It’s two in the morning. I am bleary-eyed, a little hungry, but alert, all senses engaged towards a singular objective. The cause is simple enough: eight hours ago, I booted up a new video game intending to test it out after dinner, and was hooked instantly by some alchemical admixture of challenge and discovery. I know that in six hours, I’ll regret my decision to stay up… but for now, let’s see if I can complete one more level.
Part of me wishes this story were fictionalized, or that I didn’t have multiple such examples ready at hand. And yet, another part of me knows I am irreducibly happy when my entire mind is engaged in a good game. Why are games so compelling? And, more to the point: why can’t I stop playing?
The Game
It’s somewhat odd that an activity like a game should be so compelling in the first place. From Monopoly to golf to Tetris, the commonest features of games are that they are difficult to complete, with rules which restrict participant agency and goals that are arbitrary if not expressly pointless. Games share these features with universally despised activities like tax filing, airport security, or flossing. Often the only distinction between game and tedium is games are elective.
If an activity becomes a game due in part to our choice to play, then there must be some reward in it for the players, or else they’d spend their free time otherwise. The most engaging games create benefit by simultaneously appealing to many facets of a human’s well-being, including:
- Satisfying work (a.k.a. “flow”)
- The experience of aligning ideal with action
- Social connection and bonds
- Positive emotions like joy, healthy pride, excitement, contentment
- A sense of purpose and meaning
These aspects of holistic happiness aren’t exclusive to games. They line up pretty well with PERMA theory of well-being research, a popular model for the things that contribute to holistic human flourishing. But perhaps because these facets describe flourishing and happiness so well, they also perfectly describe my mental and emotional state while playing a well-made game. I feel connection to fellow players (at least during tabletop games), I feel joy and excitement, I experience my Self as integrated, but most of all — I feel a sense of deeply challenging and enjoyable work.
The positive psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi coined the term “flow” in 1975 to describe this kind of activity. In a Flow state, work is challenging but always tractable (which firmly separates Flow from both flossing and tax returns). Completing the task is not the goal; learning and challenge are both end and means. Even the successful resolution of the task is somewhat undesirable because it heralds the end of Flow. (If I had to describe my relationship to games in one sentence, it would be that one.) When in Flow, a person feels completely unselfconscious, energized, and even unaware of the passing of time, too “in the zone” to notice anything but the enjoyment of the activity. Games generate a near-constant Flow by scaling up their difficulty over their duration (faster Pac-Man ghosts, more emergent strategic depth) such that the player is always challenged but never hopeless.
A Flow state of energized enjoyment is my primary emotion while playing games, but too often I am unable to hold myself from excess in my favorite games, so after a gaming session I come back to my senses tainted with a sense of regret. Yes, often I regret the physical ramifications of staying up late, but more deeply do I lament the (all-too-numerous) times my Flow within a game has caused me to miss a call from a family member, to neglect chores that benefit my loved ones, or to skip out on other activities that are meaningful to me, from cooking to reading and writing. I believe that the latter things are more important to me than games, but my actions as I click “Next Level” tell a different story.
The Story
Within the Flow of a game, I feel paralyzed, incapable of acting on my deepest-held beliefs, and indeed, sometimes Flow even tempts me into apostasy, preventing me from “wanting what I want to want” (to borrow the words of Harry Frankfurt as I first saw them in Jenny Odell’s writing). It is this tension and temptation that begins to unravel the Game as a concept.
I am discontent because I sense a dis-integration with my Self Who Acts from my Self Who Believes. Like most people, I believe myself to be a dependable friend and husband, a skilled professional working in a job that matters, and a human who is existentially present in an embodied physical reality stranger and more wondrous than any possible fiction. This is the narrative I tell myself to make meaning of my life and to justify my actions. As Victor Frankl wrote, “one can endure any how as long as they have a why,” and human whys are often told as story. Ken Liu goes further, saying that humans make sense of the world by placing themselves as the main character of an epic fantasy that is their life.
During the moments when Flow paralyzes me, I am a character who has gone off-script: Frodo can’t cast the Ring into Mount Doom because he’s distracted by Tetris. Romeo misses his balcony date with Juliet to finish his World of Warcraft raid. Superman, busy at a Halo 2 LAN party, lets Metropolis fall to Lex Luthor. These violations implode the suspended disbelief of the narrative. The same thing happens even when the narrative is autobiographical, when my demonstrated passion for a world of 0s and 1s is in direct defiance to my dearest-held ideals. Perhaps the character I resemble most is not Frodo, Romeo, or Superman, but Don Quixote.
The Epiphany
My happiness in games reveals myself as equal parts author and consumer of a well-intentioned, but inherently self-deceptive, life narrative. But the gestalt shift itself is the first paragraph of a new chapter.
It’s true, during the pandemic I’ve probably stayed up 50-100 nights to play video games. But I’ve spent decades reading books late into the night, enjoying Flow without an existential crisis. I may sometimes skip some trash duty to play XCOM, but I was playing the piano to avoid dishwashing before I even learned how to take a shower. For crying out loud, I’m typing this on the razor-thin edge of a tired brain just for the sheer joy of writing without an internal editor!
I love games, sometimes to excess. But I love reading, writing, philosophy, cooking, and music just as much! The sacrifices I have made for games, I have made tenfold for these activities which make my life community-filled and meaningful. When I make physical, material, or monetary sacrifice at the altars of “reading 52 books per year for 4 years straight” or “talking philosophy with friends late into the night” or “hauling a piano, drumsticks, and an accordion halfway across the country”, I give myself a pat on the back for living in accordance with my ideals, and I brag about it to my friends. But when I make modest sacrifice at the altar of an expertly crafted game, I’m riddled with regret and doubt.
One activity collapses my self-identity, while the others are its scaffolding.
The Incentives
When I contrast the allure of games to other meaning-making activities and other kinds of flow, it’s clear that there are some design-level differences between my favorite games, Magic: Arena and XCOM 2, versus my whittling knives and writing pens. Even though blasting aliens and carving chess pieces are equally adaptive in difficulty, and therefore equally Flow-generating in theory, after thirty minutes of whittling, my knife is too dull and my hands are too weak to continue safely. Most digital games don’t have this diminishing return built into their design. (Yes, the ones I like are so difficult that it’s only possible to play well for short sessions, but that’s a very light nudge not shared by all designs.)
Analog games, by contrast, have several built-in diminishing returns — getting 4-8 people in the same room, shuffling a bunch of cardboard, arbitrating rules, and otherwise interacting with other human beings is emotionally and physically taxing. It may be all too easy to play digital Magic, but paper Magic is tough to play to excess, simply because the analog version takes so long you’d have to schedule the binge into your calendar! All this tedium also means that Flow is less reliable for analog games, meaning they’re not as easy to lose oneself in. Of course, a major appeal to analog games lacked by their digital counterparts is social interaction, a key psychological path to intrinsic happiness. Analog games make players happy in more ways than just creating Flow, and are less likely to invite excess.
In the end, there are three design-level trends making it difficult to play digital games in moderation:
- Digital games are not designed to be sufficiently self-limiting; therefore, Flow doesn’t end naturally.
- Digital games inherently contain less in-person social connection, reducing their intrinsic contribution to flourishing.
- Digital games often engage in attention economy optimization, prioritizing monetization over consumer well-being.
And, one more distinction which is more a function of my history and culture, and the essence of my conflict:
- Digital spaces and activities are seen as less meaningful than analog ones.
The Meaning
My childhood influences in the early aughts, from my parents to Mr. Rogers to my Frisbee-and-Spades-obsessed peer group, instilled in me the value that analog spaces, activities, and goals were more meaningful than any alternative.
For example, a common perception was that the fictional premises of digital games, like “save the world from an alien invasion” or “outwit the enemy sorcerer,” were vapid escapism. Ironically, the nominal goal of endorsed activities like reading or sports were often no less absurd — “say goodnight to the Moon, stars, kittens, and mittens” or “throw a modified pie-pan around without letting it touch the ground.” But as my parents read Goodnight Moon and Narnia with me, I was learning a primal lesson that books were how I could spend time with my favorite people, and those people believed that reading revealed new wonders about humanity and being. As my friends ran ourselves ragged chasing a Frisbee, we learned that playing sports together was when we talked about our romantic woes and faith and the Good Life.
I’m not sure it’s possible to unlearn a preference for analog activity that goes deeper than speech and walking. I don’t even think I should try to put digital games on equal footing with analog activity, as that neglects their sometimes-unhealthy design elements and unique capacity for excess. But I can reframe digital spaces to be more equitable to their real existential value.
Just as reading about fictional worlds has made me a more empathetic human, the huge amount of Flow I’ve spent mastering various game systems has taught me practical lessons about behavioral psychology and system design. To wit: strong games encode their own physics of cause-and-effect so strongly that it yields to scientific inquiry, acting as an intellectual testing ground for my professional work. And: tailoring system incentives can generate outsize effects, and thoughtful design of such systems can combat systemic racism or slow climate change. Even my understanding of my own psyche grows as I engage with well-designed games (for example, inspiring this essay).
Meaning is what I make of it. I am writing my own sense of meaning by engaging in the activities which bring me holistic happiness, even as I am made happy in part due to the communal and personal meaning created by the activities themselves. Action reifies narrative; narrative informs action. I am Ouroboros, devouring its own tail.
The Game, Again
It’s a little bit frightening to realize there’s nothing solid under my life narrative except a cocktail of oxytocin, dopamine, epinephrine, endorphins, and other chemicals generated by those PERMA-theory activities of holistic human flourishing. Pursuit of those chemicals leads me to cooking, reading, music, games, and more, which create a sense of meaning as a byproduct of the chemicals, which justifies the pursuit.
At the same time, this is no less absurd a goal than blasting digital aliens, filing taxes that our government won’t do for us, or any other goal that motivates human action. It’s a game of its own in some ways. There are rules, too — if flourishing creates community creates flourishing, then we can’t abandon attention to ethical or spiritual dimensions of life. Not to mention that heedless pursuit of pleasure misidentified as money/sex/fame/power is the cause of endless grief.
But this game of action and ideal is immensely more powerful than any other: it is this pursuit of meaning that kept Frankl alive through the horrors of the Shoah; it is this pursuit that allows a Peruano river-float guide to lead a richer life than Jeff Bezos; it is this pursuit that lets a marriage blossom in mundane increments of tooth-brushing and grocery-shopping; it is this pursuit that allows society to prioritize people over profit and come out ahead.
Create challenging and satisfying work, find community, enact hope, and imbue daily life with meaning, and flourishing tends to follow. The nice thing about tautologies, though, is that we can start in the other direction, too — reframe or re-negotiate one’s pursuit of happiness so that it contributes to a meaningful story, and one’s situation becomes more hopeful, communal, and satisfying. That’s a game I can play for many, many levels to come… even if I have to power off the computer to do it.