3 min and 21 sec to read, 837 words

If we assume that games have evolved for some function, that they have some practical use to play (as per Ruth Millikan on concepts in general), we can think about the ability to cast the world in a game as a special kind of skills or capability, and as for any capability or skill we can also imagine that there are those that do not have it at all — the tone deaf, the color blind, the face blind…there are numerous examples of such “blindnesses”. But what would that look like? What would it mean to be gameblind or gamedeaf?

We could argue that it is simply not enjoying games, or being unable to engage in what Thi C. Nguyen calls “the motivational inversion” required for gaming.¹ See Nguyen, C. Thi. Games: Agency as art. Oxford University Press, USA, 2020. This inversion, Nguyen argues, is the ability to shift from pursuing the means for an end, to purse the means as an end in themselves. Nguyen writes: “In ordinary practical life, we usually take the means for the sake of the ends. But in games, we can take up an end for the sake of the means. Playing games can be a motivational inversion of ordinary life.” Being unable to understand or execute the motivational inversion would then be another example of game blindness.

If game blindness simply means to enjoying games at all, not seeing the point of engaging in play or no emotional or intellectual return on the invested time, well, then we could try to find out how many people regularly play games. Statistics here are not robust, however. Some indicate that there are billions of video gamers in the world² 3.22 billion gamers world-wide for just videogames, according to https://whatsthebigdata.com/number-of-gamers/ , and others suggest that roughly 21 percent of US adults play boardgames once a month³ See https://wordsrated.com/board-games-statistics/ , also arguing that 47.2 percent play word games. , but these statistics are not necessarily collected in such a way as to allow us to answer the question with any certainty. Further complicating this, most people seem to suggest that the reason they do play games is to socialize, and not to play the games for the sake of the games themselves. So, even if they were in some sense gameblind, or unable to enjoy games, they might enjoy the second-order benefit of socializing.⁴ See https://wordsrated.com/board-games-statistics/ – noting that more than 50% enjoy games for the social aspects.

Could there be other kinds of gameblindness? What would that look like? An inability to understand rules and goals in games? Or could it be more subtle and related to not being able to understand what a game tries to communicate? Nguyen, again, suggests that games communicate agency:

Games, then, are a unique social technology. They are a method for inscribing forms of agency into artifactual vessels: for recording them, preserving them, and passing them around. And we possess a special ability: we can be fluid with our agency; we can submerge ourselves in alternate agencies designed by another. In other words, we can use games to communicate forms of agency.

Now, what if we could not read games as agency, would that come closer to being gameblind? We see the game, play it, enjoy it – but there is something that is not picked up by us because we lack the ability to perceive the inscribed agency? That seems hard to imagine — what would an example look like? Say I play chess, and I am unable to pick up on the combative agency inscribed in the game, I think it is collaborative – would that be an example of gameblindness? Say that I was unable to see the opposing King as an enemy, and instead invited them in by playing badly — would that then be an example of misreading the game?

This scenario presents an interesting experiment: what would happen if you purposefully played in such a way as to allow the opponent to win — could they perceive that? And what if they started to do the same? This variation on chess exists – it is sometimes referred to as Losing Chess⁵ See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Losing_chess , and is in itself one of the more popular variations on chess. If I play Losing Chess and you play Chess, we are not so much gameblind as merely unable to communicate about what the rules are, and what game we are actually playing – so that seems wrong — but what about someone who could only play one variation? Who could not imagine playing ordinary chess, but only played Losing Chess? This seems so contrived as to be impossible, but would they not suffer from some kind of gameblindness? Or would this just be a simple variation on aspect blindness?

Being unable to shift into the agency recorded in the game, and taking on the role the game requires would come close to what we are looking for, but it would not quite be it either.

Footnotes and references

• 1
  See Nguyen, C. Thi. Games: Agency as art. Oxford University Press, USA, 2020.
• 2
  3.22 billion gamers world-wide for just videogames, according to https://whatsthebigdata.com/number-of-gamers/
• 3
  See https://wordsrated.com/board-games-statistics/ , also arguing that 47.2 percent play word games.
• 4
  See https://wordsrated.com/board-games-statistics/ – noting that more than 50% enjoy games for the social aspects.
• 5
  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Losing_chess