Essex Women in Philosophy Speaker Series: Week 23

Essex Women in Philosophy Speaker Series take place in term time to discuss various topics.

Dr Emily Ryall, Reader in Applied Philosophy, University of Gloucestershire is doing a seminar on "Games and the Grind – a life worth living?". 

This paper will focus on some of the questions raised by Thi Nguyen’s (2020) recent book Games: Agency as Art where he argues that the medium of games is agency. He notes, ‘Just as novels let us experience lives we have not lived, games let us experience forms of agency we might not have discovered on our own. But those shaped experiences of agency can be valuable in themselves, as art’ (p2).

Agency for Nguyen is an artistic medium but the question is how does this then translate into value? What do we want from games, and how does this correspond to what we want, or should want, from life? It will examine the concepts of freedom and the absurd, and the imagined and the real, to suggest that games are a mechanism for us to understand and navigate the liminal space between these existential ideas. This analysis will include discussion on the ‘grind’ in games (the point at which a game becomes repetitive, monotonous and is no longer enjoyable, but merely a chore to achieve an end that we realise has little of the striving value that we initially attached to it) and will draw upon some of the ideas about the agency and meaning that is realised through games and sport, and their relation to reality, identity and imagination.

If you would like to join us, please email Dr Ellisif Wasmuth at ellisif.wasmuth@essex.ac.uk for the zoom link.