I would summarize the arguments I took away from Games in one paragraph like this: when we play games, we get to try on new ways of thinking, acting, and being—in other words, new agential modes. We do this by immersing ourselves in environments consciously crafted by game designers. Playing a game is an amazing cognitive dance: we temporarily adopt goals within the construct of the game, and genuinely strive to reach those goals, even though the goals (like “move this piece to this square” or “climb this short wall”) are meaningless in our actual lives. Here’s the magic: oftentimes, the true purpose of gameplay is something totally outside the actual goals of the game. The goal of multiplayer board games is human connection; the goal of Twister is riotous chaos. But we don’t get connection and chaos by going after those things directly; we get those things by seriously pursuing the goals of the game. The clear-cut rules and constraints of games are also enormously satisfying because they are a reprieve from real life, with its plurality of conflicting values and goals. This value clarity is why it’s dangerous to over-gamify our lives: we strip our life of its rich and subtle values (e.g. “I want to feel fit and healthy”) and replace them with a shallow metric (“gotta get my steps in”).
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So what happens when we gamify our real lives? Well, sometimes it’s fine. Sometimes we create little games for ourselves at the gym and they motivate us to exercise more. No problem. But sometimes it’s pernicious. I joined Strava to track my bike rides earlier this year, and quickly found the platform messing with how I conceived of my rides. I felt like if a ride wasn’t tracked on Strava, it somehow didn’t count. I was now riding in order to have success on Strava, rather than using Strava to support my riding. I could tell similar stories about Instagram, Twitter, and Hinge.
Nguyen calls this phenomenon “value capture”. He describes it like this:
Our values are, at first, rich and subtle.
We encounter simplified (often quantified) versions of those values.
Those simplified versions take the place of our richer values in our reasoning and motivations.
From the book review:
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