I’m C. Thi Nguyen. I used to be a food writer, now I’m a philosophy professor at University of Utah. I write about trust, art, games, and communities. I’m interested in the ways that our social structures and technologies shape how we think and what we value. My latest book is The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game.

My first book is Games: Agency as Art. It was awarded the American Philosophical Associations 2021 Book Prize. It’s about how games are the art form that work in the medium of agency. A game designer doesn’t just create a world – they create who we are in that world. Games shape temporary agencies for artistic purposes. And games turn out to be our way of writing down and communicating modes of agency; by playing them, we can try out different forms of agency. Here’s a summary of the book. There have also been some symposia discussing the book.

I was named to Vox’s 2024 Future Perfect 50 – their list of “thinkers, innovators, and changemakers who are working to make the world a better place.”