Kelly Clancy

And

There are people who maybe didn't play enough as kids.

I know someone who when she's hiring people, she makes them play Jenga with her team beforehand so that she can kind of get a sense of like, are they a good sport?

Do they play along?

Do they get super hyper competitive?

So it's a really cool way of seeing into another person.

I had this really lovely experience when actually as I was writing the book, I met my now husband.

and we played puzzle games together.

And it was this really beautiful experience of getting to know someone else's mind through games and seeing how we solved problems together, and he solved things I couldn't solve, and I solved things he couldn't solve.

So it's a really beautiful insight into other people.

And this is something that thinkers have known for a long time, like, you know, Plato,

thought of games as being important for socializing people.

And this famous, famous psychologist, Jean Piaget, used to study how children play games and the way that they work together to maybe improve the rules or enforce the rules, he thought of as also a very important foundation for democratic principles.

How do we all work together to find rules that work for everybody?

Absolutely.

And that's something that's really kind of beautiful about games, too, is that you get to kind of try on different personas and different personalities and, you know, make choices that you might not make in life.

I started playing Dungeons and Dragons with some friends about a year ago, and it was all of our first time playing it except for one of us.

And we all picked characters that we realized a couple sessions in were just kind of ourselves.

And so we had to make a lot of changes because it wasn't as fun to just be yourself in whatever adventure you're in.

It's much more fun to pretend to be somebody else.