Tag: C. Thi Nguyen

• Value Clarity 2.0

  C. Thi Nguyen’s “value clarity” concept (advanced in 2020’s Games: Agency as Art) is a useful one, whose basic idea goes like this: Nguyen believes games “work” (compel us) largely by providing value clarity for their players—that is, game worlds are characterized by artificially narrow and unambiguous set of priorities and purposes over which the…

  suspendedreason

  January 23, 2022

  Blog

  C. Thi Nguyen, framing, ideology, literary theory, opticratics, realism, Sam Fussell, surrogation, value clarity, William Gaddis, William Gass

• Letter to Tamler Sommers and David Pizarro

  “In each part of the poem, the goddess of cancer orders the evolving entities to compete, but the goddess of everything else recasts it as a two-layer competition where cooperation of the internal layer helps win the competition on the external layer.”  A Sextant Colder Honor culture isn’t dead, just mutated. Alternate titles: The Public-Private…

  suspendedreason

  May 5, 2021

  Essays

  Batesian mimicry, C. Thi Nguyen, Campbell's Law, capital, coordination, Dave Pizarro, David Simon, extend and retreat, Friedrich Nietzsche, game theory, generalized reading, glory, Goodhart's Law, Homer, Jerry Muller, mimicry, mutualism, Neil Postman, opticratics, optics, prestige, reputation, signaling theory, strategic interaction, surrogation, Tamler Sommers, The Wire

• From measurement to degeneration

  There is no characteristic that is common to everything that we call games… It is a family-likeness term. Think of ball-games alone: some, like tennis, have a complicated system of rules; but there is a game which consists just in throwing the ball as high as one can, or the game which children play of…

  suspendedreason

  January 15, 2021

  Essays

  C. Thi Nguyen, Campbell's Law, degenerate play, flopping, game studies, gamification, Goodhart's Law, institutional theory, Ludwig Wittgenstein, metrics, opticratics, optics, psychology, signaling, social science, surrogation, systems theory