I chat with C. Thi Nguyen who used to be a food writer and is now a philosophy professor at the University of Utah.
Thi thinks about trust, art, games, and communities. We discuss his first book, Games: Agency as Art. The book is about how games are the art form that work in the medium of agency.
We chat about the difference between play and games and wider games philosophy.
Thi worries about the problems on trusting experts, if oneself is not an expert and how none of us are experts in most domains and how he’s been influenced by Elijah Milgram (also a philospher at the University of Utah).
We discuss making tea, process art and how we should be thinking about making food.
Fascinating topics across food and philosophy.
Thi’s book Amazon link. His website. And Twitter.
Contents:
06:13 Thi on Gamification
12:15 Thi on Trust and what to be worried about a gamified system
16:25 Thi on philosophy of expertise and the challenge of finding experts to trust
20:58 Thi on board games recommendations
26:05 Is “play” better or “games” better? Thi answers on how games are different from play.
31:20 The importance of drinking games
34:13 The four types of games
36:35 How constraints are useful
45:47 What is process art
50:02 Games and cooking
57:39 How to make tea
1:02:16 Thi on creative productivity (don't kill the weird ideas)
Listen below or wherever you listen to podcasts. Transcript below and video on Youtube (above).
Transcript: Games philosophy, process art and food writing.
Ben Yeoh (00:05): Hey everybody, I am super happy to have C. Thi Nguyen, a professor of philosophy at The University of Utah. He's written a fascinating book on the philosophy of games called Games: Agency as Art; you should check it out. He's been invited to lecture at The Royal Institute of Philosophy here in London and he used to be a food writer, games, food philosophy. What more could you want? Welcome C.
C. Thi Nguyen (00:30): Thank you so much for having me.
Ben Yeoh (00:35): So, I've heard a complaint about gamification recently. There's this app that we have in London UK, where you can donate unwanted food and ingredients to people. When you do you gain stars and reviews. The way you increase your reputation on this app is by playing a five-star review game. You have to review quickly. Someone who was commenting felt she was being forced to play the game. She was going to stop using the app and donating food because she felt that she was essentially being gamified. So, is this a problem of over gamification where game rules have been brought in to substitute for some other social value and essentially our agency, our feeling of choice in it has been taken away? What's your view of this gamification aspect of our world?C.
C. Thi Nguyen (01:27): It is funny because you tell me this and I thought "Oh, it sounds great" and one of the things I keep finding with gamifications is from the outside, when they're described on paper they often sound great and then when you actually live with them, you realize something was wrong. There are two problems. The description you gave is actually the thing that I'm not mostly worried about. I think some people feel that the game is getting addictive and their will is being pushed against so they find themselves doing something they don't want to, but they have an addictive relationship to the game. That can happen but that's not actually the thing I'm the most worried about. I'm most worried about cases in which people go all in. Cases where the gamification is so seductive that you don't feel like the game is pushing you, but you've just fully internalized the point system of the game.
The reason I'm worried about this is because I've written a lot about games and a lot of people think that "Oh if you love games you've got to love gamification too" Like people that love games love gamification. I think understanding how games work shows you what's really creepy about gamification. So here's one way to put it, and you can tell me if this fits the sense of your app, because I mostly think about this in terms of apps such as Twitter and Fitbit which are the ones I'm familiar with. The metrics of publishing in philosophy. For me one of the great pleasures of games is they simplify the meaning of life. They simplify the purpose of an activity. In our normal activity, there are all these incredibly rich possible values like I'm a parent, I'm a researcher, I care about climbing, I care about aesthetics and I care about my children's health.
All of these things are:
1): Often really hard to figure out how well they've done.
2): They are so hard to square off against each other.
Like, how do I measure the value of a week in which I do research versus a week in which I split time between research and taking care of my kids.
But in games, for once in our lives we have an experience of knowing exactly what we're trying to do, exactly how well we've done and in order to do that you have to simplify it. You have to make the values clear and explicit and mechanically countable. So, the things that really worries me are cases in which the gamification gets in us and it feels great to us but it's done so by simplifying the target. And we internalize a simplified target. So, I'm really worried for example what happens on Twitter. You might come to twitter for these rich, complicated values of connection, understanding etc. but if Twitter gets under your skin and if you buy into it, it points you to what Twitter measures and what Twitter measures is popularity.
So I want to ask you about your app, which I've never touched of course.
Ben Yeoh (04:44): Not mine, In London here we have it.
C. Thi Nguyen (04:47): I mean the one that you're familiar with. Do you find a simplification in that system to make something measurable?
Ben Yeoh (04:57): Yes. So there is this idea that you can trust. Someone has come down to this five star review, and then also the speed. So there's this sense that if you don't put a review quickly for one another, that you're there, but to your point, the underlying intention is noble. Whereas, I can see for something like, Twitter, Instagram, some of these things, the underlying attention could be ... and we'll maybe come to this sort of outrage because we know anger, divisiveness pulls in eyeballs and eyeballs pulls in profit. And maybe in something like Twitter, it's also slightly less obvious that you're losing your autonomy. I think that might be our argument. Whereas I guess for this app, it's so simple that you should be able to see through it. What was quite interesting is that this person saw through it and therefore didn't want to play the game. Whereas, I guess in Twitter you get sucked in because seeing the follower account you're like "Oh my God, I got to tweet" which went viral could have such a thrill to it that you then playing that game and you lost the initial impulse, which is I wanted to see reasons rational other viewpoints to my own work.
C. Thi Nguyen (06:13): So I want to talk about two things. First, the easier examples are the ones in which some corporations give your attention for money. Like, people are really familiar with that. I'm actually worried that there is a logic of gamification that underlies even well-intentioned efforts. And it seems like, for people in academics in this space to be like, "oh, it's capitalism companies trying to make money off it." But I think that there are plenty of cases where what it looks like is entirely well attempted to measure something in a public way and motivate people publicly. But the very fact that there needs to be a publicly accessible measure, forces simplification. So I've written a paper that is not out yet called Transparency of Surveillance. And it's about all these cases where you look at something where transparency goes wrong. And the way that transparency often goes wrong is there's an overall attempt to get a group of people to do something good, and to do this you have to create a quick and easy measure that everyone can immediately see and catch onto that can be quickly tabulated. And the gap between that and what's really important is often huge.
One of the examples I've been looking at is; a lot of charity oversight. So it seems like a really good idea at first. Isn't it great to have transparency, for a lot of charities for a lot of times, the oversight measure they were using was something called Throughput. So Throughput is the amount of money the people donate, how much of that emerges from the other end and the charities just got ranked on Throughput. Of course, the Throughput measure catches really wasteful charities, but once you get rid of those, you get a situation in which most charities are increasingly cutting the way to increase Throughput to cut internal costs. And if anyone in any kind of organization knows, you're not going to get the most efficient and powerful organizations if you're constantly forcing all of them to cut as many internal costs as possible. But once there's a ranking out there, then people seem to respond to the ranking. I've actually confused the issue, I realized because there are two things that we should really be worried about. I don't think anyone in the charity space has internalized the Throughput measure. But there are a lot of other cases where people do seem to internalize these measures. The ones that are in my life, of course, are academic ones. Like, which articles get excited for the most.
Ben Yeoh (09:15): And I think a lot of times GPA.
C. Thi Nguyen (09:17): Yeah, I was just about to say GPA.
Ben Yeoh (09:20): That's a great point average for our non-US.
C. Thi Nguyen (09:27): Right, GPA actually is one of the least useful measures of a student's success. There are all these other things that seem really important. Like how curious are they? Are they reflecting about what they're doing and why they're doing it? How much are they enjoying or thoughtful about their materials and what they're learning? But that's very hard to measure. So, because of the nature of large-scale institutions, the most pervasive and salient measure that surrounds everyone is GPA, your grade point average. And if students internalize that as the primary goal for their education, then there's this enormous thing that's been lost. And one of the things that's been lost is control over what you yourself want as your value. So the big worry for me is that in a lot of these cases, we have used vast pervasive Metro fire systems. They're clear, they're crisp, and they’re appealing. But if you internalize them, you don't figure out for yourself what you should value about the thing you're doing. That's my big worry.
Ben Yeoh (10:49): It seems to me that that's a second order or an unintended consequence of simplified game systems or point systems that they miss a lot through the fact that they are simplification, that sort of analogy to get to something, but they miss all of the new ones.
C. Thi Nguyen (11:03): Right.
Ben Yeoh (11:04): And we can see that. But I kind of got the sense that there could be something even deeper and darker than that. Meaning, we know there are problems, sometimes regarding regulation and these unintended consequences, although this is particularly something quite addictive. But I was thinking, trust is ailing in a lot of developed world democracies. And sometimes these systems, you could almost design them that there's almost whether it's intentional or not. That is actually undermining a lot of our trust systems. And you could be designing these games almost intentionally in some way to simplify this in a way that you know won't point people in the way that is actually most value-add. Do you think that is also a deeper causal thing to where the system might be alongside a lot of these kind of unintended consequences, because like you say, Fitbit, they're obviously aiming for something relatively positive and you get lost in the game, I could see that. But then some of these systems might be even more pervasive. Like, oh, we go for GPA, but we're not going to go for broadly what education might be. That seems to me even potentially darker.
C. Thi Nguyen (12:15): Right? So I think this is exactly the thing to be worried about. So this paper I was telling you about, Transparency in Surveillance, It started with this line from Onora O'Neill. Onora O'Neill is one of the great philosophers of trust and her BBC rifle lectures. She has this paragraph that I think most people have ignored where she says, "yeah, most people think trust and transparency can go together, but actually their intention" And her version of the argument was, transparency asks experts to explain their reasons to non-experts, but an expert in reasoning is actually an expert. So you're going to force experts to deceive and make up reasons that aren't really theirs for public consumption. So I was thinking about this and I think there's something that might happen that's even worse, which is, experts might become motivated to hit targets that are available and legible to non-experts. I'm not a person to say no, there should be no transparency. Transparency is important because people might be corrupt. I think you can see this clearly in the early political philosophy attempts to transparency arise from distrust, right? You're afraid that your politician is going to do something crappy, out of sight. So you make them be transparent. Here's the worry, there's actually a tradeoff between trust and transparency. The more transparency you have, the more you ask your experts to align their action to a metric that's comprehensible and give reasons in a way that's comprehensible to non-experts right? So you bring experts to interview. So that will eliminate the possibility of corruption, but that's also going to eliminate the possibility of experts acting on expert reasons and expert understandings of value.
I see this in my life as an educator because a lot of the time what it looks like is there are all these things that I want to teach students in philosophy class. Critical reasoning, thinking, curiosity, self-reflection none of that is measurable in a way that's available to the legislator and the public. So, we have to justify our actions in terms of our graduation rate, graduation speed and post graduate salary. Those are really publicly available measures. So the worry is, there's this trade-off and the more you move towards metrified publicly available systems, the less you have access to the wide range of expert understanding of their domains. I guess we're really far apart from games.
Ben Yeoh(15:15): And the less help for students. That has brought to mind two particularly important domains where I think we've actually seen this in action. So one is on the COVID pandemic response and the other could be potentially on climate science. So, on the COVID response, we now have kind of quite tidily articulated that the experts decided to communicate in a way that they felt non-experts would understand, but which weren't actually what they were thinking or wanted to happen. And it seems to potentially be happening over climate. You do something because asking about climate science scenarios is way beyond. There’s maybe 20,000 people in the world that really understand that, right? And they can talk amongst themselves. There may be one degree but so few people end up with these simplified ideas, two degrees in 2050 or whatever it is. I'm kind of making it up to, to say that which doesn't represent that whole entirety at all. And then we make our problems for ourselves. COVID is another example. Sorry about that, I cut you off and you were going to say something.
C. Thi Nguyen (16:25): Oh yeah, it's funny. I thought we were here to talk about games and aesthetics, which is one side of my research, but now we're talking about the other half, which is the expert stuff. So, I genuinely think there's a problem here that no one has solved and that deep problem is the right balance of exactly the situations you're talking about. My intellectual life was transformed by a book by Elijah Milgram, a living philosopher called the Great Endarkenment. And Milgram's view is the primary epistemic dilemma of our time. The primary knowledge dilemma of our time is that the state of human knowledge is so huge and so fast that no one can master even a tiny fragment of it, which means that we're in this incredibly complex relationship of trust and vulnerability. So in that buyer, who's one of my favorite philosophers, she is the great philosopher of trust that kicks off the conversation about trust in the eighties. So the essence of trust is vulnerability. Here's the scenario: Any action we take involving any technology or any science involves trusting this massive network of experts that none of us can actually ascertain for ourselves, right? So here are two things we don't want to do. We don't want to trust without any management at all. If you just trust whatever you're screwed. They're going to be calm people and there is going to be corruption.
On the other hand, if you demand that you understand everything, that people will be able to explain themselves, you're not going to have access to the full richness of science, the full richness of humanity's knowledge. The fact that any interaction with science involves not only trusting people who you can't understand, but not knowing who you trust, right? So the massive dilemma I think of our time is how you manage who you put your trust in when you have to trust people that are beyond your comprehension and understanding because of the hyper specialized nature of science. And I think people who work on this stuff have barely adjusted to this. A lot of philosophers who work on knowledge are still working under this frame of "A single person should be able to know everything and understand everything for themselves." How do they know for sure, but that's not the right question anymore.
Ben Yeoh (18:53): So what do you think from your reading of the state of the philosophy or even your philosophy? What does it have to say about this situation? Or this is a question that you think the philosophers should be tackling but haven't tackled successfully?
C. Thi Nguyen (19:11): There's a really small literature in this, mostly the philosophy of science. So this is a puzzle I've actually been obsessed with for a huge amount of my life. This is a puzzle as old as Socrates. Socrates' version of it is if you don't know anything about a domain, how you pick a good teacher instead of a con person. Same problem with a scientist. So some people think, oh, what you are searching for is good people because goodness is unified. I don't think this solution works at all, because I think there are plenty of expert scientists and there are plenty of good hearted people. So, the closest answer is Phillip kitchen's answer, which says something like "you might be able to trace lines into more esoteric sciences from sciences that you can judge." So I know that I can trust aeronautical engineers because planes don't fall out of the sky. And so I can trace who they trust back. But how I am supposed to treat that as an individual is really, really tough. This is a real dilemma that people in philosophy and people in science communications are working on right now. I think it's kind of the dilemma for our era and I don't see a great solution yet.
Ben Yeoh (20:35): Great, well, social scientists out there that are listening and watching this is a dilemma for you to solve. Perhaps leaping back a little bit then into the games. Well, let's ask a simpler question. You've been playing and reviewing board games for, it seems, many, many years. Can you explain the best kind of games for you? What do you recommend?
C. Thi Nguyen (20:58): I've been playing board games my entire life. My board game interests have gotten super esoteric, but I can say a few things. So I played board games, role playing games and computer games for much of my life. Right now I'm seeing fewer computer games that excite me. Most of the computer games I'm seeing do the same things as [Inaudible 21:23] was doing 10 years ago, but with better graphics and more complicated mechanical systems. But a lot of them seem like addictive grind machines. So the board game world on the other hand is exploding with innovation. So I'm really interested in these very complex, incentive manipulation games. So one example is Imperial; Imperial is a game in which the theme is truly nasty. It's world war one, the countries are at war, you don't play one of the countries. You play a shadowy investor, changing your investments in the countries, and you can control whichever country you momentarily have the most investment in, but the point is not to lead your country to victory. The point is to get the most money in the end, which you often do by dumping your country on the next stockholder or playing the Alliance structure. So that kind of structures, or the interesting to me. One of the most interesting board games out there right now is Root, which is called Whales game in which each of the sides is completely asymmetric and has different roles and different goals. One of them is like trying to build an industrial build network. Another is a warmonger trying to conquer everything. Another is basically the proletariat revolution. And you have to watch these different sides play out with different mechanics against each other, which is incredibly fascinating.
Ben Yeoh (22:56): I think board games are incredibly rich at the moment. I'm not as expert as you to sense that actually, maybe this is a golden age of board gaming. Do you think that in some way a counterpoint to what we're seeing on social media and some online that actually it's forced us to this is almost a counter-culture to that was that too soon.
C. Thi Nguyen (23:16): Oh, I don't know if it’s the relationship to social media. I'm seeing explosive innovation in the Indie Tabletop role-playing scene. And I think one of the things that's happened is it's really an age thing. So two things happened at once. One is this enormous flowering of board game innovation in the eighties and nineties, starting in Germany and leading to what we call the Euro games scene. Why that happened is really interesting. One theory is that post-World War II, Germany in particular became culturally uninterested in war games like chess, where you played head to head. And Germany has a really long history of family board gaming. I think the last stat I saw, German families were still 10 on average playing more board games and watching TV, but it's like, so you have this incredible instead. So in America you have a lot of crappy family games and you have this incredibly esoteric war-gaming culture that's built for hardcore hobbyists. But over in Germany you have this board gaming tradition that is made for families and it's also trying to find ways to make board games not just about war. They've been uninterested in war. So there's this theory that since the accident, American board gamers made these first like market manipulation auctions and bidding games. And so the German board game designers seemed to have seized on this stuff and realized, "oh my God, auction gets me really interesting," it's a way for five people to play against each other, always be in the game instead of like, one person makes all their moves. So there's this flowering in Germany and then people in America pick up on it. And I think the thing that's really driving it is a lot of people like me, my age, my wife grew up as computer gamers. Now we work full time. I don't have time for an 80 hour computer game. Melissa and I both grew up on civilization games, which will suck your life away.
Ben Yeoh (25:30): Your whole summer holiday is gone.
C. Thi Nguyen (25:32): Yes exactly, And so now, like you have people that have grown up playing games like Civ and Warcraft and StarCraft, but now we want to do it together. We want to be social. And so, that's driving, I think this huge market, incredibly rich innovative game for people who grew up playing games, and are a little burned out on hundred hour crafting video games. Anyway, that's [Inaudible 26:00] that's too long. That’s even more interesting.
Ben Yeoh (26:05): Because I think games reveal a facet about what it means to be human. So I think this is quite interesting and we can explore this a bit. So, a friend of mine who is the artistic director of Kony, did a lot of work with Bernie Dekoven Blue on game theory and games practitioner. And he makes the point that Dekoven had quite a lot of emphasis on play rather than games. And obviously there is this overlap and a lot of what we talked about are kind of these, and your book talks about mostly striving games for this. But I think one of the points that Dekoven was kind of making was this idea that cooperative games or games which don't really have any points scoring or things which are involved in play can be more fulfilling or somehow say more about this. And I was interested in what you think about play over games or even the making of games in play rather than perhaps even the games themselves.
C. Thi Nguyen (27:07): So this is actually to me, one of the things that really pushed me to write this book, because there's a standard view that a lot of people have that play is better than games, especially free and creative play. So, a little bit of background, what's the difference between games and play? I think the clearest version of this is for Bernard Suits. So Bernard Suits is a definition of a game, voluntarily taking up unnecessary obstacles for the sake of the possibility of the activity of struggling to overcome them. So any case in which you have clearly specified obstacles. So a game is really something where the rules tell you what you're trying to do, how you're doing it, and exactly what obstacles there will be in the way often those obstacles are created by specifying which abilities you're allowed to use and not use. So for example, soccer, the obstacles are created because you can't pick up the ball with your hands mostly. Rock climbing; what I do, a lot of the obstacles are creative because you're not allowed to use a pick or a helicopter. A lot of the time these constraints are so obvious we miss them. For example, running a marathon has a constraint. You're not allowed to take a taxi or a bicycle, right? That creates the kind of activity you're doing. So in student’s point out that look and play is something really different. Here's a kind of play: wasting resources is normally instrumental for pleasure or fun. He has some great examples; so here he thinks sometimes you play games in this way, but there's some kinds of games that are not played.
So he thinks a professional boxer wearily checks in because that's how they make money, that's a game and not a play. He thinks kids rolling around with no rule, just wrestling in the mud or flipping things around that's play, but not a game. So they're different. And there's a bit of a standard view that pure game-less play without rules or points or scores is the highest form. And my book was trying to mount a defense, not saying that games are better than free play, but trying to say that there were different things that had their own different value.
So play offers you creativity and free form. Games for me are the specific thing where the specificity of the rules and the affordances create for you a specific sculpted experience of practicality. So the way I put it in the slogan of the book is that a game designer just doesn't tell a story or create an environment, they tell you what your abilities are, what your environment is and most importantly what your motivations are in the game. Another way to put it is the game designer sculpt the form of agency. And then when you play different games, you pick up and learn different kinds of agencies. I kind of think games are more structured experiences and that's what art is, right? You could say, why read a book, just make up your own stories all the time. Then you'd never read other people's stories. To do that, you have to have a much sculpted, structured, roulade and experience. Similarly, you can make up activities, but you'll never experience an activity that someone else sculpted for you. So my view here is that games are the special things that let you record it, communicate forms of agency and free play doesn't do that, right? So those are two really different, valuable things. Games are more forms of communication.
Ben Yeoh (30:49): Great. No, I think that's very clear. Hopefully we'll have some time to talk about process art over object art of which I think that tally somewhat. So, again, a simple question on that. What do drinking games about this or the designers of drinking games? And I actually think drinking games in some ways do maybe create some sort of process art, but, maybe with your idea of the rules that game designers create as well. What's the drinking game say?
C. Thi Nguyen (31:20): Drinking games are so important. Here's something really interesting. I should say drinking games and party games are the most important things in my book. There's really little scholarship about them. One of the things that frustrates me in the game space is how many people would it be like, "oh my God games can be real art too" And what they do is they create mechanically dole games that are like anything else you've seen. But they put important thematic stories on them about big topics, ethical issues. And this is not exciting for me as the development of games as an art form. What's really interesting to me is the creation of new and novel forms of agency. So, drinking games are fascinating. I should tell here for your audience who hasn't read this stuff. My favorite part of the book is a discussion of drinking games. So for me, there are two kinds of play: achievement play and striving play. Achievement play is playing for the value of winning while Striving play is temporarily adopting an interest in winning for the sake of a struggle. So Achievement plays, you really care about winning. Striving play, you just basically get yourself to care about winning temporarily for the thrill of a struggle. And some people are like, "of course they're too difficult to play." And a lot of people, when I presented this stuff, would say stuff like "you're ridiculous, there's no such thing as striving play that is not a thing people can do. Achievement play is the only thing that makes sense." So I had to come up with an argument. So here's the argument. Consider the category of a stupid game. A stupid game is a game where the fun part is failing, but it's only fun if you're trying to win. So my favorite examples are Twister and most drinking games. The whole point of a drinking game is that you really try to do this silly thing. And when you fail, everybody laughs together. But it's only funny if you fail and it's only a failure if you're actually trying to win. So drinking games illustrate this weird capacity we have to get ourselves soaked so much in the attempt to win, when even what we wanted to do fails. But if we intentionally fail it's not funny. If you intentionally fall over and twist it's not funny. So the demonstrating game I know you just go around and everyone has to name a candy bar that someone else hasn't named. And when you can't do it, you have to drink. And of course, it's funny because it's the silliest little task, but you're, cognitively just frozen in the moment, that’s what's funny. So drinking games are super interesting.
Ben Yeoh (34:03): It makes philosophy a lot more interesting to most people if they did more philosophy on the games of drinking and the study. But yeah, I think you have a really good point.
C. Thi Nguyen (34:13): Yeah. One of the great writers about games says there are four types of games, to translate from fancy Latin there's competitive games, make-believe games, luck games, and then vertigo games. It's like kids spinning around and roller coasters. And I think drinking games actually are often a vertigo game. Like a lot of is by the experience. So a lot of games for me are about the experience of changing how your mind works. Like suddenly my mind is focused on, look ahead. Suddenly my mind is focused on balanced challenges with climate and taking games directly to change your cognitive experience of the world while you're trying to do something. It's not just being drunk. It's trying to do a simple task as you get drunk. And that gives you a direct experience of your mind and flux. And I think that's one of the really interesting things about drinking games. That's why I think there are processors.
Ben Yeoh (35:19): Great. I'm thinking on my feet on that. So that's really fascinating. So only one kind of element specific that drinking games that came up which I thought was potentially looping back, was the only issue being that when you choose to do drinking or choose, say to go ahead on drinking at a certain point, do you lose a bit of autonomy because of what the drink does to you? And I thought that was really interesting because to me that was a little bit like Twitter. At some point you go into really good intentions and then at some point you've lost sight of it because of the whole moral outrage thing, or you want the follow a thing and you're sucked in. Now drinking games does have a nice end point because you will always either collapse or stop at some point in which Twitter doesn't. But I was wondering, where we can see that you might lose autonomy in something, is that a danger flashpoint for you in any systems [Inaudible 36:15] or not, or it just occurred to me that there's a specific issue maybe with alcohol, although not with the whole sense of vertigo games.
C. Thi Nguyen (36:26): There's a bunch of interesting philosophy and rational choice theory about this. So I've been really influenced here by Jon Elster. Do you know Jon Elster's work?
Ben Yeoh (36:35): No.
C. Thi Nguyen (36:35): So basically I think there's a really simplified view of autonomy that says the fewer the constraints the better, the more the constraints the worst. That can't be the right theory of autonomy. It has to be that you can take on constraints to increase your autonomy. So for one thing, if you believe that the more constraints, the more freedom, and then all governments decrease your freedom but that's a ridiculous theory of freedom and autonomy because governments can, through the creation of constraints, create new categories and new possibilities. So you can actually see this really clearly in games. Let me give you the simplest example. Imagine you're in an open field and someone proposes to put up some walls and a roof. You might think, "Oh, I've lost freedom, I used feel to walk in every direction and now I can't. But the real answer is no, you've lost a little bit of freedom, but you gain a different, more rich kind of freedom. You're given the freedom of having the choice to be inside or outside. So similarly game rules work like this. The game rules constrain you in a certain way. And if you have this really simplified notion of autonomy, you would say "oh my God, well, the game rules are telling me what to do. I can't do anything I want, that's destroying my freedom" but now you think, "no, no" Especially since the rules are voluntary. The rules of basketball enable new kinds of action that never existed before, without the rules of basketball, you couldn't pass and you couldn't dribble. You couldn't make a point. You couldn't play basketball. So, I mean, for me, [Inaudible 38:37] is my favorite philosopher in the space of games. What's interesting for him, but it's interesting for me, for what he's doing is he is saying that because games are activities that are literally constituted, they are made up of constraints. It's a clear case where constraints make us freer. Because they invent new activities. We could never have done it before. But I think that argument can easily be applied to governments. And I think one of the interesting things I find with my students is a lot of students can't see that when you talk directly about governments, you can see it with games.
So far as new activities are created by constraints, games and governments, both can make us freer. If the trade-off is worth it. If what you lose is counterbalanced by gaining a richer and more valuable set of options. So Jon Elser had a bunch of great examples about this. So in his most famous book called Ulysses and the Sirens. You think about Ulysses, right? So, you know the story: Ulysses has himself tied to the mast so he can hear the sirens. Because he knows he'll be weak of will. Here's a case where the constraint being tied to a mast that he entered into voluntarily let's have an experience he couldn't have had before, which is hearing the sirens. So, what I would say is given the fact that a drinking game is a impairment on your cognition that you enter into voluntarily and lets you have any experience and you didn't before, then if you did it knowingly and voluntarily, then it's increasing your freedom. It is a decision that you make that takes on a temporary constraint that increases your range of experiences and your range of knowledge.
Ben Yeoh (40:05): And that would be a similar argument that people who take psychedelics would say. I would actually extend this further into a lot of creatives and artists would tend to say this about art. So a poet would say by putting these constraints on, I want to write a sonnet. I want to write a haiku that you actually more creative, particularly when you say, I want to write a sonnet and then I slightly change what a sonnet means to me. You couldn't do that without the form of the sonnet to be able to do so. And actually that's true across artists and painting and segue into our other conversation, potentially was around the food. I would say these constraints around how we cook might be similar. If you can cook with anything available, then that actually isn't necessarily a sort of cuisine or a cooking or a thing. But if you say I'm going to use salt, sugar, these types of ingredients, and I'm going to create something from that, that says something more about the constraints that we put on food to make a meal. Do you think philosophy says anything particularly about food or the constraints we have about food and maybe let's touch upon. I think you send and I think I agree that actually cooking either for ourselves or friends and family or cooking on a stage for a restaurant of people is a lot of the time a form of process art. Something actually ending in an object art as well, although we eat it, but it certainly seems to be a priceless art with a history and a culture and everything about that. So I don't know comments about the philosophy of food is art [Inaudible 41:45].
C. Thi Nguyen (41:46): So the constraints question, the process, our question are really different. So the constraints are super interesting. There's a lovely little conversation in the philosophy of art about this, that centers around the paper from Kendall Walton called Categories of Art. There's I think a simple view that's like why have all these rules about genre and form? Why not just do anything? I think you said exactly what a lot of people in the space thing. The rules are ultra-binding. There are rules to what counts as a Western. The rules can't have sonnets. You don't have to write a sonnet. You don't have to make a Western, but once those rules are there, then you can do really subtle things. So my friend, Matt stroll, who works in the philosophy of film convinced me that one of the nice things, but incredibly specific genres like zombie movies, Westerns or Kung Fu movies, is that as the sonnets would so much as be fixed, you pay a lot of attention to subtle variations. And the subtle variation becomes incredibly important. What Walton's whole theory was that when you fix certain things, the audience knows what to pay attention to and what to ignore. So one of his examples was, so you know, busts like a thing, that's just the head and the shoulders, a statue, but no arms. We need to know what counts as a bust. We need to know the standard bust doesn't have arms because otherwise you'd walk around being like, "wow, there's a bust of Socrates with no arms. What a bold choice? What did that mean? What are they trying to do?" But when you constrain the space in a certain way, people know where to look for the meaning. They know that when you break this little rule, that's really meaningful. They know that if it's a Kung Fu movie and then the main character just stops fighting in the end, that something really extraordinary has happened because that's not part of the conventions of a Kung Fu movie. The view is kind of like when we have these constraint latent structures, they make the possibility of meaning because they give you the background against which variation can happen. That's a brief thing about constraints.
Ben Yeoh(42:27): No, I think they're great. I guess they're underappreciated and they are underrated. And also, as your earlier point is, we don't appreciate them sometimes because they're so soft there. A marathon has lots of constraints, but we somehow don't think about them because we realize it's all about the running.
C. Thi Nguyen (44:44): Yeah. I mean, people are always like, there's this standard argument. People are like, "Well, games can't be art because there are rules." And I think if you do philosophy of art, you're like, "wait, no, that's nuts, Like every single art form has rules for consumption that stabilize our relationship." So here's a simple one. The rule for novels is to read the words in order. So, if you like, I read Moby Dick. First, I had a computer program, alphabetize all the words. You haven't read the book, right. There are every art form. If you're like, "yeah, I had a great experience with Van Gogh's Irises. I closed my eyes and I just licked the back of a canvas, and it was so musty." You're like, "No, no, you did something, but you did not experience that." So, should we talk about process art?
Ben Yeoh(45:47): Yeah, Let's talk about process art. I have a question which might introduce us to a little bit, at least within cooking or something. Is there any dish which you've been trying to perfect? Maybe trying to perfect your whole lifetime, or feel you have perfected and what are you doing with this dish?
C. Thi Nguyen (46:07): It's funny, a lot of the times when you cook, I've noticed that when people come over, you want to cook something new and exciting. But once in a while I get lazy and I cook one of my old, simple standards and people freak out, they're like "oh my God, this is so good." My centers are like omelets and Sichuan mapo tofu. There's this really simple dish I found, an Okinawan dish of turmeric miso, bok choy and tofu, over sweet potato rice. And I make this stuff for myself all the time. And I realized it's not that I'm consciously trying to perfect it, but when I make it for people they love it. And I realized it's because of fancy new dishes I've made two or three times in my life. Like Mapo tofu, I've made it like a thousand times in my life. I think a lot of us are very cosmopolitan about dishes we cook and then we always talk about, grandparents cooking was so good, there's something in it. A lot of people like my mom make about 20 dishes over and over again. She cooks mostly Vietnamese Chinese. When I talked to her about how she cooks, she doesn't have recipes, but, she knows all of these like micro variations that are like, "oh, well, if the fish is a little bit drier, you should up the temperature of the oven by five degrees and when it's a little humid, she actually has like different spoons that she uses to prop open the oven, like a tiny bit. And she has that master because she's doing that thing over and over again. But I haven't [Inaudible 47:56] except for like the stupid dishes I make for myself when I'm lazy. And of course the stupid dishes I make myself when I'm lazy are the best things I cook because I made them a thousand times. I wasn't trying to perfect them. Mapo tofu is the thing that I can make best in this world.
Ben Yeoh(48:23): Great. So I have a seminar, so my mum makes chicken rice, a kind of Singapore-Malaysia dish that's all around Southeast Asia. Vietnamese have one as well. And I think when you watch her cook it in all circumstances, it is a form of art. I think something that you alluded to is what also sends it to me, takes it to art for all participants, but also kind of one is artist or cook is the state, or the physical motion. All the emotion that you have through this, obviously when it's shared with an audience of more than just one. You mentioned this, I think in a blog, but I agree that this is an underappreciated form of this art is what you and your audience go through. So I have a particular art practice which I picked up a little bit, which we call in theater, a performance lecture practice. It is actually when I was reading your work, I realized it was a type of process art because the art is often in the place between the audience and the performer. These types of performance lectures don't work because the audience has to participate. So there's a little bit of games and rules, and it's oddly most successful when there's more of the audience or the space between where the audience and performer live, which I think is one of the elements of process art. And so I was wondering, how do you feel about that in terms of cooking and whether we really understand what we go through within that?
C. Thi Nguyen (50:02): The stuff I've written about processors actually started in two different places. And I didn't realize until I saw in the end that they intersected. One is games, the other is cooking. So let me give you the different threads and then we can talk about theater. So with games, one of the things I think is really interesting is if you look at scholars and critics and people talking about how games can be great art, they tend to constantly have the fixed features of games that are like written into the script, graphics, music or the dialogue. But if you look at game reviewers and game players kind of in the wild, what they talk about is the gameplay. Basically I started thinking that people, especially people trying to defend games and art form or scholars, or do it by making games too much like fiction or movies by concentrating on the fictional or movie parts of it. So here's the theory. I think their aesthetic qualities in the object [Inaudible]. So, the novel is thrilling, the movie is beautiful, the painting is amazing and then there's another thing that I want to call processes, aesthetic qualities. And those are the qualities that are in you, the audience member interaction. So, so with the game, right? So take super Mario brothers, the object aesthetic qualities are the things that are in the program itself, the graphics and all that stuff. The process aesthetic qualities are the aesthetic qualities in you and the player as you interact. So how it feels to make the jump just in time or slide or time to thing, just right. It is the beauty that is in your body, your movement and your decisions. So my theory is that in games process or process aesthetic qualities are actually most important in natural practice. And then when people are worried about it being art or something, they concentrate on the object aesthetic qualities, they concentrate on the fixed qualities in the work, but think that's what games are for. And one of the big things that makes it difficult is that sometimes object aesthetic qualities are kind of the same between us, right? Like we see the same.
If you're looking at a movie and the aesthetic quality you're interested in is like, say, the cool jump cuts. Those jump cuts are the same between us. But if we're both playing a game and what's interesting is how it felt to execute a jump, we executed different jumps, we had very different solutions. And so you don't get this precise sharing. And I think a lot of people in the art world really want this precise, they want to be like, we have to be talking about the same novel, but you're playing and my playing are different. And trying to find the sameness there. I tried to say that the most important things about games are things that are the same between all experiences. What's really special about games? Games are emergent, interactive qualities, and the game designer skill isn't making this thing that makes for so many people have these interesting aesthetic qualities that emerge in their own mind, in their own bodies as they play. So that's the game side. On the food side, I had this thing where I got really interested in. So there are some cookbooks I love to cook from like Marcella Hazan's essentials of classic Italian cooking, where everything is just elegant and lovely. And then like a lot of people, when I started to learn to cook, I would buy fancy restaurant cookbooks and the food would come out good. But the process of cooking was miserable. And I think the reason is they were never made for one cook. They were made for a working kitchen where there's the person making the stock, and so when you boil that down to one person, it asks you to do things that are impossible or incredibly awkward and there are like 15 things coming off the stove at once and they all need to be dealt with simultaneously.
So I got really interested in the fact that the cookbooks I was drawn to are ones that had this elegant process of creation. But when you look at cookbook reviews, they concentrated on how good the dish was, but they never talked about the process of cooking. So, when I'm cooking, I'll often be cooking for an hour or two. Most of my engagement with the cookbook is in the cooking process. But the most important thing is to find a cookbook that gives me an elegant, lovely process. And yet that's elided. I think again, because people are obsessed with these kinds of stable object qualities in the finished dish. John Thorne has a really lovely comment here. So he's my favorite food writer. He's an amazing writer. And he says something like "we become hyper obsessed with the product of cooking and making it perfect that we are willing to sacrifice pleasures and joys and aesthetic qualities and the process of cooking it." In this version a lot of the time people cooking now like to shut their friends out and try to cook by themselves to get everything right behind closed doors.
Ben Yeoh(55:00): But they have these second kitchen, where they do the cooking and then present it in their main kitchen.
C. Thi Nguyen (55:05): Right, exactly. What happens when you invite your friends and you cook with them, you improvise on the cooking, you taste things together, you drink together. The final product can be significantly less perfect but the entire process is imbued with action and collective choice and all these wonderful, mixed, socialist aesthetic qualities. One of my big worries these days about cooking culture is the rise of the scientifically perfect cookbook that says, if you do exactly this exactly that and you make sure that perfect French fries and I'm like, yeah, but that was no fun. That was like me looking at my watch that wasn't me smelling, tasting and stowing them around. It was me just anxiously looking at my thermometer until it had exactly the right point. And so again, I think not always, but for a lot of these cookbooks, they arise because we're so laser-focused on the object qualities in the finished product that we're willing to sacrifice all the pleasure along the way. I mean, one interesting thing about cooking without a thermometer is a lot of the time, the way you're judging it is by smelling the food and making a judgment based on the smell of the food. And that's incredibly aesthetically pleasurable.
Ben Yeoh(56:28): Yeah. and there's all of the elements of your environment, your friends, the time, all of those elements, which go into eating. So, I have a question for you on tea, which is how best should I make my tea? So I like oolong tea and I've paid a little bit of attention, but actually I've realized after reading some of your work far not enough. So consider me a great beginner. I've never really heard of a Gong Fu style. I like complexity, I like oolong tea. What should I do and what should I be thinking about making tea?
C. Thi Nguyen (57:04): Yeah. This is interesting because this is very processing. So going from the style tea comments through China, and Taiwan. The way you do it is you take a guy wun, which is like a covered cup. And you put what'll seem like a lot of tea. This is like an eight ounce cup, or less often maybe a five ounce cup. And you'll put in like a teaspoon or two of tea. So first of all you need high quality tea. I'll send you the link.
Ben Yeoh(57:35): [Inaudible 57:35] leaves, but you got actual leaves at the end, right?
C. Thi Nguyen (57:39): Yes, you definitely need something that has whole leaves. Most of what Americans drink is the equivalent of particle board. It's like the sawdust from the bottom of the factory that they've packed in bags because that's the cheap crap. So real tea should be whole leaves. Some of it is rolled up tightly into balls and they'll open up. And the way you brew it is, you'll put a lot of tea in a little cup, and then you're going to brew it for a short amount of time, but you'll brew the same leaves a bunch of times. So for example, I will typically brew some of the tea I have five or ten times. The first brew is five seconds long. The second brew is seven seconds long. The next brew is nine seconds long. And good Chinese tea is really made for this process. So you get to glimpse over time, the changing quality of the tea like each little snapshot is a little evolution and that's what you want. That's the glory. And also you're smelling it the whole time you're adjusting in response. So yeah, this is a case where I think the enjoyment is actually inseparable from the process of making, as I find it really meditative. I write a lot with my tea set up right next to my computer. And the fact that you're constantly pouring a little bit in making it up. I also think you are micro adjusting your caffeine dose because the first few doses off of any tea have most of the caffeine and then it goes down, down, down. It's just a complex, lovely process that involves a lot of intimate interaction with some leaves and it's wonderful. It's so aromatic, deep and changing.
Ben Yeoh(59:39): That's great. And we'll put the link in the description below for those who want to explore more about the tea making process. So I've never been to Salt Lake City or around there. If I had sort of five days, three days, or maybe one day. What restaurant do I need to go to? Let's, let's maybe cut out the Western Canon, unless you think that's going to be the one I'd be interested in, But where should I go? Or maybe we can have one from here. You can have one or two.
C. Thi Nguyen (1:00:17): Salt Lake is a really good place for growing, it's interesting farm land and it's grazing territory. Culinarily, the most exciting thing for people coming to Salt Lake. This is not a restaurant Deltek's Meats is a butcher and truck caterer that does extraordinary work. Cafe de Bola is this wild intensive coffee master who does siphon service and he understands his coffee so profoundly and it's worth doing his siphon service. Interestingly it's like, you can get normal coffee at normal prices, or you can get his special siphoned service for like 12 bucks. And it's funny that people will freak out. People who are totally willing to pay like 10 bucks for a glass of crappy wine will not pay $12 for an extraordinary perfect coffee service.
Ben Yeoh(1:01:18): That actually feels cheap to me, $12 compared to master sushi chef and things like that. Okay. I will definitely put that on my list. Well, maybe we're in around Utah. What do you think is most misunderstood about Mormons? Is there something people kind of think, and then we just really don't understand about Mormon culture? Is there a Mormon cultural food? I suspect there isn't, I don't know.
C. Thi Nguyen (1:01:43): Oh yeah. There's some Jell-O and scallop fried potatoes. I'm going to decline to answer your question.
Ben Yeoh(1:01:48): That is fine. Okay. Let's move over that. So coming to the last couple of questions. What makes a productive day for you? So we had a little bit of it. It seems like tea is an important part, but, what makes you think this is your productivity, or you're feeling most creative and what's a good day, in terms of productivity for you.
C. Thi Nguyen (1:02:16): I think you're asking about creative productivity. So I'm going to leave aside the sludge of like grading [Inaudible 1:02:23].
Ben Yeoh(1:02:24): Yes, Some really good hacks like one of my teachers always used to joke, but I think he did it for real. He would just get your essays and throw them down the stairs and rate it that way, because he says that was just as useful. This is your whole thing about it. He was not a believer in the whole GPA thing. It was everything else. So he said, "I'm just going to throw them down the stairs, but I hope you got a lot out of the process of writing the essay" but no, yeah, creativity.
C. Thi Nguyen (1:02:47): So I went through a big thing in my life where at one point I was writing really boring stuff, because I thought that was what you're supposed to do. I got professionalized in this discipline and a part of the discipline that wrote a lot of very tiny technical papers that I ended up finding really boring and I was doing boring work. And so for me, one of the most intriguing things is figuring out a new idea that excites me. And so the best days are when I actually managed to grapple together some big connection between different ideas. I find it really easy to bog down in boring ideas that you can write a little bit of something about. So here's my productivity tips for creative writers. I often write down every single weird, bizarre idea I have. And then I'll sit down and try to develop every single one, at least a little bit. This might mean just taking a one sentence scribble and trying to turn it into like a few paragraphs or taking a few paragraphs and trying to turn it into an outline for a paper. And what I often find is the really bizarre ideas that seem silly if I give them a little life, if I breathe into them, they'll suddenly flourish. And so what I often do is instead of immediately for each idea, picking which one seems most likely to work, I will try to breathe life into everything and then sit back and be like, wait, which ones are the most interesting. And what this looks like for me is I often have a notebook with like 50 different ideas. Then I will try to turn each of them into a couple paragraphs. And in the end, I'll end up writing papers out of two or three of them, but it's not the ones I expected at the beginning. It's the ones that I let sit around for a few weeks and try to expand and let sit around again. And then suddenly like, oh, that idea isn't silly. That actually is really interesting. Most of my good ideas started just like silly, probably drunk one-off jokes that lived.
Ben Yeoh(1:04:57): Cool. So don't kill off the weird impulse, nurture them.
C. Thi Nguyen (1:05:05): Then kill them later.
Ben Yeoh(1:05:07): Yeah, That was really crazy, but yeah.
C. Thi Nguyen (1:05:12): If the idea is not right, don't turn everything down, but give it a chance for a while.
Ben Yeoh(1:05:16): Yeah. Give it a chance to breathe. I guess you could give advice to young food writers, also young social scientists or philosophers about what they should be thinking or doing or questions or curiosities they should be exploring.
C. Thi Nguyen (1:05:32): Totally different answers for food writers and philosophers. Food writers are curious. There's been a transition from a more professional food writer class who worked for newspapers to a very blog driven food writing world. And one of my concerns with the blogger written food writing world is…
Ben Yeoh(1:06:05): It's gamified.
C. Thi Nguyen (1:06:06): Well, that's part of it, but I'm not sure how to say this politely, but a lot of people from that space don't spend a lot of time researching the cuisines and learning about the details of the cuisine.
Ben Yeoh(1:06:25): Understanding the language of the food that they're talking about.
C. Thi Nguyen (1:06:27): I see, not all, but a very large number of the modern food blogging and Instagram world are easily captured by very Americanized foods that have been tuned for hipster, Instagram ability and missing out on the weirder stuff. I thought as a food writer, a lot of my mission was education. So I had to educate myself first. If people need to understand about how to appreciate social and cuisine, and it's really different for American cuisine, then you need to communicate the difference to that sensibility. So people can learn to do that. You have to learn by yourself and that's actually a fair amount of work. So that's the fundraiser for philosophy. The humanities are not a comfortable place to be in professionally right now. Like the world is against them. I think the only thing I can really say is that the world is huge and full of incredibly interesting topics and a lot of fields that specialize in a very narrow set. But if you keep looking around for the weird, interesting stuff of the borders, I don't know, you might do something as bizarre as writing an entire book based on analyzing the philosophy and proofing games and people might find that interesting
Ben Yeoh(1:07:55): And the world would be a better place for it. So follow the weirdness, I guess. Which then becomes not as weird as you might think. So thank you so much. Please check out the book which I have linked below and thank you very much for coming to chat with me.C.
C. Thi Nguyen (1:08:15): Thanks so much. Bye.
