Games are a distinct art form whose medium is agency itself: the designer specifies goals, abilities, and obstacles, and in doing so sculpts a temporary form of practical activity for the player to inhabit. Where painting works in color and music in sound, games work by prescribing what the player wants and how they are permitted to pursue it.
In achievement play you adopt a game's goal because you already want the prize; in striving play you temporarily take on the goal only for the sake of the struggle to reach it, and discard the goal once the game ends. This inversion means players can sincerely pursue winning while caring not about the win but about the quality of the activity the pursuit generates.
Humans can layer temporary agencies on top of their enduring selves, adopting a narrow goal and set of motivations for an afternoon and then setting them down intact. Games exploit this capacity to make our ends disposable, letting us try on shapes of agency the way we try on characters or costumes.
A game functions as a medium that captures and transmits shapes of practical activity: a designer who discovers a satisfying way to act can encode it in rules so others can later step into that same mode of striving. Games thus do for agency what writing does for thought, giving us a library of practical selves to inhabit.
Games deliver the seductive clarity of explicit scores and clear goals, and when we carry that taste back into life we risk value capture: replacing our rich, subtle values with the simplified metrics offered by institutions (likes, citations, step counts). The danger is not the metric itself but letting the quantified proxy quietly overwrite the plural value it was meant to track.
In striving play the obstacles are not incidental barriers but the designed source of value: rules deliberately add inefficiency so that the activity produces a particular aesthetic experience of effort, elegance, or coordinated struggle. Evaluating a game means judging the quality of the agency and the experience its artificial difficulty manufactures, not whether its goal is worth achieving by ordinary standards.