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When Someone Calls It a Waste of Time, What Do You Say?
I have spent three days rewriting the blurb for my own puzzle. Write "improves your focus" and you hand the reader a reason to play, ready-made. But the moment that line is there, the puzzle becomes a tool. Nobody calls Unpacking (Witch Beam, 2021) a waste of time, and that is because it wears the shape of tidying up — something that looks useful. This short piece in the Nature of Play series seats Aristotle, who treated play as mere rest, across from Schiller, who wrote that we are fully human only when we play. They disagree almost everywhere, and meet at exactly one point.
Who Is 100% Completion Actually For? — Perfectionism and the Philosophy of Play
Late at night I opened my Hollow Knight save and saw "93%" in the corner of the screen. The story is over. I have seen the ending. And still that number will not go away. If I go back for the last few items, am I playing, or am I tidying up? In this Nature of Play — Fragments piece I sit two philosophers face to face: Bernard Suits, who wrote that playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles, and Aristotle, who divided doing into two kinds. Along the way I notice that in this game 100% is not even a perfect score.
Is a Win by Luck “My” Win? — The Philosophy of Alea and Desert
Late at night, Balatro handed me a personal-best score. Delighted, I sent it to a friend, who replied, “That was luck, right?” Can I call a win that chance dealt me my win? In this Nature of Play — Fragments piece, I sit two philosophers who would answer opposite ways face to face: Caillois, who insists chance is a first-class form of play, and Aristotle, who holds that a victory lives in a person’s activity, not in fortune. Slowly the two begin to set “a single throw” and “a long win-rate” on two separate plates.
