But­ter­field is a strange choice for a two-time CEO of a gam­ing com­pa­ny. He’s no Mark Pin­cus — by his own admis­sion, he’s not that into gam­ing. As a for­mer phi­los­o­phy stu­dent with a master’s from Cam­bridge, he was more inter­est­ed in play as a frame­work for social inter­ac­tion than play for play’s sake. “Infi­nite games are what we col­lec­tive­ly do as a species for build­ing cul­ture,” But­ter­field explains. “It’s fun­da­men­tal for human beings, as deep a desire as hunger and thirst and sex.” From an ear­ly age, he was intrigued with how online com­mu­ni­ties like IRC allowed peo­ple to exper­i­ment with their iden­ti­ties. His then-wife Cate­ri­na Fake found the top­ic com­pelling too. “There are at least two kinds of games,” But­ter­field says, para­phras­ing a favorite schol­ar of his. “The first type is played for the pur­pose of win­ning and the sec­ond type you play for the pur­pose of play.” When they brain­stormed a com­pa­ny to start, they set­tled on build­ing “Game Nev­erend­ing.” But­ter­field and Fake spent a year and a half cre­at­ing it.