C. Thi Nguyen

Right.

So I think this is really important because...

I don't think everything is a game.

When I started thinking about this stuff, I was kind of lost about what a game really was.

It seemed like really an important concept, but I couldn't get my hands around it until I found this incredible book by Bernard Suits called The Grasshopper.

He's a philosopher.

He wrote in the 70s.

This book is kind of a cult classic.

And in it, he gives a definition of games that I think is incredibly useful because it like points to one specific point of life, but not everything.

So there's a short version and a long version.

I'll give you the short version first, but I suspect you're going to want the details of the long version.

So the short version is that playing a game is voluntarily taking on unnecessary obstacles to create the possibility of the activity of struggling to overcome them, right?

So what a game is, is something where, one way he puts it is,

In a game, there's always like an easy way to get to the goal.

And then we put a constraint on ourselves.

We take, he says, like the long way on purpose, right?

You run a marathon.

There are easier ways to get there.

You could not only take a shortcut, but you could

call a lift, right?