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I am firmly in the present,” she said as she headed toward the exit. “But, sometimes, I want to drag the future here and see if we want it.

Games are powerful and important partly because they help us test out the limits of ordinary life. That’s why we play. And these free-to-play games allow us to feel the edges of the unholy reality of our current winner-take-all neo-Gilded Age.

whenever we talk about science and society, it helps to keep two rather humbling premises in mind: very few of us are anywhere near rational. And pretty much all of us are hypocrites.

Hard gamification (the Normal kind) takes an activity-situation or structure of some sort and stratifies it, supposedly making it supposedly more ‘game-like’, but really just more goal-directed, metric, capable of being evaluated in terms of optimum behaviors (“addressing our problems”). Soft gamification solves no quantifiable problems; instead, it poses questions. It merely takes an activity/situation, and ADDS DEGREES OF FREEDOM such that it is more malleable (more PLAYED, more of a game).

If you want to understand the deepest malfunctions of systems, pay attention to the rules, and to who has power over them.

But Williams had stepped outside the arbitrarily defined borders of basketball form. This was an act of pure art, and not just because it was utterly and entirely superfluous. Any matter of standard sparkle could have gotten the ball into Lafrentz’s hands and past a frozen defender. Instead, Williams took the behind the back pass, firmly entrenched the NBA’s canon, and stylized it to the high heavens. Creativity for the sake of creativity, art at its most basic level.

Above all, the movements of the sixties allowed for the mass revival of free market doctrines that had largely been abandoned since the nineteenth century. It’s no coincidence that the same generation who, as teenagers, made the Cultural Revolution in China was the one who, as forty-year-olds, presided over the introduction of capitalism. Since the eighties, “freedom” has come to mean “the market,” and “the market” has come to be seen as identical with capitalism—even, ironically, in places like China, which had known sophisticated markets for thousands of years, but rarely anything that could be described as capitalism. […] What happens when the creation of that sense of failure, of the complete ineffectiveness of political action against the system, becomes the chief objective of those in power? […] The politicians, CEOs, trade bureaucrats, and so forth who regularly meet at summits like Davos or the G20 may have done a miserable job in creating a world capitalist economy that meets the needs of a majority of the world’s inhabitants (let alone produces hope, happiness, security, or meaning), but they have succeeded magnificently in convincing the world that capitalism—and not just capitalism, but exactly the financialized, semifeudal capitalism we happen to have right now—is the only viable economic system. If you think about it, this is a remarkable accomplishment. […] Myself, I am less interested in deciding what sort of economic system we should have in a free society than in creating the means by which people can make such decisions for themselves. […] Labor, similarly, should be renegotiated. Submitting oneself to labor discipline—supervision, control, even the self-control of the ambitious self-employed—does not make one a better person. In most really important ways, it probably makes one worse. To undergo it is a misfortune that at best is sometimes necessary. Yet it’s only when we reject the idea that such labor is virtuous in itself that we can start to ask what is virtuous about labor. To which the answer is obvious. Labor is virtuous if it helps others. A renegotiated definition of productivity should make it easier to reimagine the very nature of what work is, since, among other things, it will mean that technological development will be redirected less toward creating ever more consumer products and ever more disciplined labor, and more toward eliminating those forms of labor entirely. […] Why not a planetary debt cancellation, as broad as practically possible, followed by a mass reduction in working hours: a four-hour day, perhaps, or a guaranteed five-month vacation? This might not only save the planet but also (since it’s not like everyone would just be sitting around in their newfound hours of freedom) begin to change our basic conceptions of what value-creating labor might actually be.