Playing Quality Games

A Life of Games (and the Game of Life)

The game of self is the game of learning, managing and evolving the particulars of our person in order to improve our ability to accumulate moment wealth (i.e. a lifetime of positive experience). It is a meta game running constantly in the background of our daily lives. However, while the course of self-development may call on us occasionally to directly play the most fundamental of games, the majority of time is spent playing a nearly infinite number of other, secondary ones in order to address the burden of attention.

These secondary games can be thought of as any framework in which attention is rested in problem solving in order to achieve various ends. The rich and varied games of the modern world make up the attention infrastructure built to replace the game of survival we emerged from long ago.

It is essential to understand that, intentionally or otherwise, we will spend almost our entire lives playing games of some sort, then the nature of our mind is not suited for a passive existence. We are, at our core, problem-solvers, and that means we must spend our time either solving problems or distracting ourselves from the need to do so in order to achieve positive experience. ¹ It is possible to leverage other types of activities to engage our attention positively, but these engagements are generally suboptimal; they can serve as the predominant infrastructure for our day to day lives only inferiorly and likely harmfully (imagine spending a lifetime mainly watching television series, eating recreationally, partying excessively or in the throes of a drug addiction). Further, many of the most common forms of passive engagements – like reading, attending sporting events or watching movies – are often actually just a way of playing games vicariously. We celebrate with our favorite athlete or protagonist as the game is conquered as if the trials and tribulations had been our own. One may reflect that feelings experienced in such engagements are nearly identical to those experienced in the ups and downs of the games of our own lives.

Evidence of this can be found readily in the way we spend our free time. One might develop a penchant for learning new languages, for example, while another falls in love with body building. Another may take up sewing, another drawing, another gambling, another cooking, another fishing, yet another fantasy football. These engagements are distinct in character but uniform in nature – they all represent ways to allocate time to problem-solving to achieve an end, and thus to positively occupying our attention.

Of course, games are not limited to recreation. The major game most play is the game of work, which often occupies the majority of our time. ² We tend not to think of our work this way, but we should… work is best approached like a video game. Failures should be treated as enemies to defeat, hurdles to growth like levels to overcome and lack of great design like reasons to leave it sitting on the shelf. This re-framing is a very useful way to transform work into play, and thus to improve our skill in it. Work is, in essence, a macro game constructed of countless micro games in which we can rest attention in the long term.

So, professionally and privately, day to day, year to year and decade to decade, we play games constantly — and until the very end. Therefore, the quality of games in our lives will be a decisive factor in the extent to which we enjoy them. It follows that, in order to lead the best life possible, we must not only actively choose the games we play, but also do so wisely.

The Five Criteria of Quality

Five criteria which can be used to measure the quality of any game are as follows:

To begin, the foremost measure of any game is how well it captures attention. Games that involve immersion – an experience often described as “losing yourself” or entering a state of “flow”—are ideal because they represent the highest ceiling for positive experience. An attention that is perfectly engaged with a positive-experience-yielding-game enjoys perfect bliss, then all things external (negative or otherwise) cease to exist for the duration of the engagement. Games whose nature require more focus will thus naturally be of higher quality.

The second criterion of a quality game is the potential for continual progress. Such a game should have clear feedback of a player’s development and a great number of levels to progress through, then otherwise it is not worth the cost of getting started. Especially for macro games, one should be wary of committing too much time and energy to any game that is either too quickly “winnable” or too simplistic. We can imagine that even Sisyphus would have had the means to enjoy his fate should the hill have been larger, the terrain inconstant and the boulder of gradually increasing weight.

Third, a high-quality game has the potential for positive first, second and third order rewards. This means that along with providing the first order reward of positively engaging attention in the moment, a quality game also enhances your ability to do so in the near and distant future. The game of work is the essential example of this. If you enjoy what you do professionally, you enjoy your day to day (first order reward) while earning the means (money) to enhance your free time (second order reward) and accumulating resources to retain the ability to do so decades down the road (third order reward). In other words, playing a game with positive first, second and third order rewards optimizes attention engagement in the aggregate.

Criteria three and one are most easily achieved when criterion four is met. When we find a quality game that is compatible with the characteristics of our person, we can enter the game at a higher level (and subsequently realize greater amounts of benefit). ³ One should be very careful to not commit the uniqueness fallacy, however, and assume that they are searching for a game that fits them like playing the piano fit Mozart. As a rule, we are all similar enough that most of the games that suit our nature fit humans in general (and are thus common ones). Since our individual variation exists mostly in nuance, we should seek to find compatibility in the nuances of games instead of a perfect fit of the game itself.

Finally, the fifth criterion of a quality game is the lack of significant existential risk. This risk can be thought of as “game-over” risk, or the chance that a failure in the game results in the end of the game permanently. Game-over risk can be either literal existential risk (a game that risks death) or just essential existential risk (a game that risks serious and permanent injury).

Choosing Wisely

While the very best games convincingly meet all five criteria, a game doesn’t necessarily have to in order to be worth playing. The circumstances of the gamer will dictate the nature of the compromise, though not all criteria should be weighted (or discarded) equally.

Criteria three and four, for example, are often difficult to meet with the games available to us at any given point of time. Especially at the onset, many of us are unsure of where our strengths and weaknesses lie (something of a Catch 22, then this knowledge is best revealed during gameplay), which creates ambiguity as to which games we are best suited to playing. Further, we may not have immediate access to, clarity about, or requisite competence for longer-term games that fulfill the conditions of criterion three. In these cases, one’s best course of action is to turn to short and medium-term games that still meet the other three criteria.

The reason for this is two-fold. For one, the process of learning, evolving and gaining wisdom that comes naturally from playing quality games usually creates opportunity to play new ones of higher quality. For another, even if we are, for some reason, not able to progress to better engagements, a life of good (if not great) games is still superior to one of passive distraction.  We should thus be careful not to let an absence of games that meet criteria three and four result in us playing very few good games at all.

On the other hand, games that fail to meet criterion one and two should generally be avoided. There is, as a rule, a gross abundance of games that both intensely engage attention and are sufficiently complex so as to offer durable potential for progression, and so settling for one that falls short of these two criteria is only justifiable in atypically circumscribed circumstances. Still, edge cases in which such games are still worth playing may occasionally be identified.

Really the only grave mistake we can make is choosing engagements that meet criteria one through four but fail to meet criterion five. This is unfortunate, then this sort of game is a very tempting one — examples of those that have fallen into this trap can be found all the way up the ranks of prominence in our societies. We may call these games of abridged high quality.

Take professional fighting as an example. The discipline, passion and skill that professional fighters must embody to advance to a profitable level of their sport surely deserves respect. They have likely been playing this game their whole lives, and, to get to where they are, they are also almost certainly masterful players of the game of self (or at least many aspects of it).

Further, by the measure of most of our criteria, their game of work is a very good one. Few activities capture and hold attention so well as martial arts, which requires nearly perfect focus to do well. When it comes to potential for continuous progression, the physical body will give out long before its occupant achieves perfection in this field, and even for the most durable champion there will always be another challenger, which means he will always have another level to play. Third, while the point may be validly made that the second and third order rewards of professional fighting are mostly enjoyed by those at the top, one cannot deny that the summit is a lucrative one. Fourth, the ranks of professional fighting are filled with people whose characteristics are perfectly suited for their profession. Professional fighters are often athletes of the highest caliber, and so it may seem almost pre-determined that they should play the fighting game.   

However, having now reached the fifth criterion, we have also reached the problem. Professional fighting is an extremely dangerous activity that threatens both literal and essential — i.e “game over” — existential risk. Though cases of actual death are rare, the chances that one will suffer serious injury in the short term and brain damage in the long term are too significant—they should eliminate this game from contention.

Here it must be stressed again that our goal is to accumulate moment wealth in the aggregate. Even a game of extremely high quality in the short term should be avoided if it inhibits continued wealth accumulation in the future. Think of it as owning a stock that delivers fantastic returns for ten years and then pitiful ones for thirty. It is dubious at best that any level of return in the first period can compensate for those in proceeding three.

There are countless other examples of people falling in love with this kind of game. Along with professional fighting, bodybuilding (the extreme kind), Wingsuit flying and spelunking are engagements often seen as attractive due to being of abridged high quality. This is in contrast to plainer cases, or games that fail criterion five so obviously that the rest of us struggle to understand what could possibly bring people to play them (it may be reasonably doubted that few long to find themselves riding a bicycle along the edge of a skyscraper).

In any case, that people can be found doing pull-ups off of cranes or willingly exposing themselves repeatedly to brain damage demonstrates that humans are prone to both discovering and falling in love with abridged quality games of all different characters. ⁴ While the reasons for this are surely many, a major one is the uniqueness fallacy. We fall into a habit of believing that our minds and subjective experience are significantly unique, and so when we discover a game of high quality, we are loath to turn it away again. Under the assumption of significant uniqueness, this is actually logical. If we believe that we are unique, we probably also believe that the games we like to play are uniquely good for us. We may be aware that other quality engagements exist but are not open to the possibility that we would enjoy them as much as others do. Further, since the extent to which our attention is engaged positively determines the quality of our experience, and since quality games engage our attention most positively, stopping a game of abridged high quality can appear the equivalent of removing the highest tier of positive experience from life. Depending on the ways that one’s attention is otherwise captured (or, perhaps better put, one’s ability to capture their attention otherwise), this could even mean tipping the scales of average experience decidedly to the side of suffering. In that case, a game that fails criterion five would still be better than no game at all. When considering this, it should be less perplexing that one could fall into the habit of dangling from skyscrapers. Where instinctual aversion stops short of identifying these engagements, reason must be used to complete the analysis.

In the end, succesful curation of the games of life requires discipline and calculated sacrifice — especially when doing so requires resisting the temptation of a game of abridged high quality. In other words, filling our lives with secondary games of the highest order requires a high level of skill in the meta game of self. As will be seen, mastery of this game lends itself to mastery in any other game we seek to play.

Additional thoughts; Pain and Progress

A mistake that is easy to commit in playing games is to confuse the discomfort of starting a new, high-quality game with the quality of the game itself. After all, for complex engagements (like starting an entrepreneurial venture, for example) an initial period of pain or discomfort is likely unavoidable. In this period, attention will often be forcibly engaged in things that are distinctly negative, like failure, stress or a creeping sense of incompetence. This appears rather spuriously to violate some of the most basic criteria of quality. As a result, many of us stop short in our pursuit of these games, and in doing so deprive ourselves of the opportunity of playing games of the highest quality.

To combat this, one might reflect on the logic of a moment investor who pushes through the discomfort of exercising in order to unlock the promised secondary and tertiary rewards of the activity. In general, pain should not be avoided if its end is worthy, and this is of the utmost importance in playing secondary games.

Further, it should be encouraging to consider that those who have successfully fought through the initial pain and discomfort of regular exercise typically become passionate exercisers as a result of it. This is reflective of an important truth: if one can endure the pain present at the beginning of a high-quality game, she will eventually develop the capacity to enjoy it. 

Understanding this should help one guard against the tendency to seek paths of least resistance.