A Philosophy of Games That Is Really a Philosophy of Life

The greatest power of games is that you can explore this landscape of different agencies. The greatest danger of games is that you can get sucked into this experience of just craving and wanting to be in a clear, crisp and gentle universe where you know exactly what to do and exactly how well it’s measured.

But the thing is, more and more of life is structured like a game. Increasingly, corporations, institutions, governments have begun to understand how powerful this way of transforming and shaping our agency, our behavior is. And so social media is structured like a game. Our school and work lives are structured around points, ratings, grades, metri... See more

The structure of games is not that the points are valuable, but that the attempt to get those points, the attempts to win the game and the game’s terms sculpt some kind of interesting or beautiful activity.

But on Twitter, if you tweet something out and one lone person out there— it moves them, it changes them, it changes their world— that’s not going to register. What that’s going to look like is your tweet got one lonely like and you’re going to feel like a failure. And one of the interesting things about this experience is the process of quantifica... See more

the way I navigate the world right now is I’ve developed a fair amount of defensive suspicion about certain kinds of pleasure. A marker of design game-like systems is that they’re very pleasurable to operate in.

So if you have large-scale bureaucracies that need to be organized and function coherently, then you need these kind of simple, nuance-free packets of information. And I think that’s one of the reasons we’ve seen this constant rise of simplified metrical analysis.