The single biggest misconception about games is that they’re an escapist waste of time.
I’ve been running since high school. My boyfriend was on the track team, and I’d run with him.
There is so much more knowledge than most people realize about how to maximize the benefits of play and minimize the potential harms.
If you make it a game, gamers will play it no matter what your motivation is in making it.
Clinically speaking, depression is a pessimistic sense of your own capabilities, and despondent lack of energy.
Things like depression and obesity are global challenges.
Over time, the games we play can change how we think and what we’re capable of. And it’s easy to maximize the benefits so the changes are positive.
I worry a lot about people using games just for marketing, to get people to buy more stuff, which I think would be the worst possible use.
Games are work. There are economies popping up in games now because people value them.
Game design isn’t just a technological craft. It’s a twenty-first-century way of thinking and leading.
We’ve been playing games since humanity had civilization – there is something primal about our desire and our ability to play games. It’s so deep-seated that it can bypass latter-day cultural norms and biases.
A dramatic decrease in oil availability is not at all far-fetched.
It seems like what happens when we play games is that we go into a psychological state called eustress, or positive stress. It’s basically the same as negative stress in the sense that we get our adrenaline up, you know, our breathing rate quickens, our pulse quickens.
I’m not a fan of simulations. Where, ‘Oh, we’ll go play a simulation of world peace and figure out how to make peace’ and then somehow magically that will get translated into the real world. No, that’s not the kind of games that I make.
The more we consume, acquire, and elevate our status, the harder it is to stay happy.
Games are providing rewards that reality is not.
When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complexities, all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation.
A traumatic event doesn’t doom us to suffer indefinitely. Instead, we can use it as a springboard to unleash our best qualities and lead happier lives.
I see a future in which games once again are explicitly designed to improve quality of life, to prevent suffering, and to create real, widespread happiness.
Games that make you feel good about yourself are good games to be playing.