Sublime

World of Warcraft is a status generating machine. The game conjured for Rodger an alternative reality in which an avatar of his self could play. He built a life in there. He played games of dominance and success. He thrived. This is how all the games people play for fun function: by exploiting the neural circuitry that evolved to play the status

The game, he sensed, was testing his relationship to information: when he sought it, how he sought it, how he updated his beliefs in response to it.

Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.

Well . . . if there’s one aspect of humanity that I want to augment, it’s the imagination, which is probably our most powerful cognitive tool. I think of games as being an amplifier for the imagination of the players, in the same way that a car amplifies our legs or a house amplifies our skin. [. . .] The human imagination is this amazing thing.

We do not fit this world comfortably. The obstacles in our path are often intractable, exhausting, or miserable. Games can be an existential balm for our practical unease with the world. In games, the problems can be right-sized for our capacities; our in-game selves can be right-sized for the problems; and the arrangement of self and world can