The book Games: Agency as Art, specifically this overview and this podcast episode, have come up in a couple different conversations anyway.

What makes something a game? In Nguyen’s telling, as I understand it, there’s about two core bits, and one optional but often-present bit:

1. Arbitrary but well-defined goals: you always know what you’re trying to do
2. Arbitrary but well-defined constraints: you always know what you can and can’t do
3. Often, progress indicators (or points): you know how close you are to your goals ¹

In other words: (from the amazing ebbits)

Once you define these goals, constraints, and maybe progress indicators, you can just zone out of the rest of life. You don’t have to worry about your taxes or your chores while you’re playing the game; you’ve defined, “all I have to do is get the most victory points/save the princess/run the fastest.” Now, not 100% - you want to make sure you don’t hurt yourself physically, you have to remember to drink water, you don’t want to say a hurtful thing to your friend just to get more victory points - but the more you can zoom into just the game, the more engrossing it is. This is kind of exciting and kind of toxic. In Nguyen’s words:

And games are toxic for me when we just get hyper-narrowed on the point system and we never think about the larger outcome of the point system. We never think about what our life is like or what the activity is like under that point system. … What I’m worried about is those cases when the point system blocks out everything else from your universe and you don’t see any of the other stuff.

some examples of games

• A footrace
• Settlers of Catan
• Super Mario Bros
• Grade school
• College admissions
• College²
• Learning to play an instrument as a kid
• Building a good credit score
• Some work that is pretty well defined, like some building software

some things that are not games

• “Playing” on the playground³
• Dungeons & Dragons
• Learning to play an instrument on your own
• Grad school
• Dancing
• Travel
• Gardening
• Most work, as it is not very well defined

why do I care right now

I’m thinking a lot about what kind of work I want to continue to do. I’m really good at playing games! If someone sets up a task for me as a game, I’m great at it; if not, I’ll often turn it into a game and then be good at it.

Some things are not games, and cannot be made into games. Research is one, whether we mean “discover something new to humanity and write a paper” or just “discover how to make this thing work at your company for your circumstances.”

I talked to someone recently who’s a few years ahead of me who framed my current dilemma as, “do I want to play more games? or do I want to get better at not-playing-games?”

I’m not actually sure! This question implies a value judgment, as does our constant cultural valorization of Research, but… maybe if you can make a good career out of playing games, maybe just go for that. (Outside of work, either way, I’ll have a lot of time to learn to play not-games. Living your life is a pretty good not-game. So is raising kids.)

One thing I’ve been noticing in the meantime is, when I try to turn non-games into games ⁴. Like, set out a list of goals for myself when I’m doing researchy tasks so that, even if I “make no progress”, I can at least check off boxes and feel good. “Feel good” is really important, because when you train for 20 years to play games, not-games can feel really depressing. But that is only one part of the process.