# Phenomenal Experience and the Aesthetics of Agency **Keywords:** aesthetics, agency, games, phenomenal experience, C. Thi Nguyen **Opening (not a real abstract):** In his fascinating new book Games: Agency as Art, C. Thi Nguyen claims that games construct and frame forms of human agency in a way that gives rise to a genuine aesthetics of agency. This is no conceptual engineering on Nguyen’s part: Nguyen means to argue that the experiences of agency we have in playing games can be aesthetic experiences in precisely that familiar sense in which any experience at all can be aesthetic. He does come at the point with an already expansive interpretation of the aesthetic, inspired in part by the generosity of John Dewey’s (1934) Art as Experience (pp.106-7). But Nguyen also seems to endorse an ‘experiential requirement’ on the aesthetic: ‘we cannot render an aesthetic judgment of a thing without having actually experienced it for ourselves’ (p.115).1 This is a requirement for an **Authors:** [[Antonia Peacocke]]