The Rules of the Human Game, Part I

Alright, Human Gamers.

It’s sure hard to play the game without knowing the rules, right?

So let’s equip you with the four rules that guide this wild ride.

These rules are inspired by ‘Reality is Broken,’ a book by world-renowned game developer Jane McGonigal where she breaks down exactly how games hack life in a way reality has missed.

Without acceptance of these four rules, life begins to feel a lot more like struggle and a lot less like play.

Think of your current life situation:

Are you clear on your goal?

Do you accept your limitations as a creativity-inspiring challenges?

Do you clearly see the result of your efforts?

Is this something you want to be doing?

Let’s dive in.

Rule #1.

A game requires a goal or a purpose.

Now I’m not talking about a ‘climb to the top of the corporate ladder and forget every step along the way’ kind of goal.

I’m talking about the thing that gives us direction.

Without a goal, we have no direction. There is no place called North, but we follow the compass toward North in order to arrive where we are going.

A goal or a purpose gives life direction.

You can experience both small and large (or micro and macro) goals in life- for example, a micro-goal might be ‘I’m hungry’, and a macro-goal might be ‘I want to make a difference in the world.’ Both of these games set you up with a direction. So now what?

Enter-

Rule #2.

A game requires arbitrary limitations to increase creative thinking and inspire new potential outcomes.

If I’m playing golf and the goal is to put the ball in the hole, I’ll just walk up to the hole and drop the ball in. It’s no fun. Why would I keep playing that game?

Let’s introduce arbitrary limitations (or A.L.):

I need to be 500 feet away from the hole, and I have to use a very specific kind of stick, and stand a specific way. There are sandpits and ponds, and I get punished if my ball ends up in there.

For people who love golf, this game just got fun. Now I have to train and practice to be able to get the ball in the hole with this club, and I have to use creative thinking to be strategic about how I do it. These arbitrary limitations just unlocked everything that makes a game fun.

So- what about the Human Game?

A.L. are everywhere. They come in the form of societal, racial, and economic limitations, in the form of your personal physical and mental abilities and functions, as well as in your personal skillsets, motivation, belief patterns, what you believe yourself to be capable of, the physical location where you live, etc. They show up in every arena where you struggle because of ‘something else’, something that is keeping you from what you want.

There are also much less loaded A.L. Say for example you want to watercolor, but you don’t have any paints. You look around and see a box of food coloring. Your creative, outside the box thinking says, ‘that might work if we mix it with water!’ You try it. It works. You would never have tried it if you simply had watercolors on hand. The A.L. of not having paint on hand inspired this wild re-purposing of food coloring. How fun!

Now, I’m not here to argue the ethics or inequity that goes into A.L., because there are a LOT.

But I am here to offer you back the power that is being taken from you every day you suffer at the hands of those limitations rather than letting them be what they could be:

Creative limitations that inspire you to come up with wild, creative ways of working within their confines.

This creative thinking, problem solving, and optimistic use of our brain power (I can solve for this limitation! This is fun!) creates the parameters of the game, without which we’d just get everything we want all the time and never get creative or wild.

See what I mean?

Head over to the next post - there are only two more rules and we're about to break them down.