Life and Games. Games and Life.
Is there really any difference?
“What defines a game are the goal, the rules, the feedback system, and voluntary participation. Everything else is an effort to reinforce and enhance these four core components.”
— Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken
Most of the more than ten books I have written on approaching life gamefully contain this quote by Jane McGonigal, New York Times best-selling author, game designer, and game advocate known worldwide. This quote opened my eyes to how close games and anything in life are and uncovered many parallels between them.
Here is another quote that drew my attention to how important emotions are in games:
“Bring awareness to the emotions that arise during play.” — Justin Gary, Think Like a Game Designer
Justin Gary, an American Magic: The Gathering player, champion, and acclaimed game designer, listed this pearl of wisdom as one of the three necessary habits of a great game designer.
That helped me understand that when I want to approach my life gamefully and design, develop, and play it as an exciting game or a collection of games, I should pay attention to my emotions in all these processes.
Discovering Brené Brown’s book Atlas of the Heart and resonating with her strong emphasis on the importance of understanding our emotions and being careful with the language we use to express our feelings, regardless of whether we relate them to ourselves or others, is probably one of the factors that brought that urgency I felt to write this book. To write it before the other books I had planned, drafted ideas for, or even started writing.
In the previous chapter, we discussed that when you start exploring something and learning about it, you often start by searching for a name for it and its definition. Finding definitions for what emotions and feelings mean was the first step in drawing parallels between games and emotions. The next step is to consider the definition of games, which we started with the quote at the beginning of this chapter.
In the following chapters, we will consider each of the main components of games outlined in the quote by Jane McGonigal above and see how they manifest themselves in emotions, feelings, and experiences.
But before that, let’s consider other examples from our daily lives and how they have the same core components as games. Here are two examples I described in my book Actual Real-Life Role-Playing Games.
Let’s start with an employment contract. You will find all four core components there too. The goals and the rules are outlined, and you regularly meet with your supervisor for mutual feedback. Voluntary participation is visible through the signatures in the contract and the fact that you don’t do your work twenty-four-seven but interrupt it for other activities, including a short break.
Nowadays, modern workplaces allow you to do your work when it is most suitable for you, and you feel most efficient. There might be hours you need to respect, which make up a rule or a set of rules in your job’s game. But you have a say so that you can play your work’s game to your best abilities. And if you or your boss are not satisfied with the game and its flow, then changes are made, whatever they might be.
The example above is more on a larger scale of a job, which can be extrapolated to any project or activity. But relating games to everything in life also applies to the smallest steps in our lives.
Take a physical step you take when you go somewhere. You might not be thinking of it, but there is a goal in terms of the direction you take, the rule to walk on your two feet instead of crawling, and the pace adhered to, and the feedback is your awareness of whether you move toward the goal you envisioned or away. Your voluntary participation will determine whether and how you engage in the game, which is the next step.
This fundamental truth of everything in our lives mirroring games and their core structure, be it on the scale of a whole life, a specific activity or dream we envision, or the smallest step we take, can help us see life in a whole new light.
Even validating what we just did becomes much easier, more realistic, and valuable when we realize it is a game on its own.
And if it is only a game, it is manageable, adjustable, and playable.
Thus, the next step in this book’s game is to explore how goals, rules, feedback systems, and voluntary participation become apparent as part of emotions, feelings, experiences, and other related concepts. That can help us make the navigation of emotions much more manageable, adjustable, playable, and, thus, easily doable and, above all, fun.
About this article:
This is an excerpt from Navigate Your Emotions by Exploring Them Like Games: How to Feel with Curiosity Rather Than Suffering.
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I have written more than ten books on how to live gamefully. Check out these and other resources (including two online courses) here.
