The philosophy of games has recently gained traction as a serious domain of aesthetic and ethical inquiry. C. Thi Nguyen has made a particularly compelling case for games as sites of agency exploration, demonstrating how they allow players to experience, modify, and reflect on their capacities for decision-making and problem-solving. Simultaneously, Hartmut Rosa’s theory of resonance offers a critical framework for understanding how individuals cultivate meaningful relationships with the world. This paper aims to explore how gaming, understood through Nguyen’s aesthetics of agency, can be reconceptualized within Rosa’s resonance theory, revealing new insights into both theories and providing a fresh perspective on the role of play in fostering meaningful human engagement–insights with broader relevance for religious ethics more broadly.
Nguyen argues that games are distinct aesthetic objects because they are designed to sculpt players’ agency. Unlike traditional artworks that offer aesthetic experiences through sensory perception alone, games provide structured environments wherein players exercise, manipulate, and experience agency in a controlled yet dynamic fashion. The “aesthetics of agency” emerges from the satisfaction of navigating these structured constraints, exploring different forms of decision-making, and engaging with rules that shape experience. Importantly, Nguyen highlights the value of temporary self-transformation in play, as players adopt new modes of agency—whether through the strategic problem-solving of a board game or the embodied movement of a sport.
Rosa’s resonance theory critiques the alienation of modernity, arguing that meaningful life experiences arise from relationships characterized by mutual responsiveness. According to Rosa, modern capitalist societies foster acceleration, optimization, and instrumental rationality, which undermine genuine connections between individuals and the world. In contrast, resonance occurs when individuals engage with people, objects, or activities in a way that fosters mutual transformation and a sense of deep attunement. Resonance requires both adaptive receptivity (i.e., “intrinsic interest”) and the possibility of responsive engagement (i.e., “self-efficacy”), leading to an ongoing dialogue between subject and world.
Bringing Nguyen’s aesthetics of agency into conversation with Rosa’s resonance theory offers a novel way to understand gaming’s capacity to foster meaningful experiences. Games structure agency in ways that allow players to cultivate forms of engagement that resonate deeply with them. For instance, the experience of being immersed in a well-designed game environment can be seen as a resonant relationship in which the player is both shaped by and responsive to the game’s structure. In Nguyen’s words, “when your abilities are pushed to their maximum, when your mind or body is just barely able to do what’s required, when your abilities are just barely enough to cope with the situation at hand— that is an experience of harmony available primarily to the players themselves. It is a harmony between self and challenge, between the practical self and the obstacles of its world. It is a harmony of a practical fit between your whole self and the world. This, it seems to me, is a paradigmatic aesthetic experience of playing games.” By “harmony,” Nguyen means something like what Rosa calls “self-efficacy” and by “challenge” he means something similar to what rosa calls “intrinsic interest.”
Additionally, Nguyen’s insight that games provide a “temporary agency” aligns with Rosa’s understanding of resonance as requiring a dynamic interplay between self and world. Players willingly submit to game constraints, yet within those limits, they exercise meaningful agency, engaging in a back-and-forth process that mirrors the conditions of resonance. This may explain why games often provide a reprieve from modern alienation—they carve out structured, meaningful experiences in contrast to the overwhelming flux of everyday life.
Beyond their aesthetic and psychological appeal, games may also serve as ethical laboratories for experimenting with different forms of agency. Nguyen’s concept of agency sculpting suggests that players develop new capacities through gaming, testing modes of engagement that they can carry into their broader lives. When viewed through Rosa’s framework, this process takes on additional significance: if games foster resonance, they may serve as tools for resisting the alienation characteristic of modernity. This suggests an ethical dimension to play, wherein individuals use games not merely as escapes but as structured opportunities to cultivate resonant relationships with agency itself.
By bridging Nguyen’s aesthetics of agency with Rosa’s resonance theory, this paper sheds new light on the significance of gaming as a practice of meaningful engagement. Understanding games as structured environments for resonance challenges dominant perspectives that frame them primarily as leisure or escapism. Instead, they emerge as critical sites for agency cultivation, offering alternative models for navigating modern life’s alienation. In this way, they mirror religious and liturgical practices, which likewise foster novel forms of agency and resonant relationships with the world. This interdisciplinary synthesis thus provides valuable insights for both game studies and broader philosophical and theological discussions on agency, aesthetics, and meaning in contemporary society.
This paper proposes an interdisciplinary investigation into the connections between C. Thi Nguyen’s aesthetics of agency in gaming and Hartmut Rosa’s resonance theory. While Nguyen explores how games structure and sculpt agency, offering unique aesthetic experiences through engagement with designed constraints, Rosa’s work on resonance provides a framework for understanding how individuals relate meaningfully to the world. By bringing these theories into dialogue, this paper argues that games can serve as privileged sites for the cultivation of resonant relationships, and that this has broader implications for religious ethics.