David Egan Philosophy

The World Cup Final on July 19 drew an estimated 1.8 billion viewers. If that figure is correct, over a fifth of humanity was watching the game. Pelé popularized the nickname “the beautiful game” to describe the sport. A lot of people seem to agree.

What makes this, or any other game, beautiful? Games can be fun, certainly, and they can be exciting, absorbing, and good recreation. But are we crossing the line into a category mistake when we call a game beautiful? And if a game is beautiful, what is the nature of that beauty?

In his recent book, Games: Agency as Art, C. Thi Nguyen provides a compelling answer. Games, he says, are artworks that operate in the medium of agency. They crystallize our capacity to decide and do things.

To get clearer about what he means, let’s work through a couple of more familiar examples. Painting is an art form that operates in the medium of paint and that crystallizes our capacity to see. We have this ordinary capacity to see, which is in use for most of our waking hours. A lot of what we look at is unremarkable. A great painting doesn’t just give us something remarkable to look at. It also helps us to appreciate just how remarkable it is that we can see things. A painter curates a visual experience in which our ordinary capacity to see operates in a particularly intense and focused way.

Fiction is an art form that operates in the medium of language and that crystallizes our capacity to tell stories. Just as we see things almost all the time, we tell and hear many stories every day. Mostly they’re simple stories, like remarking on what happened on the way to the grocery store. In fiction, that ordinary capacity to tell a story takes on an intense and focused form that helps us to appreciate the remarkable power of our knack for storytelling.

Nguyen makes a similar argument about games. If painting elevates our capacity to see to the level of art and fiction elevates our capacity to tell a story, games elevate our practical capacities, that is our capacity to decide and do things. Chess, for example, takes certain basic capacities for spatial and strategic thinking, for planning ahead and anticipating the actions of others, and crafts them into a focused experience in which those basic capacities are challenged in very particular ways. Chess frames our capacity for strategic thinking in a way that allows us to experience that capacity with a special intensity and beauty.

We can experience the beauty of our practical capacities in ordinary life, of course. I feel a deep satisfaction on the rare occasions that I execute a perfect parallel park. But games are designed to create a fit between our abilities and a task that’s rare in ordinary life.

What’s more, Nguyen argues, games help us to explore the range and depth of our agency. Playing billiards and playing charades activate very different aspects of our practical capacities. Playing both of these games, and many more, gives us a rich and varied appreciation of the sorts of things we can do, as well as allowing us to try on various aspects of our agency that we wouldn’t want to exercise in ordinary life. It’s not nice to deceive your friends—but it’s acceptable and even fun if you’re playing poker.

So games, on Nguyen’s account, are art forms like painting and fiction, with the distinctive characteristic that they operate in the medium of agency. But that distinctive characteristic comes with a twist. When you attend to a painting or a piece of fiction, the thing you’re attending to is outside of you: it’s the canvas hanging on the wall or the words on the page. But when you play a game, you’re attending to your own actions. The beauty of rock climbing, for instance, lies in the way it demands of the climber a combination of balance, strength, and spatial intelligence. To appreciate the beauty of rock climbing, you attend to the beauty of your own body’s response to the challenges presented by the climbing wall. You aren’t simply the audience to the beauty of a game; you are also a participant in it.

One consequence of Nguyen’s argument is that, to properly appreciate the beauty of a game, you have to play it. To understand what makes it beautiful, you need to experience the exercise of practical capacities that the game calls forth.

Different games challenge human abilities in different ways. So what’s so special about the beauty of soccer? Why is it, among all games, “the beautiful game”?

I’m not going to argue that soccer is the most beautiful game. I’m not sure the idea of a most beautiful game even makes sense, and if it did, I don’t think there’s a knock-down argument in favour of soccer. But I do think soccer is very beautiful.

Not everyone agrees with me on this. That’s actually helpful. Thinking through the reasons people give for not liking soccer actually helps to explain what’s special about the game.

Every four years, as reliably as there’s a World Cup, there’s a “think” piece or two, mostly in right-wing American publications, arguing that soccer is a stupid sport. For my sins, I’ve read a few of these so that you don’t have to. Among the recycled arguments are the following: it’s boring because it’s so slow and low-scoring; only elitist snobs with pretensions to European sophistication would presume to find it interesting; it’s intrinsically socialist because of the equality of all players on the field, unlike the hierarchical structure of a sport like American football; and it’s bestial or subhuman because, also unlike American football, it prevents players from using their hands, which is one of the main things that separate us from animals.

The charge of boringness is significant because it’s presumably made by people who have never tried playing the game themselves. Recall that Nguyen thinks we need to play a game to properly appreciate its beauty. American football, the preferred sport of American conservatives, is a quintessentially spectator sport. The National Football League excels at the televisual spectacle. But if you’re an offensive lineman, playing the game mostly involves throwing your weight against a gorilla-sized man, falling over, and then doing the whole thing over again.

The attraction of soccer, by contrast, lies significantly in how it’s played. On that score, it owes much of its popularity—especially in hotbeds of elitist snobbery like Latin America and Africa—to its simplicity. All you really need to play is a ball and a flat playing space. Once you have those, the game is essentially the same whether it’s played in a Brazilian favela or in a state-of-the-art sports stadium. If billions of people compulsively watch this allegedly boring sport, it’s because billions of people can play it.

Many of the best games—the board game Go is another notable example—manage to craft exceptionally complex game play from a very simple set of rules. The “socialistic” equality of the players is part of this simplicity: apart from assigning a special role to the goalkeeper, the same rules apply to all the other players. The prohibition against handling the ball is the key to this simplicity. The game encourages players to strive to put the ball in the net—using every part of their body except the part that it would be most expedient to use. Once you rule out that expedient means, all the challenge and grace that’s distinctive of soccer emerges. Very few games craft such sophisticated game play from such a simple set of rules.

The simplicity of its equipment and rules is what allows soccer to have such global reach. Its universality is a large part of its beauty. If soccer is an art, it’s a popular art, more like the Beatles than Anton Webern. During the World Cup, a large part of the world is united in humming the same tune.

Which isn’t to say that everyone loves soccer, or that they should. You may well have found yourself indifferent to the spectacle of the World Cup—or even a bit disgusted (as I was) by the corruption and greed of FIFA. But hopefully there are some games in which you find not just joy but genuine beauty. It really would be a mark of elitist snobbery to deny the aesthetic value of games. 

1. Before she became famous for playing Joan Holloway on Mad Men, Christina Hendricks mostly worked as a model. Among other things, it was her hand holding the rose on the poster for the film American Beauty. (source)
2. According to the 2011 census, a little under 25,000 Indians claim Sanskrit as their mother tongue. (source)
3. Brazil has the largest Japanese population outside of Japan. (source)
4. Many animals show a preference for using right or left limbs but humans are unique in having such a strong tendency toward right-handedness (it’s more evenly split in other animals). One hypothesized explanation is connected to our propensity for violence, especially violence involving weapons. A righty will more naturally be able to attack the left side of an opponent’s chest, where the heart is. (More sharp-force injuries are inflicted on the left side of the body and these are more often fatal.) As for the 10% of lefties, they may survive in a minority because the element of surprise can give them an advantage. (source)
5. A recent study listed the most searched-for word definition online by US state. For both Florida and Nevada, the word people looked up the most was “philosophy.” (source)
6. Although the shuttering of USAID got the most press, the UK cut a greater proportion of its foreign assistance in 2025–26 than the US did. (source)