Kelly Clancy

So one idea of what play is about is more that it's

really teaching us how to play along together.

And even Plato kind of intuited this.

He thought games were this really important part of civic education because people like children playing games learn to follow rules.

And then as adults, they learn to follow laws.

Yeah, I think the best I can say is that it's probably personal preference.

There's an AI researcher, Julian Togelius, who says games are like a cast of the mind.

They're kind of like a glove fitting a hand.

So they're all kind of custom made to work in different ways with things our brains want to do.

Because ultimately...

our brains invented games and they're something that the brain wants to do, right?

Like they invented something fun to do for itself.

So it's kind of like, they're just like pure joy.

And so each game kind of has a different aspect of what kind of mental function it's fitting.

So you can think of like,

Pokemon fits our desire to kind of collect things like some people collect little baubles and some people want to collect Pokemon.

Tetris maybe fits our desire for order and cleanliness.

You're kind of like organizing the lines and cleaning things up.

And games are such a kind of broad thing.

You can talk about something completely strategic like chess or something completely chance-ruled like dice.