Fun comes from “richly interpretable” situations.

“gamification” which attempts to use the trappings of games (reward structures, points, etc.) to make people engage more with product offerings. Does it miss the point of games? It is often layered on top of systems that lack the rich interpretability of a good game. A reward structure alone does not a game make.

The brain is good at cutting out the irrelevant.

It’s the thing that builds approximations of reality.

Boredom is the opposite of learning.

This is the part of the brain that packages things up and chunks them. This part of how we think isn’t something we can access directly — it doesn’t use words.

Noise is any pattern we don’t understand.

Fun is just another word for learning.* Games teach you how aspects of reality work, how to understand yourself, how to understand the actions of others, and how to imagine.

It’s worth asking ourselves what skills are more commonly needed today. Games should be evolving towards teaching us those skills.