ABSTRACT
Games can illuminate some of the stranger and more fluid parts of our agency. When we play games, we take on alternate goals and abilities. A game designer sculpts for us an alternative form of agency, and we submerge ourselves in it during the game. Games teach us, then, that we are capable of absorbing ourselves in the pursuit of a temporary end. And in games, we can devote ourselves to the pursuit of ends that are skew from, or at direct odds with, our enduring ends. In many games, our interest in winning is only a fleeting construct, which we take on for the sake of beauty, fun, or even the comedy of failure. Games, it turns out, are our technology for recording and transmitting modes of agency. Games form a library of agencies.
