Our Human Games: games are everywhere, and they matter more than most people think

November 23, 2020

Games reflect an important part of human psychology. One broad way to think about "games" is that they are any situation that has: (a) a set of rules (explicit or implicit) that are made up by humans, (b) a scoring system (explicit or implicit) for determining how players are doing or for deciding who wins, (c) participants who are trying to increase their "score," and (d) a game context (outside of which the game rules stop applying). So, by this definition, games include ch...

Which of these supervillains could become a world dictator?

May 17, 2019

Photo originally by Enjon Chakraborty on Unsplash

Written: May 17, 2019 | Released: July 9, 2021 A little game for you related to power: suppose that each of the supervillains listed below actually existed and that each had "become dictator of the world" as their only high-level goal. That is, their primary and permanent desire is to become the highest leader of a single world government. Based on each of their listed superpowers, which do you think would actually succeed if they lived in the real world as it is today? To play the game, ...

What Makes a Game Fun?

July 1, 2017

I think it's interesting to consider what makes a game fun or boring. What properties make a strategy game better, all else being equal? Here's my list! (1) Variety: the game doesn't end up getting into the same or similar positions most of the time (so that it feels new each time you play) (2) Forgiveness: you don't automatically lose when you make a mistake (which can be frustrating for new players, and unsatisfying to the people that beat them) (3) Simplicity: fewer and easier...

Experts Are Expert But Not Necessarily In What You Think

August 3, 2011

What are top pure mathematicians experts in? How about top doctors? The easy answers would be "pure math" and "medicine", but these are a bit too vague to be satisfying (What is pure math? What is medicine?). They also don't capture all of what these experts excel at. To know what an expert of a particular type is truly expert at, we need to understand the system that creates that type of expert. What are these experts rewarded for doing or knowing? What actions make them more or less likely ...