In Favor of Enjoying Things on Purpose
The human being is an enjoyment-seeking creature. There’s a reason people are always trying to restrain themselves from excessive eating, drinking, scrolling, and shoppin...
Why Being Bored Is Good | The Walrus
Technology keeps us constantly stimulated. What do we lose when we no longer have nothing to do?
Three ways boredom can actually be a benefit
A little boredom can be good for you.
For the Love of Boredom
Boredom is prone to myth-making — much like the story of Phineas Gage. This matters. If we believe certain myths about boredom, it could lead us astray in how we respond.
What Good Is ‘Community’ When Someone Else Makes All the Rules? (Published 2018)
Life online can offer us a sense of belonging in any number of virtual villages. But the power to control those spaces isn’t very communal at all.
Are We Having Too Much Fun?
In 1985, Neil Postman observed an America imprisoned by its own need for amusement. He was, it turns out, extremely prescient.
The rule to making your own game is that there are no rules
There's nothing like laughing until your stomach hurts while playing a game with your friends and family — especially when it's a game where you make the rules.
Play is doing its work even if we’re not keeping score | Aeon Essays
We are most human when we play freely, imaginatively, pointlessly. Gamification risks atrophying that most precious capacity
The Fun Theory Sequence — LessWrong
(A shorter gloss of Fun Theory is "31 Laws of Fun", which summarizes the advice of Fun Theory to would-be Eutopian authors and futurists.) …
Starting Point
You compete with others, on an unfair playing field. Are you aware of this? Are you good at games? Starting equally Starting unequally Advantages in Games Life is Competitive Seeing Life as a Game What to keep in mind When to use this View Your Starting Point Starting equally You...
Game design is simple, actually
So, let’s just walk through the whole thing, end to end. Here’s a twelve-step program for understanding game design. One: Fun There are a lot of things people call “fun.” But most of them are not u…
Achieving playfulness in strategy game design
On a recent podcast episode, Brett “BrickroadDX” Lowey and I discussed the property of “playfulness” in strategy game design, and a lot of conversation over on my stream and…
Pluralistic: Market participation is exhausting (30 Mar 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
We're a diverse species, cognitively speaking – different ways of thinking come more easily to some of us than others. I'm good at a lot of things, but I have terrible spatial sense. I can't parallel park or catch a ball, and I get lost so easily it's almost comical (it's a running joke in my family).