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https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_flow_the_secret_to_happiness?subtitle=zh-tw
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https://mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm
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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/25/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-c-thi-nguyen.html
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Ezra Klein: “The world is an existential hellscape with too many values and games offer a temporary relief from that.”
“The most important thing in my game designer toolbox is the point system because the point system tells the players what to care about.”
The philosopher Talbot Brewer, in his book, “The Retrieval of Ethics,” says something like we’ve lost sight of how important activities are and we’re just obsessed with how important the output is and the product is. (which is the “points”)
Theodore Porter, “Trusted Numbers.”
And the reason is because this information needs to travel. In a large-scale bureaucracy, there are lots of people that need access to the same information. And they won’t have the same background. They won’t have the same contextual richness. And so he says that what an institutional quantification does is it concentrates on this little nugget that’s invariant and this lets the information travel easily between context and it lets it aggregate easily.
So again, for me, in education, the easiest example is grade point average.
“The Grasshopper.” And this is from the ‘70s. It kind of got lost for a while and then re-found and became a cult favorite. And Suits offers the following definition of what it is to play a game. He says, “To play a game is to voluntarily take on unnecessary obstacles for the sake of making possible the activity of overcoming them.”
So the punchline in the book is that games are the art form that works in the medium of agency itself.
What the game designer is doing is creating an alternate self for you, an alternate agent, describing the skeleton of that agent, saying here are the abilities you have, here’s what you’re going to care about.
But in games, because the game designer manipulates what you want to do and the abilities and the obstacles, the game designer can create harmonious action. They can create these possibilities where you’re— what you need to do— the obstacles you face and your abilities just match perfectly. So this is the weird sense in which I feel like games are like an existential balm for the horror of life. A lot of life is you don’t fit. You have to do things. And it sucks and it’s horrible and it’s boring.