Keeping track of the score doesn’t make tennis into tennis. . . . part of tennis as we’ve come to understand it is in trying to make the other player miss. . . . because it helps each of us to experience playing well, it is right and good that I reward you with a point [when] you [give] me a shot I couldn’t return.
…
It’s really amazing how much a game changes, how different it becomes, when you change whatever you are scoring for.
~ DeKoven, The Well-Played Game, 68-69
Let’s score each other for bravery. . . .
Let’s score each other for grace, flow, harmony, endurance, agility. Let’s score ourselves.
It all comes down to this: What do we want to get points for?
What do we want to get points [in return] for?
We have been asking this a lot lately.
And, it is a good question to ask, but DeKoven’s formulation here is a revelation to me–it is the same question about the content of games, but given in the language and form of games.
It brings us into the language of points. Rewards.
What [purpose] do we want to get points for?
We have expressed some doubt of the value of scoring, throughout letterclub. Why points? We can reject them:
- “Pursuing a high score is not enough. It must be done as a way to play well, as a way to preserve something else.“
- “I decided at some point that I could abandon a book halfway through and still “check it” in my imaginary list of things I wanted to read. And that experience sufficed.“
And why not reject them? I feel that reasons to accept points have slipped through my fingers over and over again. I have been a great points nihilist in my time.
What do we want to get points for?
Returning to this question again with a more full understanding of its double meaning gives us two questions, not one:
- What do we want to [do, and] get points for [doing]?
- [Why] do we want . . . points. . .?
I have answers.
1. What do I want to do? In the abstract, that’s easy: I want to do things that feel right and good — things that align with my values, the way I see the world, the way I feel the world. When I do them, it’s obvious which things feel right and which ones feel wrong.
Points? Why would I, or anyone, want points?
2. Why do I want points? I don’t value points — I value doing things that help people, doing things that people want, doing things that make people happy, more alive, better. Things that make me happy, more alive, better. I value understanding others and myself and the world around me. Learning is fun and occasionally useful.
Points, what about points? Why do we want points, then?
I’ve found it easy to say that points are vapid, meaningless. Money and likes and subscribes are all foolish and absurd measurements of something which occasionally aligns with my values — and at least as often misaligns with them.
But they are measurements of something.
And, I think this is what points are — not just points but any kind of schema of value judgement — unambiguous value judgements, clear feedback on right and wrong, that sort of thing. Why points? I now suppose it is because of their form and what that affords us in terms of their content: we can see what they are saying, and think something of it.
Points.
Points, rewards, and goals: they are the absurd tools of fools, of those without the foresight to realize that all is meaningless, that nothing can be said or held or believed for certain! Or in other words they are our imagined armour against nihilism; but it’s not that points, rewards, and goals say “Nothing matters, so let’s make up meaning.”
Of course something matters, but it’s impossible to say exactly what matters, or how it matters, or why it matters. These are our stakes in the ground. We know they are wrong. All precise statements of truth are deeply, and someday provably, wrong. Points are such precise statements of value. But we have to say something!
Points are one of many attempts to say what is good.
But that doesn’t answer our question–
What do we want to get points for?
…
We want to get points for our values.
I feel most alive when I can trust my instincts to push me in the right directions: towards what both feels good and is good.
I think when Frank Lantz said, “I want you to disappear into it . . . I want you to want its hooks in you and then I want those hooks to go in,” he was talking about something similar to this.
The world is a complicated place. When I say that the world is a complicated place, what I mean is that I have to think too much to figure out those things which both feel good and are good.
But I can find these things now and then. I think, a lot of the time, this is what games are all about. This is what flow is all about. This is what immersion is all about.
When you feel your values completely align with the values of the world that immediately surrounds you… What do we call that ephemeral state of sublime ignorance? There’s nothing like it.
Almost there.
once more, with feeling:
what do I want to get points for?
I want to feel the feeling of being connected to the center of the earth, now and then. I want to want to do something, it doesn’t matter what yet, I just want to know that the thing that I’m doing is the most important thing in the world right now, and when I finally fall out of the sky and remember to notice the rest of the world, I don’t want to think I was lost in some empty fabrication. I want to feel like there was some sort of connection:
that when i was lost i was lost in a beautiful piece of reality.
P.S. Dear Zeigfreid,
There is often nothing inherently in there asking you to appreciate the whole as a whole.”
~ Ziggy, Videogames are process
your letter, especially this quote, deeply underlies mine; I thought a lot about what it means to appreciate the whole as a whole. I wondered, what is the whole you might be asked to appreciate? But more than that I wondered, what is that most inherent mechanism by which a game asks you to appreciate something, anything?
Points, points, points.