Press Start.

This post is intended to relaunch my blog with a brand new focus.

I'm enamored with the theory that games can be studied as a microcosm of human thriving.

What can we learn from games about the good life? And how can we apply those insights to our everyday lives?

I'm convinced we can learn a lot from them and that studying games with this end in mind can make it a suitable hub topic that connects to a variety of basic life enriching insights or - to playfully aim high - might amount to something like a "grand unified theory" of human thriving for some of us. At least, perhaps for those of us who love games, anyway.

To begin, I plan to start by defining just what a game is. For this, I plan to work from the definition presented by Jane McGonigal in her book Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World which lays out four ingredients that every game has early on and than considers how the best games meet even more of our basic human needs.

With the basic ingredients of a game laid out, I'll then seek to clarify how those elements map to our basic psychological needs for human flourishing.

For that step, I'll look to Self-Determination Theory in the field of Psychology, which proposes three essential psychological needs for human flourishing: Autonomy, Competence/Mastery and Relatedness.

Here, resources like Glued to Games: How Video Games Draw Us in and Hold Us Spellbound, a book co-authored by Richard M. Ryan, the co-founder of Self-Determination Theory (S.D.T.), will be my guide.

In reality, I may try to do both of those things in a single blog post... but we'll have to wait and see.

With that foundation set, I'll begin to explore how we can apply these insights to our everyday lives and from them, define the basic ingredients for living more gamefully or with a gameful mindset, as a strategy for thriving. The terms gameful and mindset are used here purposefully as my intention is to provide a flexible internal set of ideas and attitudes rather than some static external "game of life" to play in this case.

While I am a fan of and interested in - and even involved in developing - lifestyle gamification apps and games designed to address specific life challenges, my interest here is to explore something more fundamental, personal and flexible. I want to understand how people - including myself - can live more gamefully from the inside out, as a way of being and thinking, and completely independent of the external availability, scope or relevance of such apps or games (and without the need for so much screen time too!).

Finally, I suspect this topic can serve as a hub for a variety of life-enriching topics, for which I'm interested in exploring it as a jumping off point for some grand unified theory of human thriving. I say this, not only because its fun to pursue such an ambitious theory, playfully and not overly seriously of course, but also because having connected games directly to the basic psychological human needs for thriving in a single move (or one degree of Kevin Bacon as it were), we can then also relate gameful thinking to other basic facets of human existence, including religion (which psychologists have also studied in relation to theories like S.D.T.), within two moves or degrees, as well.

But more on that later! With that said, I intend to pickup with looking at the basic ingredients of games in my next post.