Think Like A Game Designer - C. Thi Nguyen — Game Design as Art, Fish Taco Adventures, and Exploring Game Design Principles in Daily Life (#61)

Episode Date: February 27, 2024

C. Thi Nguyen is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah and the author of the incredible book "Games: Agency as Art." In this episode, Thi delves into his theory of games as an art form that revolves around agency. His website, Objectionable.net, showcases an extensive collection of published papers on games, the philosophy of technology, and other intriguing topics. My conversation with Thi digs into the essence of games—exploring their power, addictiveness, and how game concepts can be applied to enhance your daily life. Don't miss this episode for a thought-provoking journey into the philosophy of games with Thi Nguyen.Visit http://justingarydesign.com/ for show notes, game design lessons, and more! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I'll be having conversations with brilliant game designers from across the industry with a goal of finding universal principles that anyone can apply in their creative life. You could find episodes and more at think like a game designer.com. In today's episode, I speak with T. Nguyen. T is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Utah, and he is the author of the book Games, Agency, And we have a wonderful, deep-dive philosophical discussion into the nature of games, how they classify as an aesthetic experience, where the joy of games comes from. We talk about the philosophy of technology and how it applies to the creative process. We talk about how these things can impact not just your creative work as a game designer or as a creative in a field that's adjacent to game design, which he also teaches at the University of Utah, but also how these things can impact your life.

We talk about how the metrics of society can create a nightmare of a gamified situation. And we talk about how you can build metrics and gamified concepts to provide meaning and value in your own life. We talk about our upcoming books. It's one of the first times I've talked about my own upcoming book that really dives deep into these processes. You can see our mutual love and enthusiasm and we almost talk over each other a bunch of times because this sort of core passion about games and philosophy and where they overla,

lap is really fascinating. T is somebody that's moved the art forward on the understanding of how games are made and why games aren't appealing to us and the ways that we can think about the creative process. So this does get a little esoteric at times. There's a lot of deep dive and philosophy discussions. So for some of you, it make it a little bit tough to get through through some of the middle parts, but really towards the second half, we bring it back home, we make it practical. And I think it's worth getting through the theory because I do believe deep down that the theory and the philosophy does end up impacting you at a ground level in how you do the work and how you understand the craft of design. So I absolutely loved this conversation. I was

really glad to be able to reach out and have it. I'm eager to have a follow-up conversation as we work on our respective upcoming projects. But without any more preamble, I give you T. Nguyen. Hello and welcome. I am here with T Nguyen. T. Nguyen. T. It is such an honor to have you here. It's great to be here. The honor is mine. Yeah. So we get to dig in deep here because I, many of our listeners will know with someone that,

you know, I was a philosophy major. One of my paths before becoming a gamer and game designer was potentially to become a philosophy professor or something I love. And the intersection between games and philosophy is kind of your wheelhouse here. So maybe let's give people a little bit of background on yourself because you're, you're a little different than a lot of our usual guests. So why don't you give a little bit of background and then we'll start digging into some of the meat of your work. All right.

I am Tienuin. I am associate professor of philosophy at University of Utah. I was supposed to do extremely normal philosophy. I was trained in a very mainstream department to do very mainstream things like, what is the meaning of life? Is there subjectivity? Is there really good and evil? How do you know anything? And at the same time in grad school, my main occupation when I wasn't doing student shit was playing games.

It was, I mean, there was a bifurcation in my life. There's another alternate path where I could have been a go player and nothing else for my whole life. But instead, during grad school, I stumbled into the exploding world of European. and board game designs. And I'd been, you know, like a hyper geek gamer of like more like wargamy stuff and Warhammer 40K and stuff like that when I was in high school. But when I discovered this stuff and I discovered these designs, I discovered in particular like Wolfgang Kramer and Reiner Knitia and just like had these like these aw awesome moments of like playing these games and being like, how did he do that? Anyway, fast forward a bunch of years.

And I am a professional philosopher. I'm a young assistant professor. I'm sick of all the mainstream topics. None of them seem to me interesting at all. And I'm like, screw it. I'm just going to do whatever I want. And I had taught this class on the philosophy of art where we'd done this side project on whether video games were art.

And I got really angry because I read a lot of books in the space. And I was like, these aren't right. These are all about video games as a kind of movie, and there's no, like, gameness to them, right? It was all about how games were a kind of cinematic, interactive fiction. And there was nothing about, like, the stuff that I cared about, the stuff that I was reading every day on board game geek about, like, interesting choices and fructive choices and rich decision spaces. And so I had this incredible detour that at the time looked like I was flushing my career down the drain to everyone, including me, of doing philosophy of games. And then I wrote a book called Games Agency as Art that has an entire theory about what games are. And then to my surprise, people got really excited about it.

And now, like, there's graduate students in philosophy working on the philosophy of game stuff. And I have, like, people coming to a University of Utah to, like, work on the philosophy of games. So it's, like, happening. Is that a good enough starting position? it's great and and so obviously it's talking about and elucidating your theory of games as agency as art I want to

yeah but I was one of the people that got super excited about it when I saw it I also want to poke at it and see where we can find some some potential holes in fun areas where we disagree because I do think you move the conversation forward in a way it's really important but as a fellow philosopher there's just the sense of love

of knowledge and love of this debate the conflict is the fun part but I want to and I also think for those that are not interested in philosophy I just want to sort of pause for people in the audience and may think uh-oh this is an esoteric discussion I'm not going to be interested some of this will be esoteric I'm sure of it but I believe that I'm going to bring this to a home that not only matters to people that are designing games but that matters to your day-to-day life and the ways to make your actual life better so I'm making that promise here and I think we're going to get us there so so for those you that are into the esoteric stuff you're going to love this for sure. For those of you that aren't, stick with us and we'll see if I can deliver on that promise if we're actually going through it because I think we can. I'm very excited about it. So now, but before we get into that, there's one more piece of your background that is I was doing my research

that we didn't talk about here that I want to just kind of surface. Is it true that you were like a semi-professional food writer? Oh, yeah. I had a job for the LA Times doing restaurant reviews of cheap and ethnic restaurants. It was a job I got by drunk posting on the internet food reviews. And then the L.E.9 food editor was like, this sounds great. So walk me through that a little bit more detail. Because I thought this was hilarious.

And I think it actually has a few interesting, like useful notes for our audience as well. So like you just, what made you start doing it? Where did the, what was the process of getting it together? What did you learn throughout the process of writing about? Oh, yeah. So back before Yelp, there was an online forum called Chowhound where geeks like me would go and rant and compare notes and talk about things like this is the, Chowhound was the kind of place where you want. If you ask a question like, what's the best Chinese food in L.A.?

That wasn't the place for that question. This is the question like, okay, there are 15 chain. Shanghai dumpling places in the LA area, which has the best Shanghai-style dumplings. So I hung out on this board a lot. And it like, this is actually one of the things that actually is going to lead into a lot of the major themes of the book. Like, I had this, I would get these obsessive quests about food, but they like change the entire shape of my life.

Like one of the interesting things about a lot of these obsessions we have and these strange goals we set is like I, for example. got obsessed with fish tacos. And I decided I was going to find the best fish taco in Los Angeles. So I went all over East L.A. eating fish tacos. And I ended up basically hanging out a lot in a part of town where there were like almost no white people and no Asian people. I was the only Asian dude around.

And like discovering things about like East L.A. culture, which is a very Mexican-American culture that I never would have known otherwise because of my weird fish taco obsession. Anyway, we'll get back to that. Anything specific that creatures to mind from your things you discovered in that start of the journey? I mean, just like L.A. is an incredible place to be, but the incredbleness is really hidden to people because the surface of L.A., the hard kind of famous Hollywood stuff is just complete crap.

But if you spend your time, like, if you follow the food quest, what you discover is like L.A. has like the world's biggest Armenian neighborhood. Like the world's biggest Vietnamese neighborhood outside of Vietnam. Like the world's like just all these massive enclaves of like full. You can basically travel the world on a budget because you can go to a city that has like 600,000 Vietnamese. You can go to like a massive, massive like Russian enclave and just be in basically a functional community were like a different language is being spoken in the streets like everywhere. Like I would never have known this if I didn't get weird food obsessions.

And instead I ended up like getting sucked into like, I don't know, like at some point I was like learning some weird traditional like dance from Orthodox Jews in a Jewish neighborhood because I got really excited about like, you know, wood fired bagels. I don't know, like stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's awesome. And like, again, part of why I wanted to tell the story and, you know, I'll pause it. I'll pause it here.

I know there's more to come. But like, there are certain traits that I try to unearth from everybody that performs at the top of their field. And this curiosity and obsession as these sort of two things, like you find something that you're curious about that you're interested in and you just be, you just dive deep into it. It's been true like across where to get great at anything. You've got to like have some natural curiosity and then be willing to follow it.

and then just become so obsessed that you really like, you're going into the, into the weeds and playing, you know, posting on these obscure forums and then finding the thing, you know, in your case, actually traveling to these specific places and servicing it.

And then that is able to get you, you know, you did all this for free without any aspect or any hope of getting paid for it. I imagine this seemed crazy to you at the time. And then suddenly that turned into an entire like career and all these extra insights that you then carried forward in areas well beyond the actual arena that you were specifically pursuing. Yeah.

I mean, I never would have thought that the, I don't know, during graduate school, I like spent all my spare money getting like 300 European board games and playing the hell out of them every night and talking about them with my friends. And I never would have thought that that would be like the center of my career. Right. Right. Yeah. So it's just like, it's a good piece of advice for people to just like find those areas of curiosity and chase them. And then I think I have to imagine that you're writing because, you know, you write, Philist's. philosophical papers that are written rigorously, but they're much more approachable than a lot of these papers.

Like, anybody can find a lot of your papers online now, you know, just by searching your name. And there's a lot of them that are like, you know, again, they walk that line of rigor and approachability better than most that I've encountered in a way that I imagine you're writing for the LA Times food. It's helped you to develop. Maybe I'm mistaken. I mean, the real secret is I'm a failed novelist. I wouldn't create writing workshops. Philosophy was supposed to be my backup career. So I was always a writer first.

Gotcha. Okay, let's continue. If you want to either, you know, if there's anything else you want to continue, because I know I kind of took in a little tangent here in the food writing sign. But yeah, let's talk about games. So I think, you know, you sort of mentioned that you're how you started to develop your, your theory of games and agency because you were annoyed at what you saw out there, which is great. I write this scratching your own it.

And just like, I have to write this because somebody else hasn't. And it's just pissing me off is great. It's why I've written, I wrote my original book and why I'm writing my next one. So it's as good a reason as any. So there's a lot to unpack, but let's try to just kind of flesh out the overall thesis, and then we'll start digging into some of the specifics. So the book I kind of think of as like a big theoretical development off of one earlier book, Bernard Toots is the Grasshopper, which is, have you read this book?

No. It is so good. It was like this lost cult classic from the 70s. Bernard Toots is a Canadian philosopher who wrote a book about the nature of games. It's called The Grasshopper. It's staged as a fake Socratic dialogue. So you remember the morality tale of the ant and the grasshopper? Of course.

The Grasshopper plays and the ant works. and then summer ends and the grasshopper dies. And normally this is supposed to be like a morality tale about, you should work hard. Instead, suits as the grasshopper is staged as a philosophical defense of the grasshopper, as a fake Socratic dialogue with the dying grasshopper surrounded by its disciples, explaining why games are the meaning of life. And it starts with this definition of games.

And there's a long version and the short version. And the short version, we should do both because they're crucial. But the short version is this. playing a game is voluntarily taking on unnecessary obstacles to create the possibility of striving to overcome them. So I will say that one more time. Playing a game is voluntarily taking on unnecessary obstacles to create the possibility of struggling to overcome them. So one way that he puts it is that, and by the way, he plays, he means every game. He means sports.

He means card games. He technically wasn't writing about video games because video games didn't exist yet, but this clearly applies to video games. And so one way to put it is that in every game, there's an end state that you're trying to get to in a marathon. There's a particular point in space. But quickly you realize that when you play a game, being at that point in space, space isn't actually what you value, because if you just valued being at that point in space, you would take the most efficient means. But in every game, there is some way of getting to the endpoint that breaks the rules that's more efficient. So running a marathon, you could take a shortcut,

you could call a taxi, you could take a lift, you could take a bicycle. I'm also a rock climber, right? Like, in every rock climb, not only can you typically walk up the back easily, but you could haul on the rope, right? So rock climbers, most rock climbers in the modern era don't pull on the rope. The rope is just there for safety. So there are all these easier ways to do the thing that you avoid. So every game involves taking on particular obstacles. So with rock climbing, it's get to the top of the rock, but the obstacles are you only get to use your hands and feet. You don't get to use rope to like pull yourself up. You don't get to use a helicopter, right? You got to use your hands and feet. And so that pursuit reveals that whatever we're doing in games, the obstacles have to be

central to. So he gives this example about rock climbers, a mountain climbers. He says if two people are climbing a mountain at the same time, imagine that one of them wants to get to a rare herb at the top of the mountain that will cure, I don't know, COVID or something. And the other is a rock climber, right? One of them, the rock climber. The rock climber, the rock climber, is playing a game and the person that just wants the herb isn't playing a game. They just want to be at the top of the mountain. And the way you can tell is if someone comes by like in a helicopter and says, do you want to ride to the top?

The person that just wants the herb that's at the top, they don't care about doing it in a particular way. They're just going to take the most efficient means possible. They'll say, hell yeah, I'll take the helicopter. The rock climber will avoid taking the helicopter because if they take the helicopter, they won't be rock climbing. They won't have gotten to the top by that particular means. So the fancy way to put it is that in games, the goal includes a constitutive set of constraints. Does it make sense? Like if you pass the ball through the basket,

if you pass the ball through the net and you use a step ladder, that doesn't count as making a basket. To make a basket, you have to pass the ball through the net while following all these particular constitutive rules. Let me pause. How are we doing so far? Yeah, no, this is great. And actually, like, it's funny because I didn't, I was not familiar with this book and the philosopher,

but this sort of voluntary acceptance of unnecessary obstacles was the definition I loved the most I'd already heard of four games, and I've used it in my book even. So I didn't even attribute the right way. So this is great. I think you've made the point clearly. So in my book, I use this as the basis. And I end up saying, trying to build a theory of what kind of art form this is.

And it's an art form that, I mean, suits his point, is that whatever the value of games is, the obstacles have to be central to the value. One way to put it is that, one way to put what he's saying is that the constraint and the goal specified by the game create a particular new kind of activity. They bring into being a new kind of activity and they bring into being actions that had never existed before, right? Like, dribbling doesn't exist outside of the context of basketball. I mean, I once tried to like come up with a list of action types that wouldn't

exist if Magic the Gathering didn't exist. And I ran out at like 150, right? just all kinds of new actions and things you can do that are created by these obstacles. But in particular, it's sculpting a kind of action, right? So the way a game designer is working, you're a real game designer. I got this from reading game designer blog. So what I was doing was, I was reading these accounts of saying what the game, art of games was by academics.

And they were all talking about script and cinema and storylines. And I was like, this is not the games I recognized. And when I looked at game designer blogs, basically, what I saw was all. this stuff about, okay, now we tweak this constraint, now we tweak the point system, now we tweak the point system, this changes how the action feels this way, this changes the decision space this way. And I was like, that's what it's about, right? Like, the game designers and the people arguing on board game geek, they get what it's about. And so the theory I ended up saying, giving, using the suit, was that game designers are working in a distinctive

artistic medium. So the artistic medium is, you know, whatever the artist manipulates to get their effect. And my claim is that the primary things, the artist, the game designer as an artist, is manipulating are the environment, the goals, and the constraints. And together, those produce a kind of action. And one way to sum that up is that game designers work in the medium of agency itself. They're designing an agent. They're designing a goal set and an ability set, an affordance set, along with an environment of obstacles that those things will face. And together, using to coordinating a kind of action. And in a lot of cases for me, like, they're doing it artistically. They're doing it not to, like, train people or make people smarter, but just because to sculpt an action that feels beautiful. And in

general, we can talk about this more, but in general, I think that a lot of academics and kind of like serious cultural critics that have looked at games, have looked in the wrong place because they're using this paradigm of object arts, where they're looking at the thing the artist made and looking in the static thing for what's good, right? So, like, if you praise a movie, you're going to praise the script or the dialogue, the fixed features of the game. And when you look at a computer game, people will look at the fixed things like the dialogue, the cutscenes, the graphics.

I think games are a distinctive kind of thing where the beauty and the grace and the wonder emerge in the player themselves. And so what the game designer is doing typically, one of the primary things are doing is manipulating features of agency and an alternate agency for a player to enter into,

and they're doing it for the sake of the player's own experience of their action. So one way to put it is that when you watch a movie, it's the movie that's beautiful or thrilling. And when you play a game, it's you that's beautiful, or you that's comically absurd, or you that makes the fun

mistake. I want to pause here because you're an actual game designer and I want to find out if you think this is bullshit or not. Yeah. Yeah. So there's, I wouldn't say it's bullshit. I think it's a, and so I'll give you, I'll give you my, some of my frames around this and we'll, we'll kind of, we'll see where they, where they land each. Right. So for me, the way I think of the job of game designing is it's that, you know, the, the, the game, the work of a game designer is to manipulate the interaction between players and rules to generate an experience in your audience, right? And so the idea, experience or an emotion, right, this effect that you're trying to create. And so at the colloquial way is like, I joke about it is like, my job is to frustrate

my players, right? My job is to throw walls in front of them, throw blocks in front of them in the right sort of way so that when they leap over them or when they comically fail to, that creates this fun, like tension, excitement and like joy and whatever the different experiences I want to create for you. And so that, I think, tracks pretty well to what your, to how your definition works. I think that there is an overlap. And so I think, I think you'd also agree with this, but I'll just make sure that, you know, that the different art forms use, that are sort of composite art forms, you can judge them

on a variety of different criteria. So a movie can be judged on the script, which is writing, right, and the dialogue and whatnot. It can be judged on the acting and the performance. of the specific characters. It can be judged on the cinematography and the filming, right? And then at the end of the day, it's judged on the emotional impact it has in the audience, right?

Does this move me? Does this make me laugh or cry or present a shift in my perspective in a way that's meaningful and powerful, right? At the end of the day, the cash value of any art form, I don't care what it is, is that the experience of the consumer or whatever your target, whoever your target is. Does that track with where your theory goes?

Yeah, I mean, I want to be a little more minimal than that because I don't think that the value of. So, I mean, it sounds to me like we're saying really similar things except, sorry, I'm going to like geeky philosophy right now. Like, there's debates in the philosophy of art about whether what's valuable is the experience or the activity. So, I mean, some people might think what matters in a game is how it feels to you, the emotions you feel to it. And some people might think what matters in the game is that you exercise a complex skill. And the experiential version is very much like the modern account of what makes art good.

But it's not the only account of what makes art good. So I mean, I'm trying to be a little, whatever, I'm being too fussy. whatever. I think we're about... I have no issue with getting in the weeds here. If it's too much, I'll steer you back on track. There are very few people I can have this conversation with and get into the weeds, so I don't mind it. Let's see the weeds.

If I think we're losing the audience, I'll steer us back. Let me give you then some background, since I think there are very few times I get to talk to a game designer who's also, you know, has a philosophy background. So in... So let me talk about the value of games. in general first and then talk about accounts of values of art because they're really they're I think rich and interesting so so one of the accounts of the value of games

that's out there which also draws on suits is Tom Herca's and Tom Herca uses an Aristotelian account to say something like games are valuable because they because in games you do difficult things and doing difficult things in and of itself is a good. So this is an Aristotelian view, right? What Aristotle thought was that what the goodness of a human being was, was exercising their capacity as well, being engaged in activities. So another way to put it is that under the Herkha's kind of view of value of games,

like, it doesn't matter whether you enjoyed it or had a good experience. What mattered is that you did something difficult and exercised your capacities. I think a theory that really well fits Herka's kind of account is like the Olympics. Like no one asked an Olympian afterwards like, but how did it feel? Like, right? That sprint feel amazing to you? Yeah. So yeah, I'll, I'll point out just briefly that the, because I think this is great and the dignity, but my account, I specifically use the term for your audience. Right. And that's important because there are some things, the Olympics, I would argue, it's not specifically about the challenge to the player. It's about the audience of the people watching

and demonstrating, seeing these high performance is the value. If nobody watched, this would not be a same value of a thing. This is the big difference in you and Herka. So this is not my theory. This is Herka's theory. Yeah, but the big difference in you and Herka is for Herca, and this is very Aristotelian, if an Olympian does it perfectly, and no one's watching and no one knows,

that was still an essentially valuable activity. And he intrinsically got no satisfaction from that. no feeling of like. So this, so this person does something perfect. No one watched and that person theoretically their memory got wiped at the end of the activity and they had no joy or experience during it. And this would still be, that would still be a for in Herca's account, a, that would be the value of valuable. Yes. Exactly. Got it. That's cool. But remember, so there's what you're up against is these huge two divides about different theories of value. One of them is that the value of human activity is an experience and pleasure and what we feel. And the other is the

value of human activity isn't doing shit. Like who cares. Like for Aristotle, it's basically like, who cares how you felt about it. What matters is whether you did something good, right? Or goodness will involve excellent action. Anyway. So that's one. Yeah, now we get into the definition of good here. Right. Yes. Okay. You cut that off well enough for now. But yes. All right. Great. So, and I'm really interested in aesthetic accounts where what's valuable is something else. It's something artistic. But again, like, there's, there's so many accounts of what makes art valuable. And I find different ones convincing in different ways, right? Like, some say what's valuable about art is your pleasure. Some say what's valuable about art is your experience. Some say

what's valuable about art is learning things about, okay, so here's, here's, here's an important, here's an important one, because this becomes important for me in talking about games. Martha Newsomam has this account that what's good about narrative literature is that it gives you experiences of other people's perspectives. They're emotionally rich and intellectually rich perspectives on the world. And so the cash payout there isn't whether you enjoyed yourself, but the cash payout is that you become more empathetic and understanding of different perspectives. I think this is interesting because I think this is another possible thing you get from games, right? Like one thing you can get from games is really pleasurable emotions and exciting and exciting feelings and feelings of your own beauty. But another thing you could get is familiarity with different modes of agency, with different ways of thinking.

So I literally, so one of my favorite games, I mean, we're in the right context for this. I love Imperial and the 18XX series and all these games where you get to manipulate. Should we assume that your audience knows 18XXF or should we explain it a little? No, brief, brief explanation is probably important. A lot of people probably won't know. So a lot of these games, Imperial is probably the most playable. They're games in which, so in Imperial, it's World War I, and there are the six nations of World War I fighting, but you don't play the nations.

You play shadowy investors, trading investments in the nations, and controlling the fate of the war for your profit, which is super cynical, but it has this, like, interesting doubling doubleness to it where like if you're heavily invested in England and the player who's heavily invested in Germany is about to attack you, one plausible strategy is to let the player that has a lot of Germany get some cheap stock in England. So now they're co-invested, right? And your incentives are shared. And this, I love playing these games, but this is not a way I naturally think. But I find myself accessing this mindset in like negotiation meetings. with upper administration that are trying to defund my department.

Yeah. So this is, yeah, so this idea that you're like learning something valuable, right, you're gaining a skill or a perspective that's valuable, I think is absolutely very important in games. In fact,

I would argue that it's the reason we play games in the first place, like as a species, like as a, like, right, that play, even in a broader sense, but games specifically is because it gives us a safe space

within which to practice, learn, and develop skills that then become useful in life. So outside of the, when I say experience, you know, I probably mean it more precisely in a broader term that includes the experiences that come after, right? That what can I gain from this later? Right. I mean, let me give you, let me put one more main ingredient on because this might be useful. So in my book, one of the things that I think I found when I was reading the suits that seemed really clear, but suits didn't quite articulate. And then I got frustrated because

other people I thought were screwing it up. So I think what suits reveals is there are two different motivational states you can have for playing a game. This is a spectrum, but let me just talk about the extremes. One of the extremes is achievement play and the other is striving play. So achievement play is playing because you value winning. And striving play is getting yourself temporarily interested in winning because you value the struggle.

So I think a typical Olympian or a typical competitive poker player actually cares about the win. People that you might think of as just are like super competitive, they might just care about the win. Striving players, I think,

don't really care about the win. They care about something experiential, something in the doing itself. But to get that, they have to get themselves invested in the win. And I think one of the reasons places we see this a lot of the times is,

So the classic case, this is my book, but the classic case for me that made this clear to me was my wife and I play a lot of board games together. And we're rarely evenly matched because she is a chemist who's much better at anything that involves precision and geometry. And I am much better at anything that involves deceit and manipulation. So most games, one of us is just going to

win. But sometimes we can find a game where we're evenly matched and it's like super delicious. And then I find a strategy guide at night. And my wife will never read strategy guides. That's not the kind of person she is. And so here's here here's the point. If so some people think the only reasonable kind of play is achievement play. Right. If that was true, there's only one rational thing for me to do, which is to read the strategy guy, right? If the point of playing is to win, then I would be an idiot not to read the strategy guide. But I don't read the strategy guide, right? And I think the reason it's obvious, because I like this delicious struggle. And if I read the strategy guide, I would leap ahead of my wife and then our games would turn

boring and uneven. And I would much rather play even tight games. But what's interesting here is the experience I want, I can only get if I'm really invested in winning at the moment. But my actions outside reveal that I'm not truly invested in winning, but I just take on the interest in winning temporarily to get this experience of intense absorption. So I just want to say two things. One is one of the reasons I'm being fussy is I think that games are so valuable in so many different ways and there are reasonable ways to be achievement players and reasonable ways to be striving players. But then I think the thing I care the most about is striving players who play for aesthetic reasons,

who play for the beauty of their own experience. And there, I think, that's a subtype. And I just want to be clear that's a subtype because I think a lot of people get obsessed with one type of game playing and think the only reason you can play games is for development, or the only reason you can play games is to win,

or the only reasons you can play games is for fun. And I just think there are tons. But the one I'm most interested in is striving, aesthetic play, where the game designer does all their stuff, designs the agency to create an experience of action and to create the player's own experience of the action. And I think, like, I mean, my hope is that I'm using, like,

my background and philosophy of art to just, like, give a clear taxonomy to stuff that I just found that was kind of background and assumed and obvious in most game designer diaries. Yeah. Yeah, no, that's, well, this is the beauty of what good philosophy is, in my opinion, right? It's, you're actually, you're not like discovering something that wasn't there before.

You're just articulating something that was there in a way that's more, makes it more conscious and accessible so that you can kind of realize when you're in that zone or you can bring some of those tools to bear more consciously, but they were there before. My greatest goal, my greatest goal is if people read the stuff and we're like, yeah, that's where I always thought. I just didn't have quite the right words. Yes, exactly, right? You need to say something that's obviously true that nobody said before.

it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a great success in the in the world and uh and the same is true with in my opinion when you're designing game mechanics right new a new game mechanic shows up and it's like one of these revolutionary ones like you know trading card games existing right or like you know having these things where it's like oh duh like all the pieces don't need to be contained together or you know like obviously we could do this like and that's and then it unleashes this like you know waves of creativity behind it oh my god oh i just i just had such so can we talk about the game i've played the in the last six months, and it's sort of in your case. Have you played Monster Train?

Yes, I've played plenty of monster train. Okay. So I was looking at it. I was like, oh, all they did, so I didn't play a lot of Slay the Spire, but I played a ton of DreamQuest. DreamQuest was one of my favorite games ever. And all they did was take a rogue-like deck builder,

and we're like, we could cross that with plants versus zombies. And the amount of glorious density that came from adding a bit of tower defense positional play into a deck builder was enough to like obsess me for six months of every moment of my free time. Yep. Yep. I mean, again,

I've mentioned this a lot of times on the podcast, but it's like pretty much all of all of creativity is generally just taking two things that existed before and combined them together in a way that has a big goodbye. Like that's it. You're not reinventing anything generally. It's put two things together in a new way and then execute it well. That's the hard part. Not the, and this is exactly what, what this is.

So much of design is that, oh, wow, okay, this puzzle piece and this puzzle piece go together and look at this beautiful thing that comes out of it. So it's a, yeah, it's a great individual's example for it. And also a genre I'm obviously very passionate about it. I think it's, I've, the episode. Go ahead. Do you track much of indie tabletop role playing? Because I think from what I can tell, that had a similar thing where a lot of the Genesis was people fusing things they learn from D&D with things they learned from improv theater school.

Yep. And just getting this, like, unbelievable torrent of, like, creative wonder out of it. Yeah, there's a lot of overlap for there. And I've had a lot of guests on the podcast about this and others that are, that are not even aired yet. We were, like, exploring the different spaces that are available that, you know, just weren't, you know, back when Dungeons and Dragons first came out that are now, like, really getting there in terms of types of different emotions and characters and things

like, you know, single evening type experiences like fiasco or solo player experiences like thousand-year-old vampire where you're actually like creating these emotions of wistfully having to lose your memories through this like interacting with the book role-playing experiences, like just fascinating spaces that are available now that weren't, you know, even whatever 10 years ago. Right now, it feels like sometimes like I feel like in an art world, like different areas get super exciting. Like, you know, there's the period where jazz is just exploding.

the period where hip-hop is just exploding. The electronic music is just exploding. And I feel like right now, we're in a golden age of indie tabletop. I keep reading new rule sets and having my mind blown and playing these things and having, like,

completely new experiences I've never had before. And that's just, I mean, that's actually, like, I think one of the reasons I wanted to write a book as a philosopher and a philosopher of art about games was, I don't remember which, I mean, some of it was just like,

being obsessed with Kinetia rule sets. But I played, I was playing some of the stuff from that world. Like, I think it was like John Harper's Lady Blackbird. And there was some rule. And I was just like, that's the coolest rule I've ever seen in my life, man. That's just amazing. Why are people looking at this? Anyway, whatever.

Yeah. Well, and so, yeah, there's another tangent road. We could go down on sort of like what's caused that and how that's why that's exploding the way that it is. And I think it's, this is, I have a kind of whole other sub theory about, you know, sort of technology and the medium that exists as the main springboard for all of these things, right? Like I'd say, you know, indie games and specifically role playing games, I think are, are having this Renaissance and Golden Age because of streaming. And in part because the idea that like people can watch and it becomes a performance that others can participate in without having the pressure being in and then become invested and then slowly bring themselves into. is like game changing for that genre. And so I think it's created more space globally.

That's super interesting. I mean, maybe, so here's something that will interest you. There are some people that think that what an artistic medium is, is like really narrow. Like, it's just like the physical stuff you're manipulating. But one of my favorite theories is Sand Lake of Ells, where he thinks the medium is just like everything in the whole social environment. And he is this incredible example that you might love. It blew my mind.

So it turns out before the 60s, you didn't go to a movie when you went to the movies. You went to the movies. What that meant was they didn't publish movie times, right? That makes sense? Like, you didn't go to a particular movie. You went to the movies. You walked in and you walked into the middle of a movie and you stayed for as long as you wanted and saw a bunch of random things and you went away.

It was only in the 60s. They started publishing individual times for movies. and people went to a movie. And Kavelle thinks that this completely changes the medium of film. Not because it changes the technology of, like, making movies. What it changes is now someone can make a movie for a specific audience, and the audience can self-select the movies they wanted to. And that was not available before because of the social context of film.

And Kavel says, the fact that you can do that changes the medium of film. And I think what you're saying is something similar. Streaming changes the basic nature of RPGs. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and I think there are so many things about the realities of the world that change what artistic tools are available to you and which ones are likely to resonate. So like, you know, even just like, for example, the game I work on with Richard Garfield, SoulForge Fusion uses digitally printed algorithmically generated cards.

Like that wasn't a thing you could do 20 years ago or even think about. Right. And now the fact that that's possible is cool and creates this whole. new medium within which to build things. And then how you get that to, like, how much the production costs of printing tabletop games has gone down and generally moot making them means the market is way more flooded, which means more ideas can come in. What AI is going to do to that creation process is another whole rabbit hole that's like

fascinating that, you know, we're all still trying to figure out and society is wrestling with quite a bit right now. I mean, did you, when you were doing, did you see that, so the other major realm I work in right now besides philosophy of art and game? is philosophy of technology, and in particular stuff about how things like social media change the landscape of communication and the way that the institutional nature of knowledge

changes our trust relationships. So just in general, one of the reasons we're really interested in games is just because they're like representations of ways that we restructure the world and interact with each other in new ways. I'm interested in Twitter for the, the same reason I'm interested in games.

It's a new rule set and a new point set that changes how people interact with each other. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, those systems are specifically designed to optimize for certain things, right, to keep you engaged. And then to give you the, you know, what things are going to give you your experience and dopamine hits at the right ratios to keep you engaged with it and how that's going to things. And that the structure of that shapes who we are as a society and major consequential decisions. Like that stuff's always fascinating to me. And I, you know, okay, we'll go down this rabbit hole because it's exciting too. I have, you know, I believe that, you know, every major communication medium change is a meaningful

shift in how society interacts. And every single one of those triggers, you know, good things and bad things. And every single one of those triggers society freaking out, right? So everybody's freaking out about social media and there's good evidence that there's some challenges and concerns about it. But the same thing happened like television, right? people were freaking out about television for the longest time, right? It's essentially controlled authority, pushing out information to you. It's going to brainwash you. It's going to take over. And you

can see records of the same thing happening when newspapers and the printing press and books were that people were worried about those and yellow journalism and all of those problems, all the way back to when books were first started getting scribed and people were worried about losing the art of actual storytelling and the nuance of giving you voice, you know, conversations. Everybody freaks out when there's a new technology. And what happened, is there are hardships, there are challenges, there are upsides, and eventually society learns to adapt. And we learned to, you know, so, you know, it used to take, and I'm going to butcher the numbers, but it was something like seven times that you would see an image or something, an advertisement on

television before it would likely influence you to make a purchase. And now that number's, like, in the like 30s or 40s or something. It's like a huge orders of magnitude difference in like how much we are resistant to that. And I feel like the same thing with advertisements and how social media affects me. I've like learned over time to do, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, train myself away from it. And there's still problems and challenges, but I feel like as a society, we become conscious of them and adapt to them, you know, within a 20 year span or so. I don't know how you feel about that or if that's in the realm of the types of stuff you think about. I mean, I don't do a lot of future prognosticating about whether or not. I'm just like

trying to figure out the specific change that's involved in the particular technology. I don't share your optimism just because I think your optimism depends on a fair amount of background stability for us to like infer to the future from how the past has gone. And I'm not sure that's warranted given the pace of increasing technology. Like I don't know, man. There's plenty of evidence that things are changing faster and I'm not sure we can keep up. But that's sorry, that's not the stuff that I actually know about. The stuff that I've actually been thinking about. is, I mean, so one really useful way to put it,

there's this great Langdon winner piece called Artifacts Have Politics. And he's really interested in whether technology has, this is a philosopher of technology. And he's really interested in whether different technologies carry different, subtle political framings with them. And he's not interested in the dumb shit that everyone else. Like, oh, it's like, this technology is liberal or this is conservative. He's not interested in that.

He's interested in something much deeper. So the primary thing that a lot of people get interested in is different shifts in the centralization of control. I mean, you mentioned the printing press, right? So, I mean, you mentioned television. So one of the background theories that people have is that we get these different waves of different degrees of centralization. So at some point, we have oral communication, very decentralized. Then we get printing presses. And at one point, they're really expensive.

and that's a really hyper centralized communication system. At some point we have like ham radio and that's super decentralized. At some point we have like broadcast TV and then again that's super centralized, right? There's a small number of broadcast stations. It takes a huge amount of money. So it concentrates communicative power in a small number of hands. And one of the interesting things, and I think so a writer names end up to Fecky is really good about this stuff, is that it looks so a lot of people like things like

Twitter and Facebook are radically decentralized, but the way a lot of us have is that there's a secret centralization underneath it, and that centralization is the centralization of the search algorithm. Right. So one of the things I'm worried a lot about is all this evidence that there's this radical de-diversification of what people are paying attention to. And this is just, by the way, so I've been doing a lot of research. outside of the game stuff on the nature of metrics. And in general, in every sphere, what people

seem to observe is when a metric shows up and gains any kind of public credence, then you get this radical reduction in the diversity of values in the space. So there's this really interesting book called Engines of Anxiety, which is a study of what the U.S. News and World Report law school rankings did to law schools. And what they show is over 10 years, law schools, Some law schools used to be research schools. Other law schools used to do more minority outreach or more social justice work. Other law schools, renees interest in corporate law. In the moment the U.S. News and World Report shows up,

and its rankings become dominant, and its rankings pick up on a very small number of things. It seems to just, so it's just, for example, those metrics are aimed heavily at incoming class LSAT score, incoming class GPA score, outgoing class, employment rate in the nine-month mark. Employment rate only doesn't care about quality of job. And so schools that used to do things like outreach to poorer students or

underserved communities can't do that because those values are skewed to what the U.S. News & World Report ranks. So they're kind of forced or pushed. And so one of the general worries I have is something like we have what looks like this massive diversity of information. And then our attention gets channeled through one, a very small number of algorithms that tend to search in a very, to present searches in a fairly similar way. So there's a lot of evidence that, for example, you would think, so Spotify gives you access to so much music. You would think people's music listening has radically diversified all the empirical research shows.

people's listening is radically de-diversified and mostly most of the listening is now just whatever is trending on the front page. Yep. Yep. Yep. I think this is critical. Sorry, two key points that I think I want to underscore like one, yes, the power of centralization versus decentralization and the even more dangerous part when it's under the surface, right? You don't know for sure, so you don't know to resist it. And I think it is important. And part of the, the, my, you know, optimistic view as a society's kind of immune system to this requires the surfacing of where those problems are to be able to adapt to them. And then I think the other point that you made, which is going to bring this, now I'm going to start bringing us back into

the games world so we don't lose people too much because I took us on this tangent, so I like it. But this idea of metrics and optimizing for the wrong metrics is so important because it is critical, especially with video games, it's common practice, right? You're optimizing for metrics with any large company. There was a recent interview I saw with Jeff Bezos, talked about this at Amazon, that you end up having to use metrics to manage your decision-making, but that often those metrics become divorced from reality,

and you need to realize that and always bring it back, that what really matters is your customer experience, right? What really matters is, like, you know, where the kind of bottom line hits, and that you need to, in often cases, try to counteract for this and purpose, by tracking countermetrics or being able to, you know, every, you know, with regular intervals, re-question what is the key metric that we're looking at? And then is this still valuable to us

five years down the road? Or is this something we're just slavishly following because it was the metric from before? It has incredible, I don't think there's a way around using metrics to kind of manage and measure the world and to be able to interact at large scale. But it's a really important thing to surface for anybody working on games at scale or digital games or any of these things that the metrics are potentially poisonous as well as useful. Yeah, one of the, before we go back, and maybe this will be useful for game designers, professional game designers, especially because I think

everyone who's making any kind of art form has exposure to various success metrics. It's just that I agree with you that there's no way to not use metrics at scale. But the stuff I've been writing lately has been saying something like, look, the problem with metrics is that they're adapted to be comprehensible at scale. and that involves using the kinds of information that don't require high context and high background knowledge. Theodore Porter, who is this incredible book, Trust in Numbers, says that basically what data is, is its information that's been prepared to be understood by distant contextless strangers,

and that this is encoded into what metrics are. They're the kinds of things. Like, it's really hard to explain, like, the weird delight you have in this. weird-ass game, but it's easy to look at everyone understand and collects sales data or page views or things like that, right? And so it is both the case that you can't, that you can't function at scale without metrics, and that if you as a person or a small community get completely captured by metrics, then you're letting large scale, the demands of large scale and the demands of utterly contextless understanding, strike into your soul.

Yeah. Yeah. So the way I would kind of reflect that back with my own lens here is that, and the way I teach game design, it's like you, your intuition as a designer, there is never going to be a substitute for that. In fact, figuring out the right thing to do for your game is going to become from your intuition more often than it comes from the data. The data will have to inform you and you are going to have to use, your intuition is going to be wrong a lot. So when you follow your intuition, you need to figure out how you're going to test it. And that can, you know, and that's, that's where your sort of data and your feedback come in. And then, but you're not going to get the core answer from data by itself. You need to like train your instincts, train your intuition.

And that's where the, you know, the sort of artistic impulses. That's where the skill is of refining over time is. And it's a, it's a, it's a fuzzy space because people don't like hearing it. But it is also this sort of, you know, where the real joy of the process comes from. And it's important to like maintain it because it's also where the best design, the best ideas, the best refined things will, will spawn from that less quantifiable piece of the creative process. Yep. Totally agree.

So, all right, I want to jump into a meteor topic because I want to make sure we have enough time for it, which is this my personal, I haven't, I don't think I've talked about this on the podcast. before, but I have been hard at work on my second book. My first book was kind of trying to really say what I had to say about making games and the creative process at its core. And this book is about taking the best parts of games and why they are powerful and successful at what they do and applying those to make life more successful in that way. So massive undertaking, very difficult. And some of your work, I think, aligns to this very well.

in a way that I want to dig into. So I'm going to just throw some of my stuff at you and pull out some of yours. So there is, in my view, there's sort of four major pillars of like game, what makes the game experience so effective in terms of both as sort of a learning tool and as a experiential one, right? It's sort of, you know, leaving aside there was a Stittilian challenge section, This idea of like as I'm using it as a tool for growth and I'm using it as it and I'm actually enjoying the experience. And so there's clear and meaningful goals, tight feedback loops with rewards, an appropriate difficulty setting, and the fact that we approach it with an iterative playful mindset, right, the kind of gamers mindset.

So those are kind of the four pillars that I that I viewed as. I kind of, well, one, I know I'm speaking in a little bit fuzzier terms probably than the philosopher and you wants to hear, but I'll pause there briefly. But then I'll, I can also just circle back and we can go, I want to go into some of them specifically in how we, how I think about them and how you think about them. Can you tell me more about what you mean by the, the gamer's mindset? Yeah. So in a gamer's mindset, you approach, and to some extent, this is the, the striving play mentality that you talk about, this idea that I take on a goal and I treat it as serious and important for the purposes of doing the thing. But then I expect to lose often. I expect to not

hit the goal. And that's part of the fun and it's part of the process. That I'm willing to go through and do it again and again. If I play a game and I lose, it doesn't mean that it's a terrible experience. In fact, I'm willing to take what I've learned and come back to it again and be excited about playing again because I've learned from that last experience. Whereas in their life, we're the exact opposite, right? Generally speaking, when you try something and you fail, people's egos are destroyed, they run away, they don't want to do it again. There's a totally different mindset.

So in your account, is it like, this is good because it pays off in success in the end? Or no, it's cool if you just fail the whole way. I'm on the no, it's cool if you just fail the whole way, by the way. Yeah, no, I'm in that, I'm in that mind. I'm in the latter camp. I think that the ideal world is that you're achieving both goals, but it's not required. The mindset is, I enjoy this for its experience, and I'm expecting to have failures and learn from those failures. Those are two pieces of it.

I think we're reading on the same page. Let me try a formulation for how I've been thinking about things right now, and we'll see if it tracks. I think we're thinking about things similarly, maybe. So I've been thinking of there's a really bad way to export things from games and a really wonderful way to export things from games. The bad way for me is kind of like knee-jerk gamifications. This is what I'm worried about Twitter, right? And the good way I think is what I would call the playful mindset of trying on a point system

and then stepping back from it and asking if the experience, was worthwhile. Because I think one of the distinctive things about games is this thing I wanted to talk about before, about like, I mean, the thing that is so at the center of games that we almost miss it, which is that you take on new desires when you play a game. The game tells you what you want. It tells you whether you're on a team with people. It tells you whether you're cooperating or competing. You just want that for a while, and then you step back from it. And my worry about the gamifications is that what they do is they pervasively set our values for us in the long term. So I talk about this at the end of the book, but I just published a paper about this.

I'm calling it value capture. So value capture is what happens when you have kind of rich values that are your own, and then you get put in a social setting, and that social setting feed you a really simplified version of the value, typically a metric, like page views, citation rates. GPA, Twitter likes. And that takes over. So that's value capture. And that seems really worrisome to me

because that involves like non-fine tuning of what you actually care about. And the playful mindset, what people actually do when they play games and they play games aesthetically, and they play games in the context I think a lot of people on board game play games with is they try and appoint scoring system

and then don't just follow it forever. They step back from it and they ask, was that worth it? And when they ask, was that worth it? They're not asking that from the perspective of some external fixed metric. They're asking that from themselves, right, from what you would call their intuition, like their sense, their feel, their joy, their interest, like their own sense of value. And so the playful mindset, the thing I care about, I mean, when game, I think the worst

version of a game is to be birthed to this world and the world just hands you like, here's the university rankings, here's money. And you just go like, fuck yeah, I'm doing it. I'm maxing out those stats and you just go hell or high water and you don't think about it. You just take these values as given. Yeah. Well, I'm sorry. I just want to pause there because I have this very real.

Like I've talked about this before. Like I fell into that exact trap. I'm a gamer and a kind of maximizer, optimizer by default. And so that's where I was like, okay, I'm going to get the highest GPA. I'm going to go to the best college I can. I'm going to the best law school I can. I'm going to go get the thing. And it took me 20 years to figure out that that was a terrible way to live.

So it's a real trap that people fall into. Yeah, this is, I say something like this is the end of my book. It's like people are worried about games making serial killers. I'm worried about games making Wall Street bankers. That is like the thing I'm most worried about is people taking out of games, the expectations for some clear, rigid value system in a quantified term. And then they just glom on to whatever the world is like, you know. But the other and the other, but the other way you can do it,

is what I think a lot of us do when we play games, which is we try it on and then we step back and we ask if we wanted that. And notice for me, like, that's not like, that's not. So like the world has these scoring systems and you can treat them both ways. Like, okay, you go to CrossFit and CrossFit gives you a scoring system. And it gives you, it scores you in a certain way. And you just glom onto it and never think about it and just assume that that's what you should be doing. Or you can try it and then ask, step back and be like,

is that scoring system working for me? It could be, right? These highly structured, gamified systems can work for us. We can also mob them, but we can also, like, I had to try, like, 20 sports, each of them with their own completely different internal scoring system in order to find a couple that, like, gave me joy instead of making me feel like a miserable husk. Right. Yeah. So, all right.

So I want to flesh out the four pillars. I talked about a little bit more now because I think you jumped, the points you made, I pretty much agree with all of them, but they jumped between them in ways that I think are important. So when I talk about, we started with deep diving into playful iterative mindset, and that is this idea where it's not all about winning that I'm actually, you know, losing, like taking on a goal for, you know, the purposes of striving to overcome it and then, you know, enjoying that experience. and then and I tack on adopting, you know, learning mentality, right? My losses are there to give me and help me grow, not just, you know, they're not just failures. Then goals that are clear and meaningful, right? One of the points you make in your book, right, it's like, and it's, I think it's just abundantly true about why games are compelling is the goals are super clear. They're just like told you, like, get the most points at the end, right? Do this thing. And like, we love having concrete goals to strive for. Life is so fuzzy, right? The idea. of like, you know, be happy, have a good relationship, get fit. Like, what the hell does that even mean? Like, how do I know if I've succeeded? What am I doing? Right? And so we try to latch on to these things. So games give you these concrete goals and life either gives you default bad ones, right? Like have the most money in your bank account or whatever. Or you just, you're just living

in this fuzzy. I don't even know what I'm winning or what I'm not. So like, hold on. Can I ask you something? Because it's funny because when you first said it, you said meaningful goals. And when you the second time you said you said concrete goals. And for me, those are hugely different. And a lot of the worries I have are that people are trading meaningful but fuzzy goals for meaningless but concrete goals. Yes. Yes.

I think both are important. So in games, we leap over the meaningful part to some extent. Like you just, you jump in the magic circle of a game and you just say, I'm willing to take on this goal as meaningful by default. And that's like, it's just a magic superpower that games have. right? Who cares if I capture your king? Who cares if I get a ball through a hoop more times? We just decide to care together and the goals are super clear, right? And so the meaning gets its own almost gets a free ride when we take a game mindset and clear is, you know, a game is not designed

well if the goals aren't clear. Like it's just it's a it's the start of the game design processes. You need to have some kind of clear clear goal, right? I'm actually not sure. I'm not sure about that. I don't I don't think that's true because I think that's true. true. I mean, I actually, so when I wrote the book, my first book, almost all my examples were like that, and I was assuming that. But I've been thinking a lot more about things like, so you know, the history of skateboarding. Um, skateboarders would go out and compete to do the coolest trick. It's not a clear goal. People didn't agree necessarily about, uh, what the coolest trick was. And that was fine. That was a great game. Um, I, so I, so, uh, I was thinking of examples for this my own life.

And I used to play a game where three of us would get drunk and then our friends would bring in random ingredients. And we would try to improvise dinner from what came in to make the best dish. Best dish is very fuzzy. There's actually no clear judgment. People had a wild disagreement didn't matter. It was a great game. So clear goals are one, are part of, I mean, it's the part of the kind of game that I spend most of my time playing. And it's clearly part of the appeal of games.

But you can have games without clear goals. and they can be really fulfilling, which I find. Yeah, it's a fine, it's a fine distinction. I think there's, there's the, um, so there's, there's two cases that I'll, I'll, I'll flush out of there, right? One is the cases you talked about fall under one example, one category, which is the, the goal is someone's judgment, right? I used to compete in debate and the winner of the debate is still subjective.

It's just the judge, right? I'm playing to the judge or a game like apples to apples or cards against humanity. Like there's a clear overarching goal, but in the end, it's like I need to appeal to the judge. Same is true in the surf, the skateboarding example or the other. So to me, there's no judge.

That's what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about a competition. I'm talking about a bunch of friends going to compete. There's no judge. They all make their own judgment. That's the interesting. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, that's interesting. To me, it starts to fall into a little bit more of play. But so how do you? Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Okay.

I mean, there's a goal. There's a sure. I mean, it's just, it's such a funky and interesting case to me. Because, I mean, I don't know.

Call it play, call it games. Sure. It's just that there's a shit. Here's a case. Maybe it's on the edge and that's, it's super interesting. But there's a shared means. There's a shared set of obstacles. And there's a shared goal that we can say, do the coolest trick.

But we don't have a shared subtle judgment. The thing that we have in most of the games we play is a mechanism to produce a precise, clear, shared judgment based on mechanical scoring. system. And that gives us a lot. I agree. That's a huge amount of pleasure and a lot of what's interesting about the games of games that you make and the kinds of games that I study are about that super, super precise specification of points. But I've just been obsessed with the caveat that there are a lot of old weird ass games out there that I don't think, that look like games to me that you don't have that. Yeah, it's great. I like the example. And the other kind of category,

of these is like, you know, when you get into role-playing games, like the goals become much fuzzier too, right? Like, what am I, you know, there's a, there's a, in theory, a basic objective of the player characters, but then the, you know, what you're actually trying to do as a player is also often fuzzy. So, coveats definitely noted. Yeah. I mean, the, the, actually, there's a reason, there's no reference to any role-playing games in my book. There used to be a chapter about it. And I said it, it just didn't fit the structure of these like hyper-clear goals. And I was like, I can't, I, I removed the chapter. Because role-playing games are also weird in this way.

They don't have the same relationship to point structures as like your games and Kinitia games. Yeah. Well, I mean, again, to briefly zoom back out if we don't end up on more tangents is, you know, games are, I love the definition of games that you, you know, you had presented that I didn't even realize was from suits. But the, you know, the games are so notoriously hard to pin down as a definition, right? I mean, Wittgenstein used it as his core example of why language falls apart, you know, at its core anyway. So there's a, obviously the corner cases were never going to completely get done. So I'm targeting this sort of, you know, core addictive game loop thing with a specific objective of trying to be able to pull it into your regular day-to-day life. So I use clear and meaningful when I say goals.

And you, you attack the clear or the concrete at the corner cases, which is great. But you agree, or you didn't argue with it. I'm curious, you agree that the fact that we adopt the goals is meaningful by default, kind of as part of the process of playing games is an important part of the process, right? That's the striving thing. Yeah, I mean, it's so meaningful is such like a tricky word. So let me try, let me try a few things. So there are a few things I would say about game goals.

One is there's a scent in which a lot of game goals are arbitrary, right? I mean, this is, this is, so one of the, when I wrote my book, like, one of my audiences was like people that were obsessed with games as like kinds of movies. But I was also interested in the kind of person that was like could never get into games because they were like, well, the points are just stupid. Why would you do that? And there's a sense in which they're arbitrary, but there's a sense in which if you understand that the points are the medium and the real goal is this sculpted experience. then you'll say that the points are meaningful insofar as they build a rich experience. So they only seem arbitrary if you're looking at the points themselves or what comes after them. But they are obviously meaningful and sensical if you look at them as experience sculpting.

But that's just not how we do it in normal life. So let me see if this. Let me try this. See if this makes sense to you. So there's a weird way in which. points are totally arbitrary and unmeaningful, and there's a weird way in which points are totally obviously meaningful. And one way to think about it is that normal life, when we look at something, we ask for its value, we look at the thing or itself or what follows from it afterwards and time,

like what we get from it later. But in games, if you want to ask about what's meaningful from points, you have to look at what comes before it and the activity it's structure. So I don't I don't know. This is maybe too philosophy-headed, but I think of it as like in normal life, you take the means for the sake of the ends, but in game life, you take the ends for the sake of the means, right? The points are justified by the rich, obviously meaningful activity. But you can forget that and just get into the point, and even if the activity sucks and just be like stuck on it. Yeah. All right. Well, I already know we're never going to get through all of these points because I love everything you're saying and want to dig deeper into every piece of it.

So we'll get through as far as we can. And so I'll apologize to the audience. Maybe we'll have to do a part too. But we'll dig in as best we can because now we're getting into two different pieces of this. And frankly, we're dancing around like the meaning of meaning. And that's just we could have decades of conversation about, I'm sure, as the universe. But so to me, there's the sort of intrinsic. There's this sort of these sort of piece that what I, the tight feedback loops and the ability for

games to give you a trail of breadcrumbs to take you where you want to go where that's that's a critical piece and i separate that out from this sort of idea of a meaningful goal and i i think that meaningful goals so like where i'm trying to go with my kind of new book is that to avoid the very trap you talked about about you know games turning you into wall street bankers right like that trace chasing the kind of point systems the metric systems that are put into place to get you to a goal you don't actually want to be at is you have to do actual hard work in real life to clarify goals that are actually meaningful to you and then build the trail of breadcrumbs that will get you there because the breadcrumbs are super helpful. The points are super helpful because

they give you a clear sign that says, hey, yeah, I'm on the right path or no, I'm not on the right path. That's another thing that life, generally speaking, lacks. And so we often will latch on to the arbitrary point system in front of us and without doing the hard work of unearthing meaningful goals. Right. We're totally on the same track. So let me try this. let me put it, we're thinking so similarly. So, I have this new paper of value capture. The way I put it there is something like, the problem with being

value captured by a metric is that you're outsourcing your values. You're outsourcing the process of deliberating about what you care about to like Facebook or Apple or whatever. And it's not that you shouldn't have points or you shouldn't have a kind of structured incentive

system. The problem is actually the outsourcing, that when you just take it off the rack, it's been built for somebody else's purpose. One of my worries about gamifications is not that they bring the structure of a game to you, but that they're typically prefabricated things that somebody else made for some other purpose. And that if you're building a game-like structure of this, I mean, I like your idea, this breadcrum of meaning that you should build your own breadcrumb trail.

You shouldn't let someone else, like, just offer you a preset breadcrum trail. And it's easy, but it's not. going to be yours and it's not going to fit you. And it's not going to be like carefully building for yourself the structure of levels, incentives and what I want next that actually suits you. Does that track what you're thinking? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, 100%.

In games, there's this very nice natural alignment of incentives between the designer and the player, right? I win as a designer if I deliver enough joy to you as a player to keep you engaged and play. Now, there are some people that go on the wrong side of it that keep you playing as a can go can go to the dark side too, right, with some addictive design hooks. But the idea is generally speaking, they're aligned. And as you mentioned, right, in places like board game geek or afterwards, you think once you finished a game, you're like, all right, how did that? Was it worth it for me? Did I enjoy that experience?

Was going through the rules and the hassle and the time I spent and the money I spent it, whatever it is? Was it worth it for me? Did I get enough joy and fulfillment out of it? Cool, if not. And you have to do the same thing with these other metrics in life because they are there and most of the time they are not designed with your well-being in mind. They're designed with the platform's well-being in mind or your advertisers' well-being in mind or the whatever, you know, like the different things that are not necessarily looking out for your interest and what's meaningful for you. And frankly, they couldn't, even with the best of intentions they can't. The same way, like, I can't design a game that everyone is going to love. If I'm designing somebody that loves these 18xx games, it's not going to be the person that loves the Candy Crush games, you know, very very small subset are going to overlap those two, right? The idea is that, you know, a metric that is applied to society at large, people are individual and unique. There's a lot of overlap of the kinds of things that will appeal to you and provide meaning

for life. And that is a whole other deep topic, which I would love to get into, but won't go down that rabbit hole here. But you have to figure out what that unique metric is for you. And it's going to change over time. What's meaningful to you in your 20s and what's meaningful to you in your 40s, very unlikely to be the same thing. Yeah, you know, I mean, this is a, I love the way you're putting it.

Let me, I mean, one way to put it is like, I think a lot of the gamifications I hate, it feels like people have extracted the exact wrong thing from games. Like, when people try to game, I mean, I'm in a university, people are trying to gamify education. I hate it. I think it's like authoritarian and imposing. And part of it is because it's inescapable. They're building one system. that's going to hit every student.

And what's great about games is a few things. One is the game designer on a good game, designed it with love. Just like you said, they designed it for the player's joy or enriched experience in mind. And that's not the goal with a lot of these other gamifications. The other is that games are small-scale objects that you get to choose. and the gamifications that are out there are typically not. They're massively scaled, non-tailored objects that are built to, like, suck everyone into the same action and harvest eyeballs for engagement or whatever,

which is going to be completely different from the experience of trying on the game and being like, I don't know, I kind of like this, or playing a game and being like, yes, this is the game that was made for me. I don't know when the last time you had that experience was. The last time I had that experience was Root. Yeah. Yeah. I think for me, I got hooked on,

I got hooked on Slay the Spire pretty bad. It was probably the last massive one for me. And so I think that was probably it for me. But it's a lot. I mean, obviously, you know, there are several games of that experience. I matched together and took over and transformed my entire life and a million others, you know, along the way.

So, okay, I want to, I kind of see an interesting connection here. Let's see if it resonates with you. because previously we went on a tangent about technology and communication mediums, and you made the point that it was really about centralization, or a key distinction was that it's about centralization versus decentralization, right? And that I heard it implied that decentralization was somewhat better or, you know, more likely to lead to good outcomes. Maybe not.

Okay. So that the implication is too much. I wonder if there is a similar thing that's happening here, because we talked about games are successful in a large part because you could just pick the games you want and they're custom tailored in these small ways. And these broader scale metrics are more threatening because they're more centralized and authoritarian. And so maybe there's a version of this that allows that if we were able to create a wider array of these kinds of metrics and made them more conscious and available to people that it could allow the sort of broader scale gamification efforts to be more effective and powerful for. like a positive good. Yeah, I mean, there's a, I am really interested in whether or not a sufficient diversity of metrics out there could work for you.

Because I feel like with games, what gives me hope is that, you know, there are hundreds and thousands of games. And I can pick between them. But I have a worry. And the worry is that what makes metrics desirable is going to resist this precisely because, what makes metrics so appealing to us is precisely their universality. So let me, let me try. Here's another weird connection from the philosophy technology stuff. So this Lange and Winter paper I was talking about, he gets really interested in what he

calls the politics of the factory. And one of the, okay, let me, let me try it this way. I think you'll see the connections really quickly. So at one point, the world was full of artisan makers, and artisan makers tended to, to make things from beginning to end. So if there are a bunch of individual artisans who make shoes, each of them makes shoes their own way, right? Each of them turns out complete shoes,

and they often make shoes for particular people. Great, lovely, kind of inefficient. Compared to the factory. But for the factory to work, the basic logic of the factory, is it to be efficient? You have to standardize all the parts, right? So if something's going to travel down an assembly line, that means that this person has to make eye hulls

all the same. The next person has to make laces the same, right? And the next person has to make little islets the same. And so instead of being able to like individually make a shoe and make it a little bit different each time and then let someone buy it, right? You, you get efficiency at the price of variability and personalization. And you can kind of scale this up to the entire market, right? Like the things, you get greater efficiency to you, if everyone is tuned into like, you know, the same millimeter sets of hexes. So now you can standardize hexus, right? So here's the big worry.

This is the big galactic world. This is what I'm writing a book right now. Here's the big worry. Part of what makes metrics really, really seductive to us is precisely their universality, precisely that everyone will understand us, that we're on the same metric, and they can travel easily, right? One of the things about GPA that makes a GPA so powerful is that it's the same system that's being understood by tons of different people, right?

It can integrate easily. Yeah. But if I in my classroom make this cool other metric for the students and tailor it to fit them, it'll be awesome, but it won't plug into the GPA system. It won't travel. It won't integrate. It won't aggregate. Yeah.

So, okay, so there's, I'll tease this out to two sides. There's one side, which is sort of like, how do you like manage systems at scale, which I think this problem, your problem, you're identifying 100% land. I can't have a national education policy without having something like a GPA or something that I'm tracking. But then the other piece, which is where I'm currently more interested, which is the how do you as an individual pick those metrics that matter? Does a diversity of available metrics serve you there? And I think I could push a little bit more on the other side too, but this is the main one I'm interested in, is that, and I think that does work. And the secret to it working is you have to pick

the social group that you want to care about. Because each different social group, each different, like, we can't help but want to, like, climb a ladder of some kind, right? We, as a species, we just, that's what we're socially wired to do that. But where you pick the group that you want to compare yourself with, will determine which metrics you care about, right?

If you're in the board game geek forum or you're the kind of person that goes to a world board gaming championship, you're going to care about performance in these obscure or these kind of very, you know, games, which other people are not going to care about at all, but you will because that's a metric that matters to you. Or an example that worked for me in my life, right? I joined a gym and got a community of friends there that would care about how much you could lift or how much you could run, how fast you could run a mile, or like suddenly that became a metric I cared about, which I didn't

care about it all before. But now I'm in a group that does that. And that was obviously just a proxy metric for something I did care about, which was getting healthier and it had a huge impact on my life. And so I think that a diversity of metrics that, and that teacher that you talked about in that classroom, like you can choose to care about these other metrics that are important for you and that help you to grow. And then it's your job to either find a community that that metric's going to matter or if you really are inventing your own metrics and building your own thing to build that community. I think that is a very viable way to make a quote-unquote gamified like meaningful life and value system that doesn't, doesn't, that can scale in a sense

that everybody can find their circles. Yeah, no, I mean, that's that that is exactly right. And that, to me, looks like a model for human life and metrics built on games. Like, what you're describing, what I, I have had this experience, too. I have wandered the world. I've tried yoga. I've tried different kinds of yoga. I've tried rock climbing.

I got into fly fishing. I'm currently obsessed with the weirdest ass like micro community called Bagelari, which is like finger juggling. You can Google it. It's absurd. And we drift through these things.

And I would describe this. as look, these are different communities built around different games. But one thing, I think you're building this into your description is you go into these communities, but in a lot of the cases, you don't have to be lockstep with everyone else in the community. Right. Like when I climb, there is a climbing rating scale, but I can also have my own personal version. Like, I do. Like there are certain climbs I care much more about.

They're not as highly rated, but they're the ones that I like. And I think once you break apart from like the kind of megametric and you're already in like some weird obscure micro community, you already there have the freedom to like kind of figure out the thing, the way you want to do the thing. Like I think about like the diversity of the indie RPG community is like a model of like people doing an amazing thing with. the shared value, but also having a lot of independent about how, like, there's no singular metric to that world, right? There's no singular metric to the world of game designers. There's a lot of shared values, but they're kind of loose and you can move between them.

You can kind of shift. And the worry I have is all about the other side, the side of like how appealing it is to get excited about page views or grant funding or these large and flexible global systems. Those are the things, like the thing you're describing is great, but that doesn't just look like we have more metrics. That looks like people are holding the metrics a lot more loosely. And then they're not only finding micro communities, but they're tailoring them to each other. I have this private theory that like a correct family size for a community. And every time you get an internet community that gets too big, they get some weird splintering.

And they splinter along some arbitrary lines so they can be like approximately the right size again. Yeah, some of that makes sense, clearly. We don't have time to dig into it now. But yeah, so this idea of, I agree. I basically agree in principle with the other thing that you've said in terms of the, you know, having your own personal sub-goals and not alignings to the biggest metric in the community. I also think you get extra resilience if you don't tie your identity to just one group, right? The more that you just tie to one group and that's your thing,

the more you're going to be naturally brought into their main metrics. And so you have more groups. I am a runner and a gamer and a father and whatever, like these things. The more that you have of a robust identity and then a robust set of kind of win conditions, if you will. This is just true for game designers too, right? You want to give people lots of ways to feel like they won, even if they didn't win, right? One of the reasons of games.

Yeah, go ahead. I just made an incredible connection. Can I try to, I think we're coming towards Dan. Can I try to blow your mind with a connection? Yes. Boom. Go. Get me.

Okay. Here we go. One of my favorite ideas. that I teach in my epistemology classes is from W.E.B. De Bois. So W.E.B. De Bois is one of the great African-American philosophers. And he has this theory called double consciousness. And he was interested in what he thought. He thought that there was an intellectual and epistemic advantage to being basically in the oppressed class as opposed to the dominant class. So he talks about them in terms of masters and slaves because he was writing. He's writing in, I think, Jim Crow era, you know, just post pre-civil rights stuff as a person surrounded by freed slaves. So what he says is something like, look, if you have this really asymmetric power dynamic, the person in power, the master, doesn't have to model the mind of the slave. And so they only walk around with one model in their mind. It's the world from their perspective.

The person who's not in power to survive has to maintain their own perspective, but also carefully model the mind and interests of whoever is in power. Does that make sense? So like, so his way of putting is like, if you have a master and a slave, the master doesn't have to worry about what the slave thinks and feels and what their perspective in the world is. But the slave has to hypermodel not only their own perspective on the world, but their master's perspective on the world because

their survival depends on it. And so people who had less power, he thought, as a survival mechanism, had to develop the ability to maintain different perspectives and flip between them regularly. So switch forward. I've always thought there's a big similarity between this and the thought that there's some huge thing that happens when you don't just spend your mind locked into one value system, but you either play games or you cross communities and you entertain multiple value systems. And instead of having this like one monolith that you presume is the only right way to be, you have some reason to constantly be crossing mental perspectives and value perspectives and be shifting between them. And that it just, it doesn't. So Maria Lagunas, who's one of my favorite

philosophers, has this paper called Playfulness, Loving Attention and World Traveling. And she defined playfulness is the ability to transition between different perspective worlds because you hold each perspective lightly. Does that make sense? I mean, well, I love this as a philosophy of life. For me, I call it like lenses.

You need to have a variety of lenses through which you can view the world and it's like the most powerful way to view all truths and ways that you behave. And so adopting that in games, I think you can get the same similar things from books and movies and taking other people's perspectives in that as well. But in general, yes, I think

this is, I'm tracking the importance of this. It seems to me like another version, another way into exactly the same thing you were saying. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. There's a million more things I want to talk about. But you're out of time for today. I want to be

respectful of that, but it's clear we're both very enthusiastic about the same things. And your next book is talking about a lot of this games writ towards the larger scale of life and impacts in mind is more towards a smaller scale of life in your personal journey. I think there's going to be a lot of interesting overlap for us to talk about as we work through these next chapters, quite literally, of our work. So I hope that we can have another

conversation like this again. And let's just end with maybe if people want to read your stuff or follow you and catch up on what's going on or dive deeper, where should they go and how could they find your work? Awesome. Thank you so much. My main book is Games, agency, is art. My website is objectionable.net.

You can find there, all the papers I was talking about, like value capture. I also have one about the value of intellectual playfulness, which is all about this perspective shifting stuff. I am on Twitter, I guess we have to call it X now.

I can't call it X. I'm on Twitter at ad hoc, ADD-H-A-W-K, and yeah I'd love to come back this is awesome yeah yeah this is awesome I have like a whole list of notes of things

that I wanted to get into with you that it wouldn't even get to touch I'm not even going to start the conversations here because neither of us will be able to stop so I will wrap it up there this was so much fun I really hope that I know people will have gotten value out of this

I think it's just thanks for moving the art of design and game design as art concepts forward I think it's really powerful stuff. So thanks for being a part of it. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast.

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