This week's Commonplace post is about the limitations of using gaming analogies when talking about life:
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This has mostly to do with our discussion about Playing to Play and Playing to Win — which, as you may recall, introduced the concept of a 'scrub'.
The problem with this is that what might be scrub behaviour in one game might NOT be scrub behaviour in someone else's game.
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That old essay on Playing to Play vs Playing to Win may be found here: commoncog.com/blog/playing-t
It was mostly reader feedback as a result of that essay that lead to this week's piece.
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Special thanks to for some pushback on the 'scrub' discussion — he was the first to point out some of the limitations of using games as a way of looking at life! His notes on C. Thi Nguyen's podcast on games are worth a skim:
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thank you :) this came up on my tl near another post from using game analogy. different domains, different directions, interesting comparison (for me)
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I wrote about the games you lose by playing
this one has generated the most response so far. h/t @Aella_Girl for her excellent frame control essay
depatterning.substack.com/p/mind-games
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Awesome! Two other things that I sometimes consider
- often it's easy to tell what game someone is playing, just by observing their actions
- a lot of people play games they hate
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I really resonate with this one. I often consider whether I'm playing a game I want to win. About money/career especially.
Tangential to being a scrub, I think a lot of people overvalue the rewards for winning and don't consider the sacrifices they're making in order to win.
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