But if the religion of technology preaches anything, it celebrates progress and evolution. And so we ask, what comes next? What do we optimize for beyond numbers? How do we bring more of the world around us back into the software in front of us?

And yet, in so much modern software today, you’re placed in a drab gray cubicle — anonymized and aggregated until you’re just a daily active user. For minimalism. For simplicity. For scale! But if our hope is to create software with feeling, it means inviting people in to craft it for themselves — to mold it to the contours of their unique lives an

Since it is difficult to find a quest that is easy and good , most people optimizing for an easy goal will end up on a quest that is both easy and bad. Now, the degree of “bad” varies depending on who you are, and what you can do.

Quests tend to manifest as an objective we center our lives around. Your quest might be to reach a specific milestone: to become a senator, to publish a book, to make a million dollars. But not all quests have an end state. You might be on a quest to maximize your net worth, or to bench-press more weight than anyone else at the gym. Maybe you’re j

In the 1980s, a venture capitalist could truthfully say their investment was the difference between life or death for an important, generational technology company. Funding such companies, in this way, was absolutely a good quest. But today there are more people "helping the builders" than actually building, fighting one another in a zero-sum game

A player's ability to complete their quest is a function of the quest and their own skills, resources, and powers. Quests that are easy for certain players are nearly impossible for others: Olympic runners will regularly run sub-5 minute miles during training, even though this would be an incredibly ambitious goal for most people.