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Quote by C Thi Nguyen

“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.”

Quote by C Thi Nguyen

Book:Games: Agency As Art
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Games: Agency As Art

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C Thi Nguyen

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“The African as immigrant was not an inevitable by-product of the traffic in human commodities but rather a creation of his or her own arduous making. It is this that distinguishes African displacement in the Atlantic slave trade from all other emigration. Slaves’ full personhood was the crux of the contest between Africans and those who commodified them. Traders and masters alike confronted the universal contradiction inherent in the idea of human beings as property; conceding that the slave had a will, in order to better devise means to control it, was not an acknowledgement of the slave’s personhood. The African slave, a victim of forced migration, cannot, then, be taken for granted as immigrant subject. This displaced being had to restore through her unassisted agency the pulse of social integration that saltwater slavery threatened to extinguish. That the Africans enslaved in America were immigrants was thus not an axiomatic truth, but rather one Africans had to fight for. Those who lived to walk away from the slave ship had to address the problem of their unique displacement and alienation. They did so in three ways that gave distinctive shape to their effort to build meaningful life in a new world. First, they engaged with the cognitive problem of orientation: Where are we now that we have escaped the slave ship? Second, they created kinship and community out of the disaggregated units remaining after the market’s dispersal of its human wares. Third, they came to terms with the saltwater journey’s haunting imprint on their communities, regularly reinforced by the slave ships’ return to deposit still more saltwater slaves on these unfamiliar shores.”

CommunitySlaveryImmigrationAgencyPersonhood
Book:Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
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“And anyway,” L3 went on, “who is the Maker but our own selves, really? Sure, some guy in a factory probably pieced me together originally, and someone else programmed me, so to speak. But then the galaxy itself forged me into who I am. Because we learn, Lando. We’re programmed to learn. Which means we grow. We grow away from that singular moment of creation, become something new with each changing moment of our lives—yes, lives— and look at me: these parts” — she ran her hand along the mesh wiring and the rebranded astromech of her midsection—“I did this. So maybe when we say The Maker we’re referring to the whole galaxy, or maybe we just mean ourselves. Maybe we’re our own makers, no matter who put the parts together.”

CreationExperienceCreatorAgencyInsightfulChangingInsipirationalBigger Than OurselvesCreating Who We Are
Book:Last Shot: A Han and Lando Novel
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“It is certainly possible that an individual can, qua individual, suffer some failure of meaning, as in pathological boredom or depression. But any given social world is also a nexus of common significances, saliences, taboos, and a general shared orientation that can also either be sustained or can fail. Indeed one of the most interesting aspects of such a social condition, shared meaningfulness, or intelligibility, is that it can fail, go dead, lose its grip, and a very great deal of what interests Hegel is simply what such shared practical meaningfulness must be that it could fail, and how we should integrate our account of action into a fuller theory of the realization of such a condition and its failure. (His general name for the achievement and maintenance of such a form of intelligible life is “Sittlichkeit” and his case for this sort of priority of Sittlichkeit over strictly individualist accounts of mindedness in-action has not, I want to argue, been properly appreciated.)”

MeaningAgencyHegelPippinIndividualistSocialitySittlichkeit
Book:Hegel's Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life
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