Thread by @add_hawk

So, the American Philosophy Association awarded the 2021 Book Prize to my book, GAMES: AGENCY AS ART. I am: shocked, elated, bemused, joyous, and more than a little bewildered.

I think I get to make, like, a little acceptance speech or something? So here it is:

This book was the center of my intellectual, emotional, and spiritual life for like 7 years. I also spent the whole time pretty sure that, like, nobody would read it except for maybe half-a-dozen other weirdos like me who were already writing about the philosophy of games.

I'd actually been on the verge of giving up on philosophy. I couldn't get myself to be interested anymore in the Official Topics that I was supposed to be interested in, and I couldn't figure out how to get other people interested in the stuff I was really interested in.

I also couldn't get anything published. I was pretty depressed. I was thinking of quitting. First, I tried an interim move: accepting alienation from the philosophical mainstream, and just writing about whatever the hell I wanted to. Which turned out to be games.

There are actually many other versions of this book, other alternate manuscripts, that I killed off. Those other versions were written in very impersonal, very official, very technical language. I hated them. There was no joy in them.

I had felt for a long time that I was split into two halves - the journalist/creative writer, which felt like me. And the professional philosopher - who took topics I cared about and emitted these awful, technical, dead-sounding things.

I think, as I kept writing versions of the book and killing them off, that I was actually figuring out how to connect those two parts, to write things that sounded like real philosophy, but also sounded like *me*.

And so I ended up with something that I was proud of, that merged of all the weird shit I actually cared about. I felt like I had finally found a philosophy writing voice that felt like me. But I sent it off, thinking: this is definitely too weird to ever see the light of day.

So it is particularly wonderful, and delicious, and genuinely shocking, to me, that people seem to be reading this book - and to get an award like this. I am really, really, really moved, and happy.

Theres a lot of people I owe an enormous amount to, without whom I would have abandoned the games stuff - and this profession - years ago. To everybody that listened to me babbling inchoately about games for years, who thought it was interesting, who poked at it - thank you.

Oh, if you're curious, here's an old tweet-thread about the book itself:

https://twitter.com/add_hawk/status/1278371157117267968?s=20

And here's a pre-print of Chapter 1, free online still by the grace of @OUPPhilosophy:

philpapers.org/go.pl?id=NGUGA…