Games People Play
The Prisoner’s Dilemma, a one-shot event, is thus not a fair representation of actual human interactions, which typically are ongoing and repeated.
Moshe Koppel • Judaism Straight Up: Why Real Religion Endures
Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and th
... See morePhilipp Meyer • Blood Meridian (Picador Classic Book 32)
Immediacy, exactness, consistency of response: the near perfect matching of player stimulus and game response in machine gambling might be understood as an instance of “perfect contingency,” a concept developed in the literature on child development to describe a situation of complete alignment between a given action and the external response to th
... See moreNatasha Dow Schüll • Addiction by Design
Open-ended meaning-making, shared world, scarce real-estate. These three properties are crucial. Every game with more than one player becomes a game about the interaction between those players. Without shared scarcity, there is no incentive to join our realities, and meaning-making becomes fork-only.