C. Thi Nguyen

Yeah, because you get absorbed in this technical specificity.

But I mean, I think the way, the thing that really highlighted this for me is this moment from my favorite game designer, Rainer Knittia, who's this board game genius in Germany.

And he said that the most important thing

tool in his game design toolbox is the scoring system because it sets the player's motivations in the game.

It just tells you what to want and you suddenly want it.

And in games, for me, what this turns out to be is that

The game designer is an artist and the game designer is an artist of alternate selves for you, right?

The game designer is changing your abilities and changing your goals in unison and designing obstacles all together.

And when it works well, it gives you magic, beautiful, fascinating action.

But it's also, I mean, in some sense, my worry is this is also continuous with what metrics do to us.

Because what we've learned is that we enter a setting and someone's like, here's the ranking system.

And you're like, okay, I didn't care about that before, but now I care about it.

And I think...

I mean, I kind of think that games are using this fluidity for the good most of the time, not always, but most of the time, right?

That they are using our capacity to just see a new system of desires written down in an explicit rule set and just plunge into them.

And then other systems are using that in an authoritarian way to pass and push values down onto us.

There's a sense in which there's a really easy thing to say here, which is games are great when you choose them, and games are terrible when they're forced on you or snuck into you.

But I'm not quite sure that's right.

And the reason I'm not quite sure it's right is because a lot of dangerous gamifications to me

look like cases that are voluntary, where someone picks up something fully, people who get on social media often are fully aware that it's a game-like system that will change their motivations, and they do it anyway.