Thinking is, in fact, mostly memory, pattern-matching against past experiences.

feelings is at that moment of triumph when we learn something or master a task.

Games that fail to exercise the brain become boring.

Either way, fun is defined as “a source of enjoyment.” This can happen via physical stimuli, aesthetic appreciation, or direct chemical manipulation.

This is why tic-tac-toe ends up falling down — it’s exercise, but so limited we don’t need to spend much time on it.

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.

“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 world is full of systems that we can choose to approach as games, and by approaching them that way, we make them into games. Games are puzzles to solve, just like everything else we encounter in life. They are on the same order as learning to drive a car, play the mandolin,

I don’t need a degree in automotive engineering to drive my car. I don’t even need to understand torque, wheels and how the brakes work. I don’t need to remember the ins and outs of the rules of grammar to speak grammatically in everyday conversation. I don’t need to know whether tic-tac-toe is NP-hard or NP-complete* to know that it’s a dumb game.