A Philosophy of Games That Is Really a Philosophy of Life

C. THI NGUYEN: 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.

Games remain necessities of life today. For one thing, they’re fun. They activate and satisfy psychological desires. Pleasure derives from immersing oneself in games’ worlds, or in improving one’s skills, or in benefiting from their systems of chance. The real world may from time to time offer us a chance to solve an elegant problem, and the satisf

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