游戏的哲学：从虚拟奋斗到被量化的生活

Speaking of why humans are so keen on playing games, this is actually a philosophical proposition worth deep reflection, rather than just simple entertainment and pastime.

When we carefully examine the act of "playing games," you will find it full of a certain absurd paradox.

In real life, we always try to achieve goals with the least effort, pursuing maximum efficiency, but in games, we voluntarily accept various artificially set obstacles and limitations.

If your goal is merely to put the golf ball into that small hole, the most efficient method is obviously to walk directly over and put the ball in, rather than standing hundreds of meters away swinging a long, thin metal rod.

However, it is precisely these seemingly unnecessary obstacles and rules that constitute the core charm of games.

Philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, in his work "Scoring," provides us with a highly insightful perspective; he believes that games are far from meaningless pastimes—they are a window for us to understand human "agency."

Games show us what "choosing a goal" is, what "submitting to limitations" is, and what it means to "deeply care about things that are actually unimportant within this specific time and space."

In the magic circle of the game, we temporarily set aside the complexity of the real world and enter a micro-universe with an extremely clear value system.

This is the fundamental reason why games are addictive—they provide something extremely scarce in real life, which is "clarity."

In real life, our values are often vague, conflicting, and sometimes even incommensurable.

It is hard to know exactly if you are a good parent, and it is hard to quantify how much long-term value you have actually created in your career.

The feedback mechanisms of the real world are often delayed, noisy, and full of uncertainty.

But when you open a game, everything becomes organized.

You know how much experience you need to level up, you know what equipment will drop when you defeat this monster, and you know that the rise in score undeniably represents your progress.

This clear feedback loop provides an ontological comfort to the anxious hearts of modern people.

We gain a sense of control in games, a sense of control stemming from the world being simplified into quantifiable metrics.

However, C. Thi Nguyen also issues a stern warning: when we try to transplant this logic of games—especially the obsession with scores, metrics, and rankings—into real life, things often go in the opposite direction.

This is the so-called "gamification" trap, or more accurately, the process of "value capture."

In modern society, we see more and more fields being implanted with game mechanisms.

Companies use KPIs and performance dashboards to manage employees, schools use GPAs and rankings to measure students, and social media uses likes and repost counts to define the importance of certain viewpoints.

On the surface, these tools promise clarity, fairness, and efficiency, just as clear at a glance as a scoreboard in a game.

However, the values of real life are far richer and more subtle than those of games.

"Value capture" refers to such a hidden and dangerous process: when we originally possess rich, subtle, and complex values, but in pursuit of clarity, we introduce simplified quantitative metrics.

Initially, these metrics serve only as auxiliary tools to help us measure value.

But over time, these simplified metrics begin to usurp the host's role, gradually replacing the true values we originally pursued.

We begin to act for the sake of pursuing the metrics themselves, rather than for the meaning behind the metrics.

This is like in the field of education, where our original goal is to cultivate students' critical thinking and love for knowledge, which is a complex goal that is hard to quantify.

So we introduced exam scores and GPA as standards of measurement.

Slowly, students, teachers, and parents all start revolving around scores, doing endless practice problems to raise scores, even sacrificing true deep learning and curiosity.

This is typical value capture: the logic of scores swallowing the logic of education.

The same phenomenon happens on social media.

Human communication was originally intended to seek resonance, understanding, convey complex thoughts, or build deep relationships.

But in the "game" design of social media, interaction is simplified into likes, reposts, and follower counts.

This quantification mechanism is extremely tempting because it provides instant dopamine feedback.

Thus, we subconsciously start adjusting our way of expression to cater to algorithms, posting content that is more likely to cause outrage or go viral, rather than those truly well-thought-out but perhaps slightly boring viewpoints.

Our "communication goals" are captured by the "game goals" set by the platform; we think we are expressing ourselves, but we are actually just playing a game called "traffic."

C. Thi Nguyen believes that this alienation occurs because we are too eager to escape the difficulty of value judgment in real life.

Exercising judgment in reality is tiring and full of uncertainty.

And handing over the power of judgment to a clear metric—whether it's credit scores, exercise step counts, or academic citation rates—is much easier.

We can even say that this reliance on metrics is actually an escape from our own agency.

We outsource the power to define the core question of "what is important" to the people or algorithms that design the metrics.

This is not to say that all quantification is bad, nor that we should completely abandon gamified thinking.

Games themselves are beautiful; they are a library of human agency.

By playing different games, we can experience different motivational structures and try out different styles of conduct, just like trying on different clothes in a fitting room.

In strategy games, we experience the thrill of calculation; in cooperative games, we experience the nobility of selfless dedication.

This experience enriches our souls and lets us understand different ways of existing.

The danger lies only when we confuse the boundaries between games and reality, when we forget that the values of real life cannot be simply reduced to numbers.

If we get used to looking at the world through "scores," we will gradually lose the ability to perceive those beauties that cannot be quantified.

We will forget that a deep friendship cannot be measured by interaction frequency; a great artistic achievement cannot be defined by auction price; a fulfilling life cannot be summarized by a balance sheet.

Games show us the aesthetics of striving, letting us see that even artificially created difficulties can bring immense satisfaction as long as we endow them with meaning.

This mechanism reveals the source of human motivation: we are not only passive responders but also active creators of meaning.

When we play games, we are actually signing a temporary social contract, agreeing to invest emotion in this specific goal within a specific time and space and under this specific rule system.

This "temporary wholehearted immersion" is a superpower bestowed upon us by games.

It allows us to practice how to pursue, how to fail, and how to care in a safe environment.

However, this practice should be to make us sharper, richer, and more subjective when we return to the real world, not to turn us into slaves of metrics.

When we realize the existence of "value capture," we acquire a power of resistance.

We can start to scrutinize those metrics that dominate our behavior in life: am I doing this because it truly has value, or just because it increases a certain number?

Am I pursuing health, or am I pursuing reaching the step count on my fitness band?

Am I pursuing knowledge, or am I pursuing an academic degree?

Am I pursuing being understood, or am I pursuing being liked?

This reflection is crucial because in this era driven by big data and algorithms, the forces trying to "gamify" our lives are everywhere.

Commercial institutions and technology platforms not only want to earn our money, but they also want to reshape our values, making us play their games according to the rules they set.

Staying awake means we must always remember: games are the art of agency, but the highest agency lies in our ability to step out of the game and re-embrace that real world which, though vague and chaotic, is incomparably real and rich.

After all, the ultimate goal of life is not to get a higher rank on a leaderboard, but to experience those moments of life that cannot be coded or calculated.