games and game design

• Game designers usually don’t tell us exactly what to do. They aren’t like novelists, who fix every action of every character. Game designers work a step back. They shape the general contours of our action, but not the precise details. They give us motivations and abilities, and an environment full of obstacles to face—but then set us free to act, to figure out how to achieve those goals. Our actions are still our own.
• Scoring systems can be used to explore alternate selves. Games are a library of agency.
• This is the incredible part of games: Whatever feeling you want, whatever kind of absorption or intensity you desire, whatever level of difficulty works for you at that moment, you can find it. Games offer you the freedom to sculpt the world, the tasks, and the goal to give you whatever kind of process you want. And they do it because the goals are detached from the world—because you can modify the goals and constraints for your own private joy.
• Playfulness builds the habit of regularly distancing yourself from the scoring system.
• if games are what we do in utopia, then they must be the meaning of life.
• Games might even act as a kind of spiritual vaccine, an inoculation against the harsher institutional scoring systems that they resemble.

metrics and false promise of "success" through quantification

• if you can define what good and evil mean for people, if you can control what success and failure mean for them, then you can control them from the inside.
• Games wake us up to a life of play; metrics drive us down into grueling optimization. And sometimes, we let some external, institutional systems—rankings, metrics, and measures—set our desires and goals.
• What's easily measurable is rarely the same as what's really valuable.
• I started ransacking my thoughts, imagining how each one would look on Twitter. It started to matter less for me whether the thing was true or deep or wise. I just wanted thoughts that were peppy and sharp and quick enough to blow up [...] Twitter’s metrics don’t capture the difference between somebody who chuckled for a second at your tweet and somebody who was shaken to their core. If they both just click Like, then Twitter counts them the same. [...] The interface of social media tends to capture positive reactions in the first moment of exposure. One of the central reasons we communicate with each other is to learn, to be challenged, to have our understanding transformed, which takes time. But that kind of communication isn’t valued by Twitter’s scoring system.
• “So what target data are you using? What counts as success when training the AI?” One team explained that they were using the Netflix database about engagement hours. Their AI was “successful” when its output most resembled the Netflix shows that got viewers to watch the most hours of TV.
• Metrics are understandable, interconnected, and perfectly transparent. And in this clarity is a certain kind of trap. We become beholden to what everybody can understand. Games are isolated, disconnected, and unimportant. The joy we take in them is often private and opaque to others. And that opacity gives us the space to be free.
• For example, the rankings care about the school’s rejection rate for applicants, because a higher rejection rate is presumably an indicator of elite status. So many law schools have started spending a lot of resources on encouraging unlikely applicants to apply, simply so they’ll have more people to reject.
• Much of our sense of meaning and worth is peculiar, personal, and local. And metrics will always be deeply insensitive to such intimate, small-scale senses of meaning. Metrics are tuned to the needs of massive institutions. They are blunt and insensitive tools for sensing the meaningfulness of life.
• Health and well-being measures typically target things like weight, BMI, and lifespan. They generally don’t target things like joy, being surrounded by richly beautiful things, or having a vivid social life.
• Metrics make a lasting claim about what is actually important. This is when we have to start worrying about the possibility of error—of a mismatch between the clarity of the score and the density of the real world. And metrics make a second offer. They don’t just promise to simplify our internal decisions. They also promise to simplify the social world—to ease the burden of making ourselves understood. Metrics offer a universal and easily communicable value system. They promise social value clarity.
• the more public the metric I attune myself to, the more universally comprehensible my actions will be. This might explain why some people will endlessly seek more money, even when they already have far more than they could ever use. This is not just normal selfishness. Some people will wreak havoc on the world while driving themselves into misery—into stressed-out, overworked, friendless exhaustion—all in their pursuit of higher numbers in their bank account. Because money is the ultimate shared scoring system, the system that is maximally legible to the largest chunk of the world. They have been dominated by the clarity of the score.
• This is why it is so hard for us, as individual people, to simply take reflective control. Because metrics are part of a larger world order—a rigid, inflexible structure that resists our attempts at reflective control. Metrics are the vanguard of a whole invading force, all working to subtly erode our freedom to decide, and standardize how we think and what we care about.
• Metrics de-skill us for the process of setting our own sense of meaning.
• metrics offer us the pleasures of seductive clarity. They make things look so simple that we won’t think there is anything else to investigate.
• What is the meaning of your life? OK, you have a nice job, but what’s that for? It gives you money. Well, what’s that money for? To buy nice cars and have nice watches. But what’s that for? To impress people, to get a better job and even more money. But what is all that for? Et cetera, et cetera, on and on. What ultimately justifies all the hard work we put into making and getting all that stuff?
• Play only seems like a waste of time if you’re stuck in the outcomes mindset, in which doing something is worthwhile only if it yields some valuable product. For Suits, the real waste would be spending your whole life accumulating potentially useful resources and never actually using them to do anything meaningful. You work so that you have the time to play.
• Meaning lies in doing: in thinking interesting thoughts, having interesting conversations, playing fascinating games. Meaning lies in the process of making things, in moving your body in thrilling and elegant ways, in loving people.
• Some of our activities end up making stuff: shelter, transportation, nutrition, and medicine, all of which we need to survive. But the true value of those things is in the wonderful activities they help us get to, the lovely processes they support.

finding beauty in process over outcomes

• In his cookbook on braising, Michael Ruhlman explains why you’re supposed to dust the meat in flour and brown it in butter before you do the long, low-and-slow braise. It deepens and enriches the flavor, for sure. But the most important reason you do it, he says, is because it smells amazing for the cook. [...] Yet cookbook reviews almost never talk about the joys of cooking—which is funny because I often spend way more time on the cooking part than the eating part. The official culture ignores the beauty of the process, trains us not to pay attention to how it feels to act, to believe that joyous action doesn’t matter.
• We’ve taken a deeply aesthetic, deeply satisfying set of sensory interactions with food—smelling it, tasting it, hearing it sizzle, being sensually immersed in the smells and sounds of food, and then making decisions triggered to those smells and sounds—and replaced it with staring at a stopwatch and a thermometer, mechanically executing a precise procedure. There are no choices, no judgments, no improvisation, and no sensory intuition. There is only following the rules.
• My spouse started gardening because she thought she could get us some delicious vegetables, but she slowly discovered that gardening could give so much more. It immersed her in the beauty of growth, the joy of seeing plants thrive. It gave her the profound satisfaction of seeing the throbbing, interacting, tangled ecosystem hiding in our own backyard.
• I had come to assume that cooking—real cooking—had to proceed via an algorithm [a rule that has been written to be used without significant skill, judgment, or discretion]. I had refused to accept that real cooking might involve a messy and organic decision space, full of a thousand decision points and judgment calls.
  • The old-school recipe is made up of principles, and the new-school recipe is made up of algorithms.
• When I’m climbing at my limit, I’m sloppy, shaking, imperfect. But it feels absolutely amazing. This is a different kind of harmony; let’s call it the harmony of capacity. This happens when an obstacle takes everything you have. It is a harmony between your maximum capacity and the precise demands of the world. It’s not just that your action fits the world; it’s that you—your whole self—are just barely enough for the job.
• Let’s say we set the meaning of health in terms of some measurable qualities: longer lifespan and lower incidence of measurable disease and injury. Even this is a value decision; it sets certain interests above others. It sets an interest in increasing the number of years and ignores the interest in the quality of those years.
• we’ve mostly forgotten that processes can be valuable in and of themselves. We have gotten used to attributing value only to the stuff we make, the countable outcomes we achieve—and not the actions we take to create them. We have come to value perfect finished art and mostly given up the opportunity to be soaked in the creative process ourselves.
• There is a difference between recognition and perception. When we recognize something, we put it in a category, and we stop there. If all I need is a pencil, once I see that this thing is a pencil, I stop looking at it and start using it. But perception keeps going; it keeps searching, seeing, finding. It’s inefficient, but delightful.
• Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home. They take you through a lot of basic recipes: how to make a good omelet or sauté some fish. And for every dish, they give you two completely different recipes: Julia Child’s and Jacques Pepin’s. And next to the recipes are sidebars in which they bicker with each other. It is the record of an argument—a rowdy conversation between friends. The paired recipes appear not as the Right and Official way to do things, but as points on a wide spectrum. The book uses mechanical recipes to create space for your culinary agency.

"trying on" different values

• You have to actually try living your life by devoting yourself to money, or learning, or travel. And then you get feedback; you find out whether you flourish or wilt. Sometimes you try on a new value and you become happy, engaged, and full of zest. This value fits you. And sometimes you try on a value and you end up bored, miserable, and exhausted. That value doesn’t fit. This is a signal that you should adjust your values—which you can do by changing hobbies, changing jobs, or tweaking your goals.
• We become something like a game designer for our own lives, trying games and modding them to fit our purposes. We can use the mechanical scoring system as a tool to approach something subtler, more sensitive, more intimate.
• We can get involved in a hobby or a job, following someone else’s lead for a while and learning to see its subtle value. And then we can start screwing with it, changing the way we do it—which methods we use, what our goals are—to tailor it to us.
• what’s really valuable is often subtle and hard to express—especially when we’re on the track of something new. If we are sincere and respectful of the value density of the world, we will rarely be able to generate quick, coherent, accessible explanations. The engineered coherence of metrics will win in a clarity fight every time.
• an oversimplified value system can get you to avoid looking for subtle values—by labeling those soul-opening activities as inefficient wastes of time.
• You might find richer, fuller views of a meaningful life in art, literature, philosophy, or friendships. Exploring a hobby like knitting could show you how much joy there could be in intricate, meditative movement for its own sake. But here’s the problem: If you’ve already decided that all that’s important in life is money, you’ll be very unlikely to spend any time on such useless distractions, because they won’t look like good paths to money.
• There will be systematically greater social power available to those who are willing to forget about everything that isn’t measured in metrics and will instead optimize themselves entirely to fit what the metrics ask for. They won’t be wasting energy on distractions like beauty or community, the joys of pure, playful process—or anything else.

technology carrying intrinsic values

• A technology isn’t merely a neutral tool; each intrinsically embodies and supports certain values over others. And different technologies support different values. We do not simply use our tools. Our tools also shape and transform us.
• a printing press created a clear distinction between the “official” word of the press and everybody else’s words—because of the basic look and feel of printed information.
  • Annotations by ordinary people look like second-class bits of information.
• But as the social media scholar Zeynep Tufekci points out, the appearance of decentralization is partly an illusion. Social media lets almost anybody produce content, but it also passes all those content producers through a massively centralized focal point: the search algorithm. [...] Now anybody can speak, but we collectively hear only a handful of them.
• Almost every map, on the other hand, contains elevation details. It turns out this is because most of our modern maps are built on top of an original set of maps that were created by army engineers to show the elevation and road details in their own countries, giving them a tactical advantage against invaders. They were made as aids for precise artillery targeting.
• If the city streets are laid out in an irregular labyrinth, then the local rebels have a major advantage. If, on the other hand, the streets are arranged in a regular pattern—like a simple grid—then the locals lose their advantage. There is nothing distinctively local for them to have specialized knowledge of.
• The rest of the world—all the stuff that’s too mushy and variable and weird to be well tracked by state tools—is illegible to the state. States have a hard time tracking and managing the irregular parts of the world.
• forestry management often involves choices that reduce complexity and biodiversity—like replanting forests with a smaller number of species, or planting trees in regular rows—which make it easier for state-level processes to manage and optimize.
• Such metrics often contain value judgments hidden at the core. We take a subjective choice and then hide it under tons of precise math.
  • We take a complex matter, like well-being, education, or success. Somebody—often, a very distant somebody—makes a value-laden decision about what that means, about what counts as well-being or success. Then we process it. What comes out the other end looks objective and free of any taint of human values. It seems to speak with the voice of God—or at least the voice of science.
• Professional wine tasters taste wine without food, even though many people in the world derive value from wine BECAUSE of how it pairs with food. This pressures wine makers to make "fruit bombs" that don't necessarily pair well with food--"blotting out dynamic wines and filling the world with stable and unreactive ones"

choosing what to "outsource"

• We have to outsource because we just don’t have enough time to think about everything. But we also don’t want to outsource willy-nilly. We don’t want to outsource away our whole souls. We want to outsource less important decisions to make more room for the really important decisions.
  • Similar argument to oliver burkeman in four thousand weeks?
• We do well when we manage our outsourcing to suit our purposes. We outsource badly when we choose resources that run counter to our purposes. And we outsource disastrously when we let some external entity rewrite our core values to suit their distant purposes.
• We deceive ourselves into thinking that we have no choice in the matter, that we are acting in the only way possible. We are pretending to be mechanical objects.
• on the "value" of national parks: "Recreation is a key value of the national parks, but there is no objective basis for this value—it is a human decision about the value of experiencing natural beauty. But the end result is a cost-benefit analysis that looks objective, because we’ve piled a lot of accounting on top of that recreational value."

how science is harmed through metrics

• It happens when scientists stop caring about finding truth and start caring about getting the biggest grants.
• the gap between good science and publication success—captures a painful open secret of modern scientific research. Scientists who pick the least rigorous methodology will tend to publish more papers. Those scientists who go above and beyond—who use a more painstaking, rigorous methodology—get more accurate results, but that level of rigor forces them to work more slowly, and publish fewer papers.

the beautiful "inefficiency" of art

• What is art but doing things the hard way? Instead of taking the most efficient path, we take on artificial constraints. We insist on doing things for ourselves, for the sake of having a particular process of struggling. We avoid shortcuts so we can be plunged into the process of looking, interpreting, and feeling for ourselves.
• Art is a game. And like a lot of games, it’s been designed to let us exercise those parts of us that have begun to wither in the modern world. It’s a reminder of what life is like when it is deeply disorganized and we’re free to revel in that disorder.
• If you thought that the point of art was to generate, as efficiently as possible, enormous piles of pleasant-looking pictures about any topic you chose, then algorithmic art might sound like a good deal. If the point of art is to maximize productivity—to make lots of art quickly and cheaply—then algorithmic art is a good shortcut.
• By using algorithmic art-generation tools, we are cheating ourselves out of one of the most precious activities we have left.
• Art is a site of human activity and agency. It is a place where we are set free to indulge in the sensuous, powerful act of creation. If the value is in the doing, then using algorithmic tools to make all the art for you misses the whole point. It makes as much sense as using a robot to run a marathon for you, or do your yo-yo tricks for you—or play charades with your friends for you.