The real reasons people love playing games

An employee of the Kosmos publishing house plays the board game Settlers of Catan. | Marijan Murat/picture alliance via Getty Images

Games are often treated as trivial. They can be seen as mere distractions. At worst, they’re time-wasting indulgences.

The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen thinks that framing is a big mistake.

In his book The Score, Nguyen argues that games are one of the clearest windows we have into how human agency actually works. Games show us what it means to choose goals, submit to constraints, and care deeply about things that don’t obviously matter. And once you see how games function, it becomes much harder not to notice how the rest of modern life has been turned into something like a game, too.

Scores, metrics, rankings, performance indicators: These tools promise clarity, fairness, and efficiency. But Nguyen worries they also reshape what we value, how we see ourselves, and what we take to be worth caring about. The danger, he argues, is not play itself, but value capture: the slow process by which simplified metrics replace richer, more human forms of judgment.

I invited Nguyen onto The Gray Area to talk about what games really are and why the gamification of work, education, and social life so often goes wrong. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, which drops every Monday, so listen to and follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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What is a game on the most fundamental level? 

The most beautiful and useful definition of a game comes from Bernard Suits, who was this Canadian philosopher and kind of a cult figure. He wrote this book, The Grasshopper, in the 1970s, and his definition is that playing a game is voluntarily undertaking unnecessary obstacles in order to create the experience of struggling to overcome them.

There’s a more complicated way to put it, but that’s the core. When you’re playing a game, what you’re trying to do is intrinsically tangled up with the constraints you’ve taken on. Think about a marathon: The goal is to get to a particular point. But, you’re not trying to do it the most efficient way you can, because if you were, you’d take a lift, or you’d take a shortcut, or you’d just get in a car. 

Finishing a marathon is not just getting to the finish line; it’s getting there in a particular way, under particular constraints, along a particular path, using your own legs. And Suits’ point, which I think is incredibly clarifying, is that whatever value a game has, it’s intrinsically tied up with that method and those obstacles. It’s not just about the output by itself.

And why do we love that so much? Why do we like having obstacles and then that feeling of navigating and conquering them? 

There’s a weird sense in which I’ve gone so far down this rabbit hole that even asking that question seems strange to me now, because it’s like, why wouldn’t you want to do that?

But the real answer is that the reason you play games is different in every game. There are party games I play just to chill out with friends, to take the edge off. There are games I play because the thought process is so interesting, [like] figuring out the perfect move in Go or chess, reacting at just the right moment.

And there are physical games I play for very specific reasons. Rock climbing is the big one for me. There’s this narrow reason I climb, which is that I like the delicate little movements of my body, the micro adjustments, the way you get past something by shifting your hip by a millimeter. But there’s also a bigger reason I climb, which is that if I don’t climb I can’t get my brain to shut up. So, only the brutality and intensity of climbing is enough to make my brain be quiet for a second.

And I think the thing that unites everything I just said is that the pleasure, the value, the glory is in the process of acting, not the outcome. That’s what Suits’ definition revealed to me. Either you think being inside the process, doing it, feeling yourself doing it, pushing against other people, cooperating with other people — either you think that can be beautiful in and of itself, or you think games are useless and insane, and half the time what people are doing makes no sense.

And I kind of think if you reject that, you’re in a different rabbit hole: the rabbit hole where only outcomes, only products, only things you can hold in your hand count as valuable.

I imagine a lot of people wouldn’t think of rock climbing as a game. They’d think of it as an activity, a hobby, whatever. What makes it a game?

This is where Suits’ definition is so clarifying. For Suits, a game is anything where the constraints, the obstacles, are central to what you’re doing. In some sense, they’re the reason you’re doing it.

So, if you buy a puzzle game, and you hack it and jump to the end without going through the struggle, you haven’t done the thing. You haven’t played the game. If you get to the finish line of a marathon by taking a taxi, you haven’t played the game. And if you climb a ladder to get to the top of a rock climb, you haven’t done the thing that’s valuable.

And philosophers will argue forever about whether this definition is exactly right, and there’s a sense in which I don’t really care. I think it’s close to our ordinary concept, but that’s not the point. What I care about is that Suits pointed to this essential part of human life and gave us a perfectly useful category for it, the category of things where the obstacles are central to why we find it valuable.

Do you think of fly-fishing, something you also write about in the book, in the same way?

I live in Utah now, and one thing I noticed here is that there are a lot of dudes who have this really intense emotional relationship with fly-fishing. They need it; they think about it all the time. And I developed this theory that what a lot of these guys actually need is meditation, but they’re too masculine to admit that to themselves. Fly-fishing gives them this cover where they can be like, “I’m catching fish,” and really, they’re meditating.

The kind of fly-fishing I love is dry fly-fishing, where you try to trick a trout into taking a floating imitation insect off the surface of the water. And the extreme, pure version of this is: You quietly walk down the river searching the surface first. You look for subtle details in the moving water that indicate there might be a holding spot — some softer, slower water. And if you’re lucky and attentive enough, you can see a trout rise and sip insects.

Then, you have to cast this tiny fake insect delicately so it lands in front of the trout, and if you get it all right, you get this incredible moment where the trout swims up, sees your fly, kind of inspects it, and decides to go for it.

And what I’ve realized about this is that catching fish is not actually the point. We let the fish go. Almost all fly-fishers are catch and release. The point is that in order to do this, you have to cultivate an incredibly intense form of attention.

For me, fly-fishing cleans out my soul more than almost anything, because there’s nothing else I do that’s like staring with absolute attention at the surface of moving water for a day. And I’m not a natural meditator; I’m a total hyper weirdo. If you took me to a river and said “Clear your mind,” I’d last 30 seconds. If you asked me to stare at a candle, I’d last maybe 40 seconds. But, if you give me a game, if you give me a target, if you tell me “Try to catch a fish,” suddenly, that goal guides my attention. It transforms my entire spirit, the way I attend to the world.

You make this distinction between achievement play and striving play. Can you walk me through it?

This is where I have to put on the technical hat for a second, but it matters.

Achievement play is when you’re playing for the point of winning. Winning is what makes it valuable. Striving play is when you’re playing for the sake of the struggle, for the sake of the process. You don’t really care whether you win, but you do have to try to win in order to experience the absorption.

Fly-fishing is striving play for me. What I want is absorption, being lost in the river, having my mind poured out of my ego and sent somewhere else. But I can’t do that without a goal. I have to try intensely to catch a fish.

Here’s my favorite argument that striving play exists: Consider what I call stupid games. A stupid game is a game where the fun part is failing, but it’s only fun if you’re actually trying to win.

Twister is the classic example. If you play Twister, and you fall over on purpose, it’s not funny, because that’s not failure. It’s only funny if it’s failure. So you get this weird mental state where you know before the game starts the point is to fall over and laugh, but you also know that to have that experience you have to try to win.

That’s striving play. You have to aim at winning, even though winning isn’t the point.

And there’s another distinction that gets confused with this all the time, which is intrinsic versus extrinsic value. That’s not the same as achievement versus striving. You can be an achievement player intrinsically, caring only about winning for its own sake, or extrinsically, caring about what winning gets you, money, status, whatever. You can be a striving player intrinsically, loving the struggle itself. , or extrinsically, doing it for some benefit you get from the process, like running marathons for health. You still get the benefit even if you come in last.

The paradoxical thing about games is that they’re governed by rules and structure and scoring systems, and yet, they create this space for freedom and play. Why is that? 

I originally got obsessed with this because I had a friend who loved to play but hated games. She was like, “Why would I ever restrain myself; why would I ever submit to rules?“ And I was trying to explain to her, and to myself, why people do it.

One early hint came from the climbing gym. A gym sets problems. You’re supposed to climb using only the holds of a certain color. That’s the route. Or, you can ignore that and just wander all over the wall and use whatever you want. And there’s a kind of person who thinks, don’t constrain me, I’ll do whatever I want. But what I want to say is: You’re missing a specific experience.

I was clumsy; I had no sense of where my hips were. I only found refinement in hip motion and subtle balance because I climbed specific hard problems. Some problems are set to force you into a new kind of movement, inching your hips over, staying a millimeter off the wall. The constraint is what pushes you to discover something new.

And I realized I’d learned this lesson before, through yoga. I had a great yoga teacher who said, “If you just let people move however they want, they tend to repeat habitual postures.” They do the same thing over and over. It’s the restriction and clarity of a pose description that forces you to find a new posture, a new way to move.

Soccer is another good example. You might never know what your feet can do until someone tells you you can’t use your hands. The restriction forces you to cultivate a freedom you wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.

So, games are like yoga; the rules force you into a new way of acting. They might even force a selfish person to be a perfect team player for a while. But you’re not stuck in one pose forever. You move between poses. Freedom comes from cycling through a variety of constraints, each one pushing you into a new place. If yoga said, “Stay in triangle pose your entire life,” that wouldn’t be freedom.

If constraints and scoring systems can create freedom in games, why is it that when we impose scoring systems on everyday life — socially, professionally, personally — they often do the opposite? 

This is the most interesting question, and there are at least two big answers.

One is design. Games are designed for fun, pleasure, joy. Institutional scoring systems are usually designed for something else: productivity, efficiency, accountability. They’re not designed to be lived inside in a way that’s joyful.

The other is choice. With games, you have free range. You can move between games. You can stop. You can refuse. But, you rarely have meaningful choice over the scoring systems that govern your education, your job, your social reputation. And there’s something else that’s crucial here: In a real game, part of what makes it possible is that the points don’t matter. That sounds obvious, but it’s the foundation.

There’s this distinction I learned in graduate school that sounds trivial until you really sit with it: Goals and purposes are different. The goal of playing a board game is to win. The purpose is to have fun. The goal of fly-fishing is catching fish, but it’s not the purpose. You can have a day where you catch nothing, and as you walk back, you realize you’re sensitized to every leaf twitch, and every bug, and every ripple, and you remember catching fish was never the point.

That separation is why you can play competitively with someone you love. My spouse and I can spend the evening trying to destroy each other’s position in a game, and it doesn’t threaten the relationship, because the win is insulated. It’s inside the magic circle.

But when the score isn’t insulated, when the score is your grades, your salary, your status, your ability to pay rent, then the freedom collapses. The metric stops being a playful target and becomes a governing value.

That’s why institutional metrics feel so different: They’re attached to your life.

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