Are We Measuring Our Lives in All the Wrong Ways?

C. THI NGUYEN: 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. 

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.

C. THI NGUYEN: But I think the most important thing about games is the way they manipulate our agency. The way we enter into this alternate self. And that’s I think where you can see the greatest power of games and their greatest danger. The greatest power of games is that you can explore this landscape of different agencies. The greatest danger of... See more

C. THI NGUYEN: So the essential insight that I got from Suits is that in so many games, the target isn’t the point. The point is this rich experience along the way. And I think a lot of the mistakes we make with games is we get into these things and we forget about these larger purposes. The fact that they can be fun. The fact that they can be beau... See more

 C. THI NGUYEN: So the basic thing that I keep thinking about is that point systems are really narrow, and really clear, and really simple. And in games— in real games— when the point systems aren’t attached to— I don’t know— the political life of our nation, that’s great. It’s beautiful. And we can talk about why that enables all these kinds ... See more

C. THI NGUYEN: I found this incredible book, Bernard Suits’ “The Grasshopper.” Suits offers the following definition of what it is to play a game. He says, “To play a game is to voluntarily take on unnecessary obstacles for the sake of making possible the activity of overcoming them.”

C. THI NGUYEN: If the wonder of real games is the possibility of flexing through this wide landscape of possibility, then the gamification of activities in the world is doing two things to us. One, it’s funneling our values down one particular pre-established path for a real world activity, for something that’s connected out to politics and the wor... See more

C. THI NGYUEN:  What I ended up thinking is that what makes games special is not just that they create a world or an environment, but that the game designer tells you what abilities you have and what obstacles you’ll face, but most importantly, what goals you’ll have.  What the game designer is doing is creating an alternate self for you,... See more

C. THI NGUYEN: Value capture cases are cases in which you have rich, subtle, maybe inchoate values or you’re in the process of making them. And then you enter something in the world and the world offers you a simple, pre-established, already standardized, incorporated into a technology simple version of that value system.