C. Thi Nguyen

Even such instrumental things as greater mental health or decreased stress, all of these are harder to count at scale.

And so my claim isn't that

It's not important to—my claim isn't that lifespan and heart attack rates are unimportant.

It's that they tend to auto-win fights against this other stuff, and that this other stuff tends to be weighted not at all in large-scale social conversations and in some of our inner dialogue precisely because it's harder to measure.

Beautiful.

And I just, I want to add to it.

And there are two directions I want to add to it in.

So let me try to remember them both.

The first is to talk about your baseball example and fun.

And the second is the larger question of what is easy to measure and what drops out.

Because I think it's really important to see what that character is.

So let me talk about baseball first.

One of the core parts of – one of the big things that started my whole weird venture down understanding games philosophically was a moment from my mentor, the philosopher Barbara Herman, Kantian ethicist, in the middle of a grad seminar where she just casually said, like –

you know, I think you're just confusing a goal and a purpose.

And I was like, there's no difference between a goal and a purpose.

And she said, of course there is.

When you have friends over for cards, the goal is to win, but the purpose is to have fun.

And I think that structure is so common in games where the goal that you aim at in the game is separate from the reason you play the game.

I have a name for this kind of structure.

I call it striving play.