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 even serve as an organizing principle for, hub to and primary way of applying every other idea worth living. But more on that below.

To begin, I'd like 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. Early on in her book, McGonigal lays out four ingredients that every game has and later goes on to consider how the best games can do even more to meet our psychological needs.

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

For that, I'll look to Self-Determination Theory in the field of Psychology, which proposes three 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.

Since as we'll discover, all games involve a goal, it will be important to suggest a goal for one's gameful disposition in life in general. For that, I'll be taking some inspiration from Ryan A. Bush's book Become Who You Are and the topic of Eudaimonia in the modern psychological sense in particular. With it, we'll find a goal big enough to be adaptable for any person, situation or season of life.

Why 'Gameful Mindset' and not 'Game of Life' ?

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 even involved in developing lifestyle gamification apps designed to address specific life challenges, my interest here is to explore something more fundamental, personal and perhaps most especially 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 any statically defined apps or games (and without the need for so much screen time too!).

A Grand Unified Theory?

Finally, I suspect this topic can serve as a hub for a variety of life-enriching topics, for which I'm interested in exploring as natural extensions of the core topic and ways of living it out. 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 or life domains, including career, religion, and more, going only one move or degree further, much of which psychologists have also studied in relation to theories like S.D.T.

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