55: Games Against Humanity (w/C. Thi Nguyen)

This episode is co-hosted by Dr. C. Thi Nguyen, a philosopher who teaches at the University of Utah. His breakthrough book is about agency in games, in which he shines a light on disquieting aspects of our gamified lives and the question of whether we’re still able to act on our own values. We’ll talk about Dr. Nguyen’s key ideas, all of which are super useful for navigating conspirituality: the gamification of Twitter and other systems of “value capture,” the feeling of knowing something really clearly can foreclose on the desire for nuance, and the pleasures and perils of “moral outrage porn.”

Show Notes

Polarization or Propaganda? (Boston Review)

Why We Call Things ‘Porn’ (New York Times)

Escape the Echo Chamber (Aeon Magazine)

Why Games are Good but Gamification is Terrible (Conceptual Foundations of Conflict lecture)

Who Trains the Machine Artist? (Daily Nous)

The Gamification of Public Discourse (Royal Institute of Philosophy lecture)

How We Can Understand Ourselves Through Games (OUP)

Group-Strapping, Bubble, or Echo Chamber? (SERRC)

Am I in an Echo Chamber? (Open for Debate)

On gurus and seductive clarity (Decoding the Gurus podcast)

What’s in a game? (Philosophy Talk radio show/podcast)

Games: Agency as Art (New Books in Philosophy podcast)

Cheap talk (Escape the Void podcast episode, talking about clarity porn)

Echoes in the void (Escape the Void podcast episode, talking about echo chambers)