is.
That is, it is more than just a material thing called paint on canvas.
The fact that these rules are public and commonly observed in social practice makes possible a certain communal experience.
Games are also this type of work, with one foot in material and the other in social practice.

Institutional theory of art basically explains that 'art' refers to what the social and historical institution called the art world says is art.
This seems to be close to the sociolinguistic truth about how we use the term 'art'.
But relying on these explanations doesn't get us to the heart of the really important question.
When people ask urgently whether video games are art, they are not asking whether any particular social institution has actually embraced games.

Games can create alternative social arrangements and alternative political structures.
For thousands of years, games have forced us to explore designed social structures.
It could even be said that games are the original social art.
This is one of the reasons why I think it's so important to look at a wide variety of games, including multiplayer games, board games, party games, and more.

How can I compare the happiness my son would feel if I took a day off work to take him to the zoo with the value of spending that day studying? And how can I compare these values ​​with the importance of participating in protests against the unjust detention of immigrants? The values ​​I place on family, philosophy, and various political agendas are all extremely difficult to compare.
In games, there is little difficulty in reconciling multiple values.
In many games, there is only one goal.

Discussions about the ethical significance and social risks of games have primarily focused on whether games contain violent or sexual content.
I'm far more concerned that games and game-like systems encourage the unreflective pursuit of simplified, quantifiable goals.
I'm more worried that games will breed Wall Street speculators than serial killers.

--- From the text