The brain is good at cutting out the irrelevant.

Faces may be the best example. How many times have you seen faces in wood grain, in the patterns in plaster walls, or in the smudges on the sidewalk? A surprisingly large part of the human brain is devoted to seeing faces — when we look at a person’s face, a huge amount of brainpower is expended in interpreting it. When we’re not looking at someone

When you watch kids learn, you see there’s a recognizable pattern to what they do. They give it a try once — it seems that kids can’t learn just by being taught.

what a book will never be able to do is accelerate the grokking process to the degree that games do, because you cannot practice a pattern and run permutations on it with a book, and have the book respond with feedback.*

The definition of a good game is therefore “one that teaches everything it has to offer before the player stops playing.”

This means that it’s easy for the player to get bored before the end of the game. After all, people are really good at pattern-matching and dismissing noise and silence that doesn’t fit the pattern they have in mind.

This is why tic-tac-toe ends up falling down — it’s exercise, but so limited we don’t need to spend much time on it.

Game theory is about how competitors make optimal choices, and it’s mostly used in politics and economics, where it is frequently proven wrong.

Noise is any pattern we don’t understand.