On this episode of Intentional Evolution Podcast, host Vision Battlesword and guest John Uke dive deep into the nature and impact of games—exploring what defines a game, gamification, and why play is central to human experience. The conversation begins with reflections on personal connections to gaming, then expands into a philosophical inquiry: games as art forms, vehicles for learning, and tools to build agency and creativity. They discuss how games are structured around constraints, goals, and choices, allowing for both competition and collaboration, and differentiate “games” from “sandbox” experiences or toys, highlighting participatory engagement as a key feature.

John Uke introduces the concept of “gamer DNA”—a multidimensional framework for understanding the diverse types of fun different people seek in games, from strategy to aesthetics, socialization to achievement. The discussion touches on the psychology of motivation, agency, and dopamine, including why gamifying work or life can transform burdens into sources of excitement and creativity. Both speakers reflect on the educational, social, and even therapeutic roles games play, recounting foundational experiences with specific games such as Deus Ex, Go, and Dungeons & Dragons.

They address topics like game-related toxicity, cheating, team dynamics, and the need for precise language distinguishing gamification from “funification.” The episode ends with reflection on life itself as the ultimate meta-game, arguing that adopting a playful perspective unlocks endless growth, resilience, and joy. Throughout, politics and wider societal systems are referenced as arenas ripe for the playful reimagining enabled by game-inspired thinking.

Show Notes

Chapters

• 00:00— What is a Game? Agency, Play & the Artform
• 07:05— Simulation, Agency & Games as Engines for Learning
• 16:19— Motivation, Achievement & Transforming Work to Play
• 23:43— Games as Learning Tools: Culture, Content, and Evolution
• 34:36— Choice, Flow, and Sandbox vs. Theme Park Dynamics
• 45:50— Gamification, "Funification," and the Science of Dopamine
• 58:50— The Goldilocks Zone: Healthy Play & Development
• 71:34— Gamer DNA: Personality, Types of Fun, and Matchmaking
• 87:38— RPGs, Social Contracts, and Games That Transform
• 104:51— Life as the Ultimate Game: Perspective and Leveling Up

[00:00:00] Vision Battlesword: Hello, welcome to the Intentional Evolution Podcast. I am your host, Vision Battlesword, integral consultant and founder of iEvolve Life, a personal and professional development practice based on the philosophy of intentional evolution. This podcast is an ongoing conversation to explore that philosophy as well as to serve as a resource, a showcase, and a catalyst for ongoing growth toward the human singularity.

That is to say, mass awakening of new consciousness, super intelligence and radical creative flourishing. Each episode, I'll feature a world class transformational facilitator, co-creator or friend, to reveal cutting edge psychospiritual technology, unpack our deepest wisdom, and evolve our awareness. This series is based on value for value, so whatever value you receive from these transmissions, please return some value back in the form of a donation, directly supporting our contributors or offering your own time and talent as a producer.

Thanks for joining me in this journey. And now here's our episode,

John Uke. Did I pronounce that correctly?

[00:01:12] John Uke: Correct.

[00:01:12] Vision Battlesword: Welcome to Intentional Evolution. Thanks a lot for coming to have a conversation with me today.

[00:01:17] John Uke: You've already got five points and you're on your way to your first achievement.

[00:01:20] Vision Battlesword: I've got five points

[00:01:21] John Uke: On getting the last name.

[00:01:22] Vision Battlesword: That's awesome. I'm really, really excited because you're, as a guest, I'm branching out into new territory here. 'Cause normally we're talking in the realm of transformation and facilitation, psychology, spirituality and things of that nature. But this of course is something that's extremely near and dear to my heart. Something that I'm really passionate about and I think is extremely relevant personally to the entire premise of this show.

And you are like one of the foremost experts that I've ever at least personally met and had the privilege to get to know. And I would even venture to say, befriend in this realm. Like, you have a subject matter expertise here that is really exciting for me to, to engage with you and kind of open up this new thread of our ongoing conversation.

So I just wanna say thanks again for coming here and yeah, are you ready to jump in?

[00:02:17] John Uke: I am. And very excited also to explore the game of life with you.

[00:02:21] Vision Battlesword: Awesome. Well, my first question as always is just for you to introduce yourself in whatever way you want, whatever way makes sense to you by asking you the question, who are you, John Uke.

[00:02:33] John Uke: I'm an entrepreneur. I'd say first and foremost, I love starting things, innovating. The biggest focus of my life has been around social and gaming. As a child, I played games with friends a lot, and a lot of my best memories and best relationships were either developed through meeting people, through gaming or gaming as a way to hang out with people, and I'm seeing a pattern, whereas time goes on, people are gaming more and more by themselves.

So what really has piqued my interest in this space is making it easier to play with friends or meet new people through gaming. Making it more meaningful and productive and fun with this hobby that we're already doing. It's sort of a way of gamifying gaming by getting more out of the thing, just by making up to more stuff and adding it to it.

So I'd say first and foremost an entrepreneur, kind of an adventurer was a pretty early adopter on like psychedelics, yoga, meditation, started this stuff when I was about 1436 now. So I really like pioneering and exploring and eventually wanna get more into higher levels of impact and restructuring systems in society going forward, because it's clear things from the past are not working as well as they used to.

[00:03:49] Vision Battlesword: I love that. And yeah, I agree with so much of what you said. And in your kind of opening introductory monologue, you've used several words that I think we're going to be playing a lot with in the course of this conversation. And so I just wanna jump right in and start defining like what these things are, what we're talking about.

You've talked about games, you've talked about the idea of gaming or gamification, and then even the meta concept of what you're doing professionally and creatively in your life right now, which you call gamifying games, which is super interesting. What is a game?

[00:04:27] John Uke: To me, a game's quite nebulous. You have open world games where you're just playing and there's no objectives, and then you have games where you have a lot of rules and an outcome.

At the end of the day, the way I see a game is it's a way of adding levels of like playfulness or fancy to life, often in an arbitrary or unnecessary way. 'cause you could call work work, but you could also spin it a little bit and then suddenly you're doing the exact same thing, but by adding some additional X factor elements, suddenly it's fun and suddenly you're enjoying it more.

You're doing better. It's more contagious. It's more sustainable.

[00:05:06] Vision Battlesword: Yeah.

[00:05:06] John Uke: How would you define it?

[00:05:08] Vision Battlesword: I love the question because it's so hard to answer. It's like you used the word play, you've used the word fun. Clearly those concepts are important to defining what a game is. You used the word arbitrary, which I also think is interesting that a game is inherently not something we have to do, but it's something that we may choose to do, and it's sort of we create the rules of the construct of whatever that exercise is that we call a game.

That's actually something that came up in our conversation before we started the recording. As I recall you were saying, yeah, there's something that we were talking about earlier that was really interesting, which is. The arbitrariness of games in the sense of they're the rules that we create. They're almost like the, the boundaries or the structures or the self-imposed limitations that we put into a system, which somehow like creating that challenge or that limitation of possibility makes it fun in a weird sort of way.

[00:06:17] John Uke: It's sort of like limitations of the birthplace of creativity.

[00:06:20] Vision Battlesword: Yeah.

[00:06:20] John Uke: Is one thing, is having constraints in a way. Games can kind of be like that. And also games are simultaneously very autistic and extremely not autistic, for example. Autism is related to systems thinking, and games are often systems with binary rules, but at the same time, they're also like potentially the highest form of art because they're so multidimensional and participatory and you have to engage with it to be able to get to the next level, so to speak.

And so it's interesting that it's something that's simultaneously like neither and both in a world that's more and more seeming like it's just one or the other.

[00:06:58] Vision Battlesword: Yeah. What do you mean when you say it's simultaneously neither and both, not one or the other? Can you, what are, what's the one and the other that you're referring

[00:07:07] John Uke: to?

For example, a game involves play. And one of the themes that often occurs in games, for example, chess, is it kind of simulates roughly like a medieval battle or some sort of battlefield. And a lot of people enjoy games, even if they're mechanically not as well designed just because of the theme and how well it feels like you're actually simulated playing the thing that you like engaging with.

It could be Star Wars or like baking pizzas. And so it's an interesting blend of different facets of reality where you want some sort of autistic mechanical system that's just optimization based, efficient, logical, but then you also have the extreme opposite where you're willingly suspending disbelief to immerse into the theme of the game.

And often, and especially depending on the particular actors or players, you'll even play not optimally as part of the game to role play or to not break the theme or the character,

[00:08:14] Vision Battlesword: or give the other players a chance to win. Like sometimes if I'm in a game and I'm getting too far ahead, I might actually.

Make certain moves to allow the other players to stay in the game, to continue to make it fun and competitive for myself.

[00:08:30] John Uke: Yeah, that's a really good example. It's like even just the social layer, the long-term layer. It's not just a wrapped container though. It also is a wrapped container.

[00:08:39] Vision Battlesword: I love that phrase you said, I wrote it down.

I want to explore it even more deeply that games are the highest form of art that resonates for me really strongly. Like there's just something in my whole body and being just lights up when you say that. And I'm sure there's are many artists out there who may, may have a spirited debate on that topic, but that's how it feels to me.

And I think that multi-layered, multi-dimensional characteristic of games and what they are makes a lot of sense. 'cause it's an art form that exists in so many simultaneous dimensions. To your point about just the pure mechanical aspect, a game is like a machine in a lot of ways. You can look at it that way.

And we even talk about game design and the way that it's. Architected in a way, the mechanics, that's how we speak of them. But then to your point, overlaid on top of that is many times a theme. Then overlaid on top of that, of course, is art overlaid on top of that many times maybe a story, maybe a storytelling aspect.

Many times I think there's a storytelling aspect.

[00:09:46] John Uke: You can even visuals, music, acting,

[00:09:49] Vision Battlesword: role play,

[00:09:50] John Uke: right? Yeah. You can really just bundle every form of art and make it as multidimensional as you want to.

[00:09:55] Vision Battlesword: Right, right, right. That's maybe what makes it maybe somewhat unique as an art form is the fact that it includes, it's like a container, a, a wrapper or a structure that all different forms of art can actually plug into synergize within and somehow become something new, becomes some emergent phenomenon.

[00:10:21] John Uke: Something greater than the sum of its parts.

[00:10:23] Vision Battlesword: Yeah, exactly.

[00:10:24] John Uke: You can have, for example, a great soundtrack, but if you overlay it with the right moment in a story or a movie, then that can make you cry, and games have that potential, but even higher because it's participatory. You're engaging with the content in a way that doesn't really exist in other art forms.

[00:10:44] Vision Battlesword: Yeah, yeah,

[00:10:45] John Uke: and in a way, you're gated by the content, by how much you understand the art. For example, if it's a video game, you can't progress in the story until you comprehend the story or solve the puzzle or optimize the thing. Or even just grinding, depending on the kind of game it is where I don't know of any other art forms that have anything like that.

Then you stack on the social layer, things get real wild. That's

[00:11:12] Vision Battlesword: where I was about to go with it. Yeah. That layer, there's so much subtlety and complexity to that layer of games. You know, when we start to, certainly there are games that can be played by yourself and there, you know, many of them. But when we start to utilize a game as a social experience or as a way of bringing multiple minds, imaginations, ideas, relational dynamics together into this interactive system, it almost becomes infinite.

Like there's the number of possibilities that can be enacted within, let's say, let's just take chess again to, as a simple example. Chess is a solved game, meaning computers can and already have calculated out. Every branch of every tree, of every possible move in the game. It's finite, it's known. There are more complex games, board games, for example, such as go where it may be possible in theory to solve the game, but the number of permutations of possibilities exceed the number of, you know, yeah.

Like proton, like particles in the universe or something like that. But I wanna be, I don't want to get out over my skis because I don't know if we really know how many particles there are in the universe, but that's what they say. That's, that's the, that's the common wisdom. It, so it's that might as well be infinite at that point, right?

It's not, we're not gonna solve go, even if we can build a computer actually now at this point, which can beat humans at go, which to me is a little bit sad. But that's a, that's a detour. But then when we start to get into this social aspect of games where we're starting to include our own minds, imaginations, all of the possibilities of the complexities of choice, of the, of the choice making that we can bring into a game where it's not such a linear, analytical, mechanical process, such as chess, where you may be able to compute and say, this is the objectively correct move in this situation toward winning the game.

It's not like that in. Many of the kind of board games that we play or many of the kind of games in general that we play, board games, video games, or any other games where the social dynamic element of it, which is actually what makes it fun, is less about winning and more about creating and having some type of experience with each other.

[00:13:53] John Uke: In a way, this experience, our consciousness in life could be summed up as a game. We're living in a reality where we could just be non-player characters or we're all the main character and we live in a reality with rules and people have different values, things they're trying to optimize. Like we could literally just be in a game sandbox right now, like literally this could just be a game simulation and we're just characters seeing what's gonna happen or playing on into some system.

And every time we spin off a virtual world, for example, all those non-player characters have sensory inputs and outputs, computer functions similar to humans in a way, very much simpler, that don't have any way of comprehending that they're in a game just based on the physics of the game itself. And it could be in the exact same situation.

[00:14:38] Vision Battlesword: I have often thought that, and I have kind of come to look at life in that way as a game, and ultimately I think it makes everything more fun. I've had this entire psychological reframe in the last five years since I left the corporate world and moved into independent consulting and building my own practice.

This psychological reframe for me from work into play and realizing the power of what it means to reframe all of the things that we do in life as different types of a game or different types of games, has been just completely revolutionary to how I like how I am in the world, and is one of the big things that I bring into the kind of coaching and consulting and facilitation that I do at like, all in all of the different realms that I do them, as well as being an actual game designer myself, and being a game enthusiast.

Being someone who's been a, an avid and very passionate gamer for many, many years, you know, ultimately, but isn't that weird? Why is it, do you suppose, I, I think we're detouring briefly, but I do wanna bring us back around to a clear definition of what it is we're talking about. But in this moment, why do you suppose it is that if we think of something as a game, it somehow automatically becomes more fun than if we're thinking of something, not as a game, as a, as a work or an obligation.

[00:16:07] John Uke: A great example that comes to mind is we've been talking about collaborating on making it easier for people to play board games with friends,

[00:16:13] Vision Battlesword: right?

[00:16:14] John Uke: And that would basically being an executive owning some massive problem and just being able to go at it and you yourself, when we reframed the, the structure of it from just having some sort of goal and get there however you want, versus you could be taking the exact same steps and doing the exact same thing and you lit up and just seemed way more excited just with that little switch.

And I think that would be the reaction of most people.

[00:16:40] Vision Battlesword: Right?

[00:16:40] John Uke: And I think that's kind of the crux of it, is when it's seen as something that we have agency over, I think that's a lot of what differentiates a game from other mediums. And in a society that's taking away a lot of our agency, which is extremely important for human happiness in the human spirit and even historically, what are happy societies where people feel more valuable and have more agency over their environments and their time.

We're living in a society that's more and more mechanizing and systematizing everything, where we're more just becoming interchangeable cogs in the machine. So being given agency to be like, Hey, here's a goal, like do it however you want with no protocols or rules or anything, then that becomes a lot more of a game than just do X, Y, and Z.

[00:17:26] Vision Battlesword: Yeah. Yeah. That's a great example. 'cause, and just to kind of fill in the blanks, what you're referring to is that at a certain point we were having a conversation about. Something, a collaboration that we might be able to do together. And there was a certain point where there were goals or objectives that were being defined and described as a step by step of, well, you know, if you would do this and do this and do this and do this, then we could achieve these results.

And it felt really heavy and awkward. Unpleasant and not interesting and, you know, not inspiring to me. But then when we reframed it as, okay, well what if we remove the actual step-by-step of what the actual activities of this work, if you will, or, or contribution would look like? And instead just describe it as, here are the victory conditions, the victory conditions, the success criteria are number go up and however you would like to solve the problem.

Play the game, solve the puzzle of make number go up. You know, at the end of the quarter or whatever is your business, you play the game. And in backing into it, I probably would end up solving the problem the same way and doing the exact same things, but by solving it for myself and choosing to play the game in that way, pursuing the goal of make number go up, all of a sudden the energy for me completely.

Transformed into something that felt exciting and that I was motivated toward.

[00:19:02] John Uke: And I think for listeners, this is a great takeaway. How can you give people more agency?

[00:19:08] Vision Battlesword: Yeah.

[00:19:08] John Uke: Even the illusion of free will is better than being trapped. And it's not actually an illusion if there is a best path to solve it, but there're at least along the ride, making their own choice and playing a game rather than just being forced to do anything.

[00:19:25] Vision Battlesword: Yeah. And in exploring this little thought experiment, I think what I'm starting to see now is that there is a, an actual meaningful difference between saying to someone, you know, I would like for you to do step A, step B, step C, and step D, versus telling someone, here's a goal, here's a destination or an outcome to achieve.

You figure out the best path to get there because there could actually be other paths to get there. Right? Step A, B, C, and D may be one of several solutions. There may actually be a better solution. There may be another solution that's equally effective, but more fun or more interesting, or one person may find more useful or enjoyable.

Versus another, but giving someone the opportunity to express themself creatively in the process. That brings it back to that statement you made earlier. I think what you said was limitation is the origin of creativity. Is that what you said?

[00:20:34] John Uke: Yeah. Sort of along those lines. Constraints.

[00:20:38] Vision Battlesword: Constraints,

[00:20:39] John Uke: yeah.

And that, that's a well-known thing where if you say like, make a drawing, you're just kind of like, uh, but if you say like, make a drawing, but you have to use the color yellow, then you're like, oh, you can get a lot more creative around this constraint.

[00:20:53] Vision Battlesword: Right. But if you say, make a drawing of a yellow duck four inches tall with a beak, you know, such and such,

[00:21:01] John Uke: that's

[00:21:02] Vision Battlesword: not fun.

Right. So, so it's like what we're figuring out here is that there's, there's some kind of sweet spot there, isn't there? There's a sweet spot of a set of constraints that narrows the possibility space and the solution space within a domain where the human imagination and creativity can flourish, but doesn't feel overwhelmed with the infinity of possibility in this particular simulation that we find ourselves in.

But it's not so constrained that they feel they're just playing out some scripted. Program or set of directives that are coming to them.

[00:21:44] John Uke: I believe this ties back to childhood play, especially not just children, but animals and everything plays in some form of skill building being a lot of the core, and that including social skills, where playing from an evolutionary standpoint is seen as a safe form of being able to practice skills.

So for example, if you practice shooting your bow, if you miss too many shots on the deer and you're like a hunter gatherer, you're just dead. So it's nice to be able to play games that can sharpen these skills in a safe container so that when it's really time to play, you are a bit better off. And so I think that could be a consideration we take into this is that by having constraints, it's almost relating it or anchoring it to reality.

Because a arbitrary game is so arbitrary, you're not really developing any skills that real life. If you're playing a game about improving hunting skills, then you're gonna have some constraints to make it relevant to skill building.

[00:22:51] Vision Battlesword: Yeah, there's so much richness right in there, because one of the things that you're surfacing is the role of games as forms of practice, like a simulation, if you will.

It's a. System that creates an opportunity to practice something in a simplified way, but that where those skills that are built within the game system are translatable to the quote unquote real world or the quote unquote outside world. So that's an interesting function of games and what they're for.

Another piece, uh, you wrote down something about how, and this is very much on theme for this point about agency and creativity and like why games are fun because we actually get to express our creative process through them and make our own choices of how we would like to, what is the experience that we'd like to create?

You said that games create a model for participatory engagement with content, which I think is super interesting because that also brings up the idea that there is a content within games and that also plays back into what you just said about skill building. The piece I was gonna layer on is there's also an educational role that games can play and it is sort of very related to skill building, but not quite the same in the sense that I think games many times can actually be containers or vehicles for information that needs to be transmitted across space and time and in a very, very.

In a way that creates deep learning. That's one of the things about games that I've started to believe and, and notice and bring into the play that I do. Which by the way, just for you and anyone else that's listening, I will always say play instead of work because of my deep philosophy and and belief in this model.

But at any rate, in the play that I do in life, my career, my professional play, I utilize games not only as a way of transforming resistance into motivation, which is something we've already touched on, but also as a way of packaging information and learning because of what I've observed in the type of games that we are taught, to your point, as children or are invited and encouraged to play, I have noticed that they contain content, which is like.

Legacy culture. Like, like, like legacy information that's being passed down from generation to generation in a lot of these traditional games that we play. So what do you think about that has, um,

[00:25:40] John Uke: one great example is Monopoly,

[00:25:42] Vision Battlesword: exactly

[00:25:42] John Uke: where the whole point of it being invented was to show that in capitalism eventually, when person ends up with everything, and people laughed for a long time, and now we're getting to the stage of capitalism where people are like, I don't wanna play anymore.

This isn't fair.

[00:25:58] Vision Battlesword: That's the perfect example. That's, that's absolutely the one that was in my mind. And I think there's many other games also, even very, very simple ones that we can look at and see what is the deep, deep information, like the oral tradition or like how our culture gets passed down from generation to generation in a lot of these games, the content that's being packaged in there, but then the engagement with that content is participatory, which I think is a huge part of what makes it so effective as a vehicle for transmitting this learning or these lessons.

But what do you, what do you think about that as far as games as a learning tool?

[00:26:40] John Uke: There's been an increasing trend towards gamification over time. So I think it's very valid. Even a lot of things that we don't think of as games are actually, can be construed as games. For example. A lot of therapists, coaches, et cetera, will ask you to like rate different areas of life, like your relationships and your health and such.

Even just by assigning numbers to these things and then looking at the numbers is sort of a way of gamifying it. You're not just arbitrarily talking about stuff and they point somewhere. It's actually more efficient and more clear how things actually work when you apply a sort of theoretical game like framework around it where it's like, oh, well if we just condense to a number, you want the lowest number to go up probably.

And that's a very simple way of being able to have a lot of clarity around what's gonna make a person or a business do better.

[00:27:30] Vision Battlesword: Yeah, that's interesting. So that kind of brings it back around to the feature of games that can be somewhat arbitrary. It's like we create a constraint specifically for the purpose of making choices to solve the problem.

Whatever that is. That problem training, yes. Like we create a problem, we, we create an artificial problem so that we can solve it. And for some reason that's fun.

[00:27:57] John Uke: And games also tend to condense a lot of the most critical thinking parts of the processes that we do. 'cause usually with any work there's only 20% that you really like and the rest is kind of busy work or the part you don't like as much.

But oftentimes some of the work that usually correlates with that is the most important work, like strategic analysis and decision making and such. So games are a way to just strip away all the paint and get to the core nugget of what the engine that drives the vehicle is and get repetitions there.

And it very much is a skill. Like we're very inefficient, organic creatures and we definitely get better at things the more we play with them. We do things faster and better the more we're exposed. Uh, some examples that come to mind like are in business school, I would play Catan with some friends and we didn't read the rules all the way.

We were probably stoned, but we. We're creating options and future trade ins on like if I give you like one sheep, now I have the option to purchase three sheep for like X later. And I don't think you're supposed to give away resources without anything back, but it just made the game like really hardcore.

And it was just a way of practicing business skills because life is a game and we can really basically do anything as long as we're not breaking the law. And so by being able to be in these games, it's training our minds to be able to think creatively and efficiently and solve these kinds of problems and be able to create something out of nothing in the way that really sets apart the people that are the most successful.

From the ones who are more like cogs in other people's machines.

[00:29:41] Vision Battlesword: Yeah. But essentially there's some part of us that likes that, that likes having a problem to solve or an obstacle to overcome. There's some part of us that actually deeply enjoys having the opportunity and the experience to exercise. Our creativity,

[00:30:03] John Uke: I think it's dopamine.

[00:30:04] Vision Battlesword: Yeah.

[00:30:04] John Uke: Games are really heavily dopamine aligned uhhuh where uh, if you have a dopamine shortage, you're more likely to enjoy games and dopamine's the, the chemical that we get for moving closer to our goals and in play in games, there's usually ways to win or to do well. And so it's really playing with dopamine a lot and you're getting it a lot more condensed, so it's a lot more interesting and we're paying a lot more attention and we're having a lot more fun.

In games to be able to, to work with this a lot more closely. Whereas otherwise, a lot of the world moves so slowly. Let's say that there's a game, Twilight Imperium, a very heavy strategy game, and it's very multidimensional and you can play it from very many different layers. Some people are paying attention to the board of the military.

Some people are only watching the objectives. Some are just focusing on diplomacy or trade or politics. And if you have a weakness with the social layer, but you're really good at optimizing other layers, then that game is a very good container and opportunity for someone to focus on that more and try to win, for example, using different parts of their brain more around, for example, alliances or strategically aligning, getting other people to like fight each other, for example, where in the real world you don't always want to do that because we're usually trying our hardest and we're leaning on our tools that are the strongest, and we're overusing those things even when it's not appropriate.

Or it could be good to use other parts of our brain or other skills, but without those developed, we don't wanna use them. So games are a great place to develop and practice those skills so that in the real world, we can then start applying those. Another great example of where this comes to mind is in role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, for example, dagger Heart.

What you see happen a lot is people who are new to these things often play as themselves the first time. And it's very fun running around in some alternate universe as yourself in some simulated reality assured story between all the participants. It could be science fiction or some specific fantasy world from a book for example.

What tends to happen is that after the first round or two of people or campaign of people playing is they'll usually play somebody very differently from themselves. And this is where it kind of comes out where once they're familiar enough and safe enough in the game system, then they like to challenge themselves and just stretch and develop new skills.

So somebody who's very like literal and practical might become very like joking and like silly and chaotic. So you see people stretching their personalities and we are everything and we can be everything. We don't have to be boxed into the the brand that we've made for ourselves in our own head and what we've reinforced over time.

We can flex into other things and games are such an amazingly fun way to actually get to do that and to build those skills and to, to adjust in the ways we wanna be.

[00:32:57] Vision Battlesword: And I still want to know why games are fun, and I think I kind of wanna know what fun even is or how to define that. But super tangent because you brought up dopamine, random thought question, why do we not take a dopamine pill or like a dopamine shot?

In your I I, I'm sure this is not like your body of expertise or anything, but I'm just curious if you know, is artificial dopamine like not a thing? Can our bodies not metabolize it? Like why is it always that we have to do some other activity in order to get our brains to generate dopamine rather than just supplement it with it?

[00:33:37] John Uke: So dopamine is, it's very interesting that it's not from getting the apple, it's from pursuing the apple and getting closer to it,

[00:33:44] Vision Battlesword: uhhuh.

[00:33:44] John Uke: So it's one of those things that like, even if you could dose it, it's not really quite the same,

[00:33:49] Vision Battlesword: huh.

[00:33:50] John Uke: And also dopamine is literally the only thing that drives us to do anything.

If we have a lot of dopamine will literally sit there like zombies and die. Like our brain is extremely black and white, like very hardwired for this. Like we cannot exist without a dopamine deficit. A DHD itself is often associated as just a dopamine shortage where you find people that need more stimulation to like feel okay or to be entertained.

So that's why you get a lot of a DHD people checking out if something's not interesting or multitasking or doing risk taking behaviors. A lot of it could be seen as just a dopamine shortage. So if there is some sort of dopamine drug. I don't know if it's even possible because it's about moving towards something and if you have it, you're just gonna sit there and not do anything.

So I think that that might be related in some way. It's kind of like playing a game where you just automatically win.

[00:34:42] Vision Battlesword: Right.

[00:34:43] John Uke: And the fun part isn't just the winning, it's the journey getting there. If you ask people like, what are the best games? They'll always say it's the one that was really close and really back and forth up until the end,

[00:34:54] Vision Battlesword: right?

[00:34:55] John Uke: Against where they're fully engaged and at the peak of their skill levels.

[00:34:58] Vision Battlesword: Right?

[00:34:58] John Uke: And so that's, I think, kind of the flow state related as well, where we're really optimally engaging our dopamine drives.

[00:35:06] Vision Battlesword: Yeah, that's such an interesting point. And, and I brought that up earlier when I said I, and probably other people will intentionally maybe back off a little bit in order to make sure that, to keep the game competitive.

Or another example is maybe I'm playing a game with some people who are newer to the game than I am, and I'm more experienced and I'll help them plan their moves, you know? Or

[00:35:29] John Uke: handicaps can be another one

[00:35:31] Vision Battlesword: or use a handicap, but whatever way that we do it. And there's, there's a whole different body of psychology that we can explore too, which deals with cheating or people who actually, for whatever reason, like there's different types of people where I think for some people, the winning of the game.

Is a supreme motivating factor and for other people, I think myself included, there's other things that are more important to me about the game, such as the social engagement aspect, the competitiveness, the excitement of just seeing and finding really good moves. It's similar to sports, you know, we're like, oh, that was a great play and I can enjoy that on its own terms, even if my team lost the game.

But to the point about the dopamine, and there's something about the tension, the anxiety, the, the adrenaline. Maybe there's a part of it there, or the, the, for whatever reason, we enjoy the thrill of the chase of it being not so easy that we just get it right off the bat. But we also don't want the game to just get away and, and we don't, you know, succeed in it, but we do want it to be hard and tough and we wanna strain and struggle and then get it at the very end.

[00:36:51] John Uke: It's sort of like a first job in high school. You get minimum wage, but you really value that money. And even though it's objectively less money than like a millionaire makes, without even trying they, val, they have more fun getting that money. They value it more, so much more tactile in a way for them is a lot more real.

And also visceral

[00:37:11] Vision Battlesword: maybe.

[00:37:12] John Uke: Yeah. Visceral and. Also with comedy. I heard a definition that humor is just the build and release of tension, and that's interesting what you just said. I wonder how that could tie in because in a way, humor's sort of in the meaning and story side of life that games sort of touches on.

So I wonder if what you're hitting on is also something that relates there. Even music, for example, is you want something that flows, but you also want to be a little bit surprised.

[00:37:42] Vision Battlesword: Well, I'm coming back around now. I think finally to the original question, which is just simply what is a game? Do you feel any closer to having like a crisp definition of it now?

[00:37:55] John Uke: I, I still think of it as something we're kind of opting into is maybe another element with agency. I think there's a lot of different ways and frames you can analyze it through. For example, even just the evolutionary skill building side is, it's like one could say that a game is training for life skills, but you could also just define it in different ways.

It's funny because games seem like one of the things that's harder to define than most things because to different people it's different things. So for example, this life could be a game. You have two people at the exact same job and one of them sees it more as a fun challenge and the other one sees it as a drag.

And just based on your perspective, you being the exact same situation to one of them, they're playing a game and to the other one, they're in trap.

[00:38:41] Vision Battlesword: I think one thing that we both seem to be agreeing on is that a main feature of a game is choice. So if something doesn't have choices or possibilities, like a novel is not a game, there are some things that are called games that are kind of like that, where they're so linear that it really is more of just an interactive storytelling exercise versus something that I think we would really call a game.

So a game has to be a system that has enough of a set of possibilities within it that a person can make choices and that there are different outcomes that are possible. I think we're agreeing that a game has to have some type of a goal or some type of an idea, well, here's a question. Is there such a game that has no winner or that has no victory condition or way to succeed?

Can you play a game that's just completely open-ended? And

[00:39:45] John Uke: if you look at Gary's mod or Minecraft, Uhhuh, those are just sandboxes.

[00:39:49] Vision Battlesword: That's true.

[00:39:50] John Uke: And in those instances, people just kind of make up their own

[00:39:54] Vision Battlesword: right

[00:39:54] John Uke: goals,

[00:39:55] Vision Battlesword: right.

[00:39:56] John Uke: You have like flight simulators or things where you build rockets and people are just liking to experiment and see what happens.

Maybe the goal is to just be like, if I put all the engines on one side of the spaceship, like what? What's gonna happen? Without even trying to optimize something, they're just playing and exploring. So it really is something that's very hard to, to completely encompass.

[00:40:17] Vision Battlesword: That's a really good point though.

I'm so glad you brought that up. That idea of something like Minecraft or just an an open world simulator of some kind, and is that actually a game or is that something different? Is that, like you said, within that space people make up games and maybe with something like Minecraft, there are some built in success and failure criteria.

I mean, there's enemies and you can. Take injury and even die, therefore lose. But the success criteria is not so clear.

[00:40:54] John Uke: It'ss almost like it's more of a toy than a

[00:40:55] Vision Battlesword: game, right? A toy. Yeah. So there's forms of play that are not necessarily games per se. Ga games in play are not identical.

[00:41:04] John Uke: Uh, if you've ever been to a live actionable play, lrp,

[00:41:06] Vision Battlesword: yes.

[00:41:07] John Uke: Uh, you can go and you can, it's sort of a game. I mean, you're playing, people kind of consider it a game in a way, but some people go and there's no objectives. They just kind of show up and they just act in character. It's almost like going to the bar and just hanging out with people, but you're just role playing as someone.

Um, but then you get other people who just really prefer having some sort of objectives or some thing to optimize some sort of quest to do, or mystery to solve. And I've noticed that it very much depends and varies person by person. Like how much on one side or the other. If you look at massive multiplayer role-playing games, the largest frame that gets wrapped around those is sandbox versus theme park, where theme park is on rails.

Sandbox is just an open world where stories sort of emerge, and that's like a spectrum where a game can kind of fall somewhere on either side or in between. And so I think that's one aspect of if we're defining sandbox more as like a toy, then how that makes sense in the frame of like a massive multiplayer roleplaying game.

Or is it the fact that it's still kind of a game because you can use it to create games out of it?

[00:42:20] Vision Battlesword: To me, a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game is a toy. It's just a big one. It's just a big, super complex toy that you can then make games with.

[00:42:32] John Uke: Yeah. And would the game be the system of the toys involved, or could the game be the container for the toys?

[00:42:40] Vision Battlesword: Or is the toy the container for the games?

[00:42:43] John Uke: Yeah, I, I think that there isn't like an objective answer, but personally what's coming up from this conversation, which I hadn't thought of before, is that I would say that open world games are not games.

[00:42:56] Vision Battlesword: That's where I'm at.

[00:42:57] John Uke: That's,

[00:42:58] Vision Battlesword: yeah,

[00:42:58] John Uke: an interesting

[00:42:59] Vision Battlesword: takeaway.

It's, well, in the theme park example that you brought up, so if we think of an actual theme park, there's the park, which is like the container for fun. Let's say there's a container within which play will occur, and then within that container that is the, say the theme park. We have rides and we have games also.

Explicitly, we can tell the difference. A ride is not a game. We would say, I think if I get on a roller coaster, I'm strapped in. I'm quote unquote, it's

[00:43:29] John Uke: like a movie,

[00:43:30] Vision Battlesword: not even quote unquote, I'm literally on rails.

[00:43:32] John Uke: Mm.

[00:43:33] Vision Battlesword: I have fun. I exper, I have an experience, but I'm going on a predetermined path. I come back to the beginning, I get off, maybe I'm dizzy, whatever, but that is a ride.

Whereas we also can go to the arcade or to the, um, midway and there are actual games to be played. I can throw the ball and try to knock down the pins. I can, you know, shoot the BB gun at the target. Whatever these games are, try to balance on the rope. And these are explicitly games. And we know that when we see it, because there's constraints, there's an objective, there's a prize.

We can succeed or we can fail. And those conditions are explicit. And what are the other attributes of that that makes it a game?

[00:44:26] John Uke: I think the fact that it's not, we're opting into it.

[00:44:30] Vision Battlesword: Yes. And

[00:44:30] John Uke: we're

[00:44:31] Vision Battlesword: doing it for fun. Yes. It's participatory

[00:44:32] John Uke: and we're doing it for fun.

[00:44:33] Vision Battlesword: Yes. We're doing it, but we are pursuing a goal.

[00:44:36] John Uke: Yeah.

[00:44:36] Vision Battlesword: So I, I really feel like that is an, that is an essential component of a game.

[00:44:40] John Uke: Some people might draw a distinction between a game being like. Not productive in a way where like it can be productive skill building, but it's, it's more of like a simulation for practice or for entertainment rather than for the work itself.

But I think that's an optional distinction one could make just depending on how much you wanna zoom in or out on what can be a game.

[00:44:59] Vision Battlesword: No, that's a good distinction to at least touch on because I do think that's how people think of games in our culture a lot. They think of fun play in games as being distinct from work production.

Doing the needful games are inherently a leisure activity. They're in. They're inherently, they're explicitly, intentionally non-productive. Even though, and this is the really interesting part, and this circles back around to the conversation we had about dopamine and what exactly is it that makes games fun?

One of the kind of observations or or insights that I had about my psychology of play, which is packaged into, you know, all of my consulting programs, is that if you observe someone playing a game, even though it is a leisure activity which someone is doing for fun, which is explicitly as an alternative to work.

Quote unquote, or productive activity by just observing their behavior. You would notice intensity. You would notice focus. You would notice even sometimes what looks like frustration, aggravation.

[00:46:15] John Uke: It creates energy.

[00:46:16] Vision Battlesword: You would notice energy being utilized, expended. And one of the thought experiments that I use sometimes to explain what, what my whole psychology of play and reframing all work into form of play or all work into a form of a game that helps crystallize this for people is if you imagine someone playing a video game, people will stay up all night long doing that.

People will do that for hours and hours and hours, you know, in this intense, focused, very intentional state. And if you took and replaced on the video, on the screen, the image of the video game with the image of a spreadsheet, you would not be able to tell the difference between someone at work from nine to five during the day versus someone at play from five to nine, you know, overnight.

Isn't that interesting? It's so, it's like the state of being in a game, in a full, full playful intensity is ob, ob observationally speaking, indistinguishable in many cases from the state of exertion and effort of being in a state of so-called productive work. And my question is, why is one not interchangeable for the other?

[00:47:28] John Uke: I believe they are, and maybe it just touches on how you wanna define it. If you find your work fun and you view it as fun and you have agency, then I think you could call it a game. And some people, for example, some programmers, coders really enjoy coding to the point where like, for them it's interchangeable playing video games and coding because the coding itself is challenging.

If they're, you know, getting dopamine, accomplishing things in a flow state, getting to exercise or agency, I'd like to, to share something that I thought was fun and I think touches on sort of the mystery and majesty of how. Multidimensional gaming can be, uh, in Game Tree. It's a gamer friend finding app, and we added a gamification layer to it, and we noticed all of the metrics went up about 25, 30% just from adding some totally unnecessary, arbitrary thing.

Game Tree, despite having the word game in the name is not a traditionally a game. It's a, it's a tool for, for meeting people that you'd like playing with. But when we added gamification, done right, you can get badges and awards, experience points level up, and again, you could totally design this whole system without that.

But by having that, it just adds so much to it. The experience, for example, gives people guidance. It gives people even like a socially. Appropriate excuse to do things. For example, we have achievements for making friends with different types of personality archetypes for making friends from different countries.

And suddenly you're not just arbitrarily looking at random profiles. You're like, oh, you know, I want this badge, or, oh, this, I have an excuse to message this person. 'cause they understand that like we're having some sort of shared objectives, or maybe they're also achievement hunting or leveling up. It's like if I'm a higher level, that means I'm more legit.

People wanna be friends with me, or it proves that I'm less toxic and more reliable and more friendly. So just by adding some totally invented crazy psychobabble bullshit on top of the system, it just makes the system so much more cool and fun. Right now we're working on gameplay coordination, a discord bot to make it easy to play either with your existing friends or also fill slots with new players that you're predicted to get along with.

And we haven't added the gamification layer yet, but I know for sure that it's gonna be very successful because. When you're playing the game, you're not just playing the game. There's a meta game going on where it's like, oh, by playing socially, I'm like leveling up my game tree account, which is a metaphor for like your social skills, your social network, in addition to just whatever's happening in the game that is the subject matter at any given moment.

So the I, I'd challenge listeners to think through what are relationships, processes, aspects of your life that you can apply a gamification lens to that might not seem so obvious, but that you might surprisingly find some great stuff. A really low hanging fruit example is goal setting where there is an art to goal setting where you want, like there's certain sizes and tempos and benchmarks that tend to feed us really well.

Breaking it down even more, weightlifting is a very clearly gamier thing where if you're actually measuring what exercises you're doing and how many reps and sets you're doing and you measure it week by week with a goal or an intention of improving, you'll find that you'll enjoy it a lot more and you're gonna be a lot better at it and you're gonna improve a lot faster than if you're just arbitrarily going and trying your hardest every day.

Like you'll actually do better by taking a little bit of extra effort to, in a way gamify it, which is just tracking it. It meets a lot of the game qualifications.

[00:51:19] Vision Battlesword: Yes. I'm so glad you brought that up because that word, gamification, that was another one of the words that came out right off the bat, and I knew I wanted to look into it.

I wanted to inspect that word. I'm not entirely sure we've fully defined game in and of itself, but we've definitely squeezed a lot of the juice outta that fruit. But gamification, I wonder if there's something different or if that is a slightly different concept to what we've been talking about as purely a game.

A game as a form of play, a simulation, an educational tool, a skill building system. This piece, when you talk about gamification, what I notice about the way that that has been used within your app, gamet Tree as well as many other apps and systems and programs that I've seen, is that it seems to be a mechanism for driving behavior for motivating people to take certain types of action.

Like you talked about a way of utilizing it in an exercise program of some sort. And so what I'm curious to know is what is gamification as compared to or as differentiated just from a game?

[00:52:36] John Uke: I'd like to shoot the question back to you because you do this a lot for clients. Yeah. Whereas my scope's a lot more limited to just my own life in Game Tree Uhhuh.

[00:52:45] Vision Battlesword: Okay. Yeah. Well, I, I was already starting to expand on it, but I didn't wanna suck up all the air in the room. But I have a little bit of tension with the, the term gamification because my passion is games and what I notice about gamification systems as I've seen them in, like you talked about software apps and programs or corporate environments or marketing campaigns and things of that nature, is, to me they are the shallowest kind of most, most bare bones, most rudimentary mentory form of what just meets the criteria, how we define what a game is.

It sets up a goal or a target, and then invites a person to do something to accomplish that goal and get a dopamine reward for doing that. The simplest formula that I think that you could talk about, and for me that doesn't feel fulfilling, and I would love for there to be a richer definition of gamification that we could evolve toward or revolve into.

To me, what I would love for gamification to become is the integration of something more like a true game in that it is fun that it contains. Content or is in some way furthering or fostering someone's actual personal development, whether that be through learning information, building a skill, practicing something that is meaningful or useful in life, or just actually enjoyable on its own terms versus just a task completion exercise in order to collect a reward in the form of like a quick dopamine hit.

And what bothers me about gamification as it is today is that I, I see it as a psychological, a hack. Yeah. But not in a good way, you know what I mean? Like a, like, um,

[00:54:53] John Uke: a gamification done badly is cringe.

[00:54:56] Vision Battlesword: It can be cringe, but even when it's done well, it can be kind of a form of manipulation is what it is.

What I'm really, what I'm really leading at is like utilizing that. Like you can think of the way social media has been criticized a lot.

[00:55:10] John Uke: It's like the difference is does it work? Like if it's manipulative and the employees are there to work,

[00:55:16] Vision Battlesword: but work for what purpose is the point, you know, it, it's, it's like, so if it works to get me to buy more stuff that I don't necessarily need.

Okay. Does it work well from someone's perspective? But is it in my favor? I don't know. Maybe not. Does it work to get me to waste a bunch of time trying to collect totally pointless stars and badges in some app that may give me a, a momentary hit of dopamine, but it is actually not changing anything meaningful in my life.

Did that work? It got me to do stuff. Did did. But was that stuff really good for me to do? So that, that's kind of the point that, that I'm making in the sense of is there a newer form of gamification that people like you and me and others in our industry can brainstorm, can dream storm that brings in more of the elements of a true game in terms of it being meaningful and fun while still utilizing that valuable part of the psychological hack of helping us to motivate our behavior to do the kind of things that we actually wanna do, like working out.

[00:56:19] John Uke: It seems too that based on what we've been digging at with games versus toys versus fun, is that a lot of gamification is actually not gamification. It's fun ification. For example, you could have a recycling bin that just makes a funny sound every time you put. A canon there. And like most people would call that gamification as a discipline, but it's not actually a game.

It's just making it fun to recycle.

[00:56:48] Vision Battlesword: Right. I agree with that. I think there are many things that are being called gamification that, and this is probably one of the things that I'm reacting and responding to that I look at and say, that is not a game.

[00:57:01] John Uke: Mm-hmm.

[00:57:01] Vision Battlesword: We need a different word for that.

[00:57:03] John Uke: Yeah. And I guess they're kind of close cousins.

Uhhuh fun in games and ideally games are fun, but you can have fun. That's not a game. And I think that,

[00:57:12] Vision Battlesword: and you can

[00:57:13] John Uke: have games

[00:57:13] Vision Battlesword: that's not fun, to

be

[00:57:14] John Uke: fair. Yeah. Yeah. But then you don't, nobody wants to play. Right. So it, it's making me consider that as a society, we should really be getting more tight on our language and perhaps not referring to open world sandboxes themselves as games.

Maybe making a new word for them or just calling them sandboxes and or if we're fing work, like maybe don't call it gamification.

[00:57:39] Vision Battlesword: It really is fascinating though, like why quote unquote gamification. Like, I think we can sort of center our understanding of that term around this idea of creating a reward system that where people accomplish, people do a thing and they, they accomplish a thing.

Even if that thing is as arbitrary as a gold star shows up in their app or they get a bonus. At, at the end of the month from their company for achieving a certain result, whatever that may be. Or

[00:58:06] John Uke: even just recognition.

[00:58:08] Vision Battlesword: Or even just recognition. Yeah.

[00:58:09] John Uke: Like employee of the month is kind of a game

[00:58:11] Vision Battlesword: Fair.

Exactly. Yeah. That's a, that's a, I think employee of the month is a great example of gamification as we would define it. Now, another thing that occurs to me in that vein is on the old style bulletin boards or forum systems, even, even now, this is still, you know, very commonplace on any kind of systems where you can post information and other people can reply or respond to it.

Maybe it's a tech support thing where you're trying to get answers. Maybe it's just a conversational thing of people talking on topics discord. Oh, like karma

[00:58:47] John Uke: systems and stuff?

[00:58:48] Vision Battlesword: Yeah. Like where exactly, where you can build a credibility and you then you get a, a higher and higher status. That shit

[00:58:55] John Uke: works

[00:58:56] Vision Battlesword: or title.

Right? Exactly. Exactly. It's like, oh, I'm Aje Jedi acolyte and no, now I'm a Jedi Knight. Now I'm a Jedi master. It's like, Ooh, I really want that title, so I'm gonna have to post a thousand times this month to try and get there. That's the point I was about to make. Is that just, it's a. Very interesting to me how effective these things are.

To your point about what you noticed with Gamet Tree, I have the same thing in my workout app. I would still be working out three times a week going through my program regardless. But they put in these metrics in there that gives you a athlete score and I just want number go up. I want you

[00:59:36] John Uke: gotta tell me about this app.

[00:59:37] Vision Battlesword: Oh, you're gonna love it. I just want number go up. I just want higher badge. I just want to get to the next level. And it means nothing. Nothing at all. Because I don't participate in this social connected aspect of this app. Although that's a, that's a feature of it, but I don't, I just keep all my stuff private, but even still, I, I, it motivates me and there's no reason for me to care.

That's so interesting.

[01:00:00] John Uke: When it comes to gaming, something that's been discovered is that there's like a Goldilocks zone mm-hmm. Where children who game too much. It's a bad. And children who don't game at all. It's actually a bad thing as well. The people who are the most happy and successful across the board are the children who kind of play like in this Goldilocks zone,

[01:00:19] Vision Battlesword: what's the Goldilock zone?

[01:00:20] John Uke: I don't remember the exact amount of hours per week, just spitballing. It might be like five to 15, something like that. Above like 15, 20. It's kind of taking it maybe too much of life where you're doing too much training and not enough implementing, for example, and less than that, and you're not, maybe not stretching your brain, you're not enjoying life.

You're not like relaxing and de-stressing and building social connections. It's interesting that a lot of people don't want to game because they feel like it's unproductive, but I think that child study shows that the right amount done in the right ways is actually good for us. And that's a lot of my obsession as an adult is being very ambitious and entrepreneurial.

So many people in the same demographic as myself stop playing games, and that's so sad to me as something that's one of the greatest things in life, is our ability to add all these arbitrary rules that make life so much more engaging and fun and magical. And so a lot of my personal life mission is just like, well then how do we just level up gaming itself to make it more okay?

And to make it within that band of Goldilocks zone where people don't binge too hard, but also don't just completely opt out and then become, I wouldn't wanna, I don't wanna say like not children anymore. But kind of lose that spark of life.

[01:01:41] Vision Battlesword: Yeah. Well when you're talking about the Goldilocks zone for children, are you referring to you, you were saying gaming was the word you were using, but are you referring to children playing games or are you just referring to children playing or in play?

The

[01:01:59] John Uke: study was about playing games. Got

[01:02:00] Vision Battlesword: it. Specifically, and, and the type of games, was that, do you, do you happen to remember any information

[01:02:05] John Uke: about that? I think it came from the video game industry.

[01:02:07] Vision Battlesword: Okay.

[01:02:07] John Uke: So I assume they were just tracking like console and

[01:02:09] Vision Battlesword: PC

[01:02:09] John Uke: gaming specific. Interesting. They might have thrown in board games,

[01:02:12] Vision Battlesword: uhhuh

[01:02:12] John Uke: there.

Um, but nowadays, like older people tend to play more board games. Younger people tend to play more video games,

[01:02:20] Vision Battlesword: Uhhuh,

[01:02:20] John Uke: so I assume that it was mostly video game tracking.

[01:02:23] Vision Battlesword: Okay. Interesting. Yeah, and it brings up, for me, there's a big difference between different types of games. We know when you're talking about playing games could be viewed as a waste of time versus playing games could be viewed as a competitive advantage.

If I'm playing chess for example, or go, or some kind of deep strategy game, I'm in training my mind to think strategically and tactically and solve problems and read situations quickly. To perform certain kinds of analysis, computation, likewise with video games, board games, all different types of games, or I could be learning information from these games.

I want to get into this conversation riffing a little bit back and forth about some of the most interesting, meaningful, and important games like that each of us has kind of played in our life and like what that's done for us, like how that served us in our life. I can think of a few of them right now where, I mean, these games were as powerful as a transformational experience for me.

As powerful as a, I don't want to sound hyperbolic, but, but like a major chapter of life. I feel like I've lived in some of these games that I've played both video games and role playing storytelling type games, so I think that makes a big difference, right? Certainly it would be different if you're talking about the goldilock zone for children or adults.

If someone is playing, and I don't mean to be derogatory to any game, but if somebody's playing Candy Crush as opposed to playing settlers of Catan or as opposed to playing chess, it's different. And I'm not saying none of them has any benefit because there's probably some benefit to just having leisure time blowing off steam, relaxing, doing something that you enjoy, getting some dopamine in your system.

But on the other hand, as far as what would make you more effective. In real life, there's probably a big difference between the types of games that we play.

[01:04:31] John Uke: On that note, uh, one of the elements of games is that they teach a very important meta skill. Maybe the most important meta skill, which is learning how to learn.

[01:04:40] Vision Battlesword: Yeah,

[01:04:41] John Uke: good games are very engaging. And then once we're good at them, we lose interest. And so what you've said that inspires in me is that when playing a game, you want the game to get more difficult as you go on, or for your competition to get more challenging so that you're constantly leveling up. And through this, you're actually learning how to learn because you're having to advance your strategies and your tactics and your skills as you progress.

And learning how to learn is the most important skill because life is just complicated and like infinite. And the faster we can wrap our mind around things, see, understand the game and how to play it, especially nowadays with the world changing faster and faster and faster, the safest place to be is on the ball.

If you stop, the ball moves on and you're stuck in the past, you could be a farmer for like five generations and not much is gonna change. But nowadays you need to learn how to learn. And gaming is the ultimate teacher of that 'cause That's basically all it is, is just throwing new challenges and mechanics at you constantly in like a hyper condensed manner.

[01:05:51] Vision Battlesword: Well, in the past you could be a farmer and in the present day you can play Farmville.

[01:05:57] John Uke: Mm.

[01:05:58] Vision Battlesword: But I think the unfortunate thing about Farmville is that it doesn't really teach you how to farm or necessarily provide anything tangible. Maybe. Maybe there's good problem solving, puzzle solving aspects to it, but do you think it's possible that there are some games, like do we have to actually be careful with games because of how powerful they are that we don't accidentally entrain ourselves into the wrong kind of patterns for what makes us effective in life?

[01:06:25] John Uke: Yeah. There's two points to that brings up, and it's a really great question. I think this is very useful for listeners. It's about that part, about being strategic, about gamifying, how you game. For example, for me, like using games as a tool to develop relationships and build social skills, not playing online by myself, but making a little bit of an extra effort to play with people and then you're just hanging out and it's just an activity.

With Farmville, there's a category of games called Idle gaming. Where a lot of it's just more like a relaxing activity where it's more meant to recharge. And in that sense it's a little less stimulating, a little less novel, and I think also a little less productive in its own state. But we all need ways to recharge and relax.

And I think in that case, knowing that that's what it's for, then that's a good thing. The challenge is that that mostly applies to mobile games. And mobile games are the most engineered to be addictive, where they like very much have it down to a science, like exactly how often they need to send you notifications and you have to check back in and do this and that to the point where it's kind of more of an addiction machine, unlike the rest of gaming.

So I'm not a big fan of idol games. I mean, they can be fun and they can be addicting, but I don't think they're actually good if you play them too much. And the second point around this is that because the point of games is to learn how to learn and to improve, like problem solving skills is once you start to master a game too much, it's also better to move on.

If you're only playing the exact same game all the time and you're not discovering anything new, not building new connections or anything, it also becomes a time-waster. But if you're playing new games, then you're still growing and flexing your brain and actually becoming smarter through these activities.

[01:08:09] Vision Battlesword: Mm-hmm. Well, I think that. Leads to the massive game modification and expansion industry as well. Oh yeah. At least that's the beautiful thing about both board games and video games is if we've, if we, well before we even that we feel that we've really like maxed out on our potential or growth capacity for growth within this game, there will be an expansion coming down the path to add more complexity and more interest to it.

[01:08:38] John Uke: Yeah. And then you might even jump to like similar but different games,

[01:08:42] Vision Battlesword: right?

[01:08:43] John Uke: Um, you might like games that just fit a certain theme and you play everything in that, or you might like certain mechanics. Um, there's a, a thing that we invented at Game Tree called the Gamer DNA model. It's actually built on top of a model called the Aesthetics of Play, written by some famous game designers that then Quant Foundry took, and then they added to their game market research firm.

I saw that they were missing some stuff and had some things miscategorized, but essentially what our gamer DNA model measures is like, what is fun for you? 'cause we've been talking a lot about like, what is a game, but not as much about like the individual curation of like who likes what types of things.

'cause if a good game's a good game, why aren't we all just playing one game? And what I've seen is that. Everybody has a unique sort of D-N-A-A-A sort of taste palette or fingerprint of the types of fun that you like. And if you Google gamer DNA, you should be able to find this in the audience. But essentially it's a way of thinking about things that can actually help you a lot in life and help you fall out of like making bad purchases or repeating mistakes.

Because you might see, for example, that in my case, the Witcher three is like one of the highest rated like best games ever made. Like objectively, like that's definitely in the top 15 or 20 games ever made. There's a lot of cult following, but I keep buying games like that personally and starting them, really liking them for a little bit and then dropping off very quickly.

And after working with this game or DNA model, what's become more obvious to me is that while I love stories a lot, it's not why I play games. If I want story, I'll go to like a movie or a book or something. Every game specializes in different types of fun and we've identified about 20 different kinds of fun and games can usually, it's usually best to pick a few of those and just specialize in those.

And that's why not everybody likes the same types of game. Because if the types of fun are like, let's say story, self-expression and role play, then if somebody doesn't have those in their taste palette, even if it's the best game that maximizes those. They either won't enjoy it or maybe they'll enjoy it, but for a much shorter period of time or lose interest faster.

And so having more self-awareness around what kind of fun we like can help us pick games and also even be able to pick who to game with. Because one of the things that I've discovered through working on Game Tree a lot and just seeing all the social dynamics at play and matching millions of people, is that there's a lot of toxicity going on right now in the internet, and a lot fewer people are engaging with each other.

And a lot of it's because it's just the wrong people playing together. Whereas in real life, there's a vibe check. You get to know somebody. There's a longer term relationship. You can figure out what game you both wanna play and such. But if you take a game like Grand Theft Auto or Minecraft, or Skyrim with a cooperative, for example, there's a lot of different, especially all the most famous and popular games, actually have a broader spectrum of types of fun that they can actually successfully implement.

'cause they have a lot bigger budgets. And with those kinds of games, you get a broader spectrum of players. And so what you see happening is that some people might just like the action and the explosions and the sensual stimulation. Other people might like just the sense of achievement or the competition.

And those are different kinds of players. And so they might get triggered by each other. For example, if one's casual and one's competitive, and neither of them are wrong, they're just different. And so having awareness of the types of fun that you like can help you not be unconsciously toxic to other people or put yourself in situations where you'll both just find each other toxic or have that awareness.

But then by having that awareness, you're not just unconsciously assuming the other person's just wrong or bad, like we do. We kind of assume anybody not like us is just wrong or bad. The understanding like, oh, we're just different and that's good. And that you can find other activities or other areas of specific common ground that you both enjoy.

I'll make one last example to kind of bring this home is Battle Royale is very popular right now. Fortnite was the most popular game in the world for a while.

[01:12:52] Vision Battlesword: Can you explain what Battle Royale is? A type of game?

[01:12:56] John Uke: Last man standing,

[01:12:57] Vision Battlesword: right?

[01:12:58] John Uke: Yeah.

[01:12:58] Vision Battlesword: Okay.

[01:12:58] John Uke: And uh, it started simple and it's been growing and growing.

Hunger Games, the movie is kind of an example of that, where what often happens is you just get dropped into a world with a hundred people. Sometimes there's some of them are bots, sometimes you're in groups of two or four instead of individually. And ultimately you just wanna be the last one surviving.

And within that, there's so much room for gameplay mechanics where you have like a shrinking field to kind of force people together. You can discover things, you can loot other people's stuff to incentivize killing each other. Battlefield Six has added a lot more interesting stuff to this with like changing optional missions within this frame.

But ultimately some people are playing it just because. It's just a way to hang out with people and they just wanna play with their friends and it is just a social experience and other people are like, I really wanna win. And so being aware of the kind of player you are can like really help to not just get triggered by other people or to trigger them yourself.

[01:13:53] Vision Battlesword: I love what you're doing with this gamer DNA, is that right?

[01:13:57] John Uke: Yeah, and we, we developed that because through matching, the best matching is gonna be multidimensional. Like if you look at the dating apps, they kind of suck 'cause they're not gathering very much personal data. And it's a combination of faster onboarding and just a simpler system that people can just like use.

And it also helps the app 'cause they don't actually wanna help people find dates 'cause then they lose customers with Game Tree. It's a public benefit corporation, so we're not legally required to maximize profit. But also the way we went down it is just looking at all the multidimensional aspects of.

People. And yeah, play style matters a lot. And you can even have a, a team for example, with a variety of personalities where some people naturally like a support role. Some people wanna be a tank, some people wanna do damage. Some people are natural leaders, some followers, some are extroverts, some are introverts.

Some are more paying attention to social layers, some are just optimizing the mechanics. You get a massive variety of people and it's not that you have to play with only people like yourself. It's actually a lot better to have a team with variety and not actually play with somebody like yourself 'cause you're competing for the same role.

But to have a awareness of even a lot of the context and nuance, for example, competitive and casual players, even at the exact same skill level, can find each other. Toxic one's like, Hey, you're not taking this seriously. Like when the other one's like, what? I'm just trying to have fun. Like, and to them, they're both trying to have fun.

They're just different and that's okay. But understanding those kinds of things and curating a tribe and players around that is gonna lead to a lot better experiences. And a lot of it even changes frame by frame based on the type of game, the types, aesthetics of play and such that it's accommodating

[01:15:33] Vision Battlesword: the concept of different types of fun is like a revelation for me.

I mean, not to say that I, I didn't, it didn't occur to me that there are different types of fun, but just for you to have broken them down, categorized them, built a framework around that is, that's amazing. Like, 'cause what you're talking about at this gamer toxicity problem, a lot of it came and, and it reflects to me.

Oh God, you said so much and like there's like

[01:16:00] John Uke: so many. Yeah. Dominance is even one that we associate with like purposeful toxicity we've noticed where somebody just likes, for example, railing on noobs.

[01:16:08] Vision Battlesword: Yeah.

[01:16:08] John Uke: When it's not even fair, there's a skill level gap.

[01:16:10] Vision Battlesword: Right.

[01:16:11] John Uke: And that's a lot of like the more explicit, like what people find toxic without it just being miscommunications, but at the same time, like it's valid in a way.

'cause that's just, that can be fun.

[01:16:21] Vision Battlesword: You said so many things. And so what I wanna do real quick is there's like at least two or three or maybe four threads that I wanna like bookmark by speaking them right now, before following any one of them. So that I like don't completely lose my train of thought. One thing.

Okay. So this toxicity, what makes something toxic or what makes people think someone's being toxic? To your point about the classic domination, you know, newbie domination, behavior, but there's other things, you know, being disrespectful. There's all sorts of different things that make toxicity.

[01:16:57] John Uke: And by the way, most toxicity is just somebody having a bad day.

Actually that that was a study by Riot games. I think the actual biggest toxicity is just the wrong people playing together.

[01:17:06] Vision Battlesword: That's the point I wanted to hone in on because that's exactly what your gamer DNA thing can highlight or showcase is. There can be a situation where two people are both just trying to have fun in good faith, doing their thing in their own way, but that doesn't vibe, that doesn't mesh well.

And then the label of toxic could get applied in that situation when in reality it's more like an incompatibility or a mismatch of the same type of two people trying to date each other who are just, they just, they wouldn't get along. So that's really interesting to me. The other thing that was really interesting to me that you brought up was this idea of team dynamics and noticing that actually if we have four tanks in a squad, that's not optimal.

Actually. Diversity and diversity of different play styles of different, let's call it fun profiles, like the types of things that people feel are fun, who's a natural leader versus who actually prefers to be a follower be in a supporting role versus who's really, really trying to win in a cutthroat wave versus other people who are actually more interested in the social dynamics, which even from a.

An effectiveness standpoint could be a really valuable attribute to have. Just like in Twilight Imperium, you can win the game with diplomacy.

[01:18:26] John Uke: Yeah. You could literally be the worst player in every other way. Right? Instead of people by the

[01:18:30] Vision Battlesword: diplomacy game. Right. But you work the social angle and Oh, look at that.

Somehow, you know, Johnny got to the top of the hill with the flag. So at any rate, there's that piece of it, which to me, the point I wanted to resonate with is the reflection of how, learning that there's an opportunity to go into a game if you have some level of meta awareness, to your point about the meta gaming component that we talked about very at the very, very beginning of the conversation, if you go into it with some level of an awareness that, oh, hey, there might actually be some lessons to be learned here, or there might actually be some valuable skills to be practiced here, and you notice at a slightly deeper level than just going in and scoring the points, or making the kills, or capturing the flag or whatever it is.

You're doing that, huh? This is really interesting when we've got these four different types of people playing together on a team, and it's not just about the character role that we embody, but it's actually our actual character and who we are as a human showing up in this avatar and the way that these different dynamics mix actually makes things really much more effective for problem solving.

And success criteria. What if I take that back into my life? What if I take that into my business? What if I take that idea into my family? Like, that's kind of cool like that there's that, there's valuable lessons to be cleaned. And then the final thing is just your concept of multiple types of fun that I really wanna ask you about in your gamer DNA system.

In terms of just elucidating for me a little bit about like what are all the different types of fun that you've categorized, but I know you've got something you wanna say.

[01:20:09] John Uke: Yeah, so we actually made a wiki, um, about this that goes into personality types. And I think that relates to fun a bit because I, I spent like probably 13, 14,000 hours studying personality psychology over the last about 20 years.

And what it's looking like is that we're genetic archetypes. We're not just random traits. And they've actually been discovering that recently where our genes are not just one-offs, but they're actually appearing in clusters, which is predictable once you are spending enough time in personality psychology.

And even when you look at, um, domestication of animals, they had a study in Russia where they were domesticating foxes and they start to basically become kinda like dogs. They, they, their ears got floppy, their snouts change. And the only thing they're filtering for is like, how close do you get before they go?

And like hissy you. But they're noticing all these other traits linked with that. And basically what they're probably filtering is like certain personality types of foxes that are naturally more agreeable or friendly. And my hypothesis is that we evolved these archetypes because it creates stronger tribes.

It's division of labor. And that's one of the greatest lessons that we learn from games is that we, it, it's such a strong, powerful way to see that. 'cause in day-to-day life, we kind of see ourselves as somewhat interchangeable. Like, yeah, we have a different job. You're like, oh, maybe I could have done that job or whatnot.

Or it's a blank slate. Or we invent a story to explain why we are the way we are, not as much because that's our nature and that whatever other life path like might have ended up here anyway. And that we're just rationalizing after the fact. But in a game, it's a lot more explicit. It's a lot more like you, this is your class.

You have very different abilities that you can use, different equipment that optimizes your character. And through this, it's extremely fun because it's almost like freestyling and music, like riffing with other people where you get to do your role and you get to specialize in it and you get to go deep.

And then you get to also be part of like something bigger than yourself. And then kind of like with dunes and dragons is, a lot of times you do the thing that you're the best at, but it's a game. You know, if it's at work, you're gonna be annoyed. 'cause the, the goal is profit. And if you're switching jobs, you're like, Hey, you suck at this job.

Like please don't do that. But if it's a game you're like, okay, well like I'm naturally a support person, but like I wanna. Play at the DPS and like if somebody wants to flex into that, it can be fun and like a safe container to sort of grow as a person and flex those muscles. When it comes to the tribes with these evolutionary archetypes, it's basically division of labor we and economics.

It's more efficient to have specialists, it's just more productive. And so we literally evolved to have a bunch of different specializations and with that, what it really comes down to is like what do you fear and how do you do things to get around what you fear? So our entire personalities from one way of looking at it are just a shell to like avoid our fears.

And a lot of the times what's fun for us differs based on the type of person and the types of fears that we have and what sorts of needs we're covering. For example, somebody could have a fear of chaos and then they might wanna be somebody who has like a lot of control elements, or it might be a safe place for them to be the chaos monkey and not feel like actually threatened in real life.

And it's almost a form of therapy. Or it could be somebody who's like really wants to be the best because they're afraid that they don't fit in with the tribe. So either they can just be the best and be wanted on a team because they're good or they can kind of flex more and like try to just be somebody who's really.

Not in the spotlight and is just shining the light on others and have a container for that. And with games, you could, especially video games, but especially in a lot of board game stores have game nights and stuff where you can even just try different strategies game across game or with different groups and sort of be in these sorts of environments.

Or you can play the long game and see, like you are saying, like letting somebody get ahead or preserving a relationship or handicapping or doing things in a lot of different ways. There's really so much space when it comes to the gamer, DNA. There are correlations with personality psychology elements.

There's a system called Objective Personality System that I study where they figured out how to apply scientific method to personality psychology. So a lot of this won't necessarily always show up in like a Myers-Briggs or Enneagram test, for example, but more and more dimensions are being discovered that a lot of them do tend to map out too.

[01:24:19] Vision Battlesword: What are some examples of the different types of fun that you've discovered?

[01:24:25] John Uke: Okay, so we have a nice little infographic here. The game of DNA framework as a way of like making it simpler. There's 10 kind of bigger categories that each of them makes up. A couple subcategories. Uh, one example is action that would be excitement and mechanical skills.

Uh, strategy is complexity and critical thinking. And the reason this is, for example, nuanced is that chess, for example, is not that complicated. There's not that many rules in chess, but it does require a lot of critical thinking. Whereas some games like Twilight and Purium have like a. A rule book that's 20 times more complicated and also has critical thinking.

[01:25:02] Vision Battlesword: It's like 20,000 times more complicated than chess, to

[01:25:05] John Uke: be

[01:25:06] Vision Battlesword: fair. Yeah.

[01:25:06] John Uke: So, but it's not like one of them is objectively a better game than the other. Right. It's just if somebody likes complexity and somebody doesn't Right, then it's just different person by person.

[01:25:14] Vision Battlesword: You could easily, a person could easily make the argument that chess is a better game on the grounds of simplicity among many others.

[01:25:20] John Uke: Yeah. And that some people wouldn't agree 'cause they like complexity.

[01:25:22] Vision Battlesword: Right.

[01:25:23] John Uke: A challenge is difficulty plus practice. Some people like never wanna practice something and other people like, like games where if you practice intentionally, you get specifically better. Like some people literally just like sit there and like aim and practice shooting arrows.

Sure. Uh, competition is dominance and status.

[01:25:39] Vision Battlesword: Okay.

[01:25:39] John Uke: Fellowship is teamwork and socializing.

[01:25:42] Vision Battlesword: Yep.

[01:25:42] John Uke: Completion is achievement and grinding

[01:25:45] Vision Battlesword: Interesting. Grinding is fun for some people.

[01:25:48] John Uke: Yeah. That's idle gaming. That's like Yeah. Right. Farmville and stuff,

[01:25:51] Vision Battlesword: right?

[01:25:51] John Uke: Yeah. It is not one of my personal ones as much. Me neither.

But some people that's like their favorite thing and like about a multiplayer game for example, is like a lot of the content is grinding uhhuh, but some people are not as into that. And it just varies by person.

[01:26:03] Vision Battlesword: Right.

[01:26:03] John Uke: And a lot of this also overlaps with personality psychology I've noticed as well, where certain types of people can do repetitive tasks more, have a higher threshold for that than others where it's like stimulating or it's, it's relaxing for like their vagus nerve or it gives them a sense of like steady progress and achievement.

[01:26:18] Vision Battlesword: On this point about grinding though, I just wanna highlight that one more time. Someone will sit there and I, I played, I played a dark room for a couple of hours. Are you familiar with that game? Ever heard of it? It's a text-based dungeon crawler game that's just like, oh my gosh, it's the griest of the grinds.

It's just such a menial task-based click here. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Click here. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. It's crazy. But anyway, I played that game for a few hours and I actually noticed as much as I really, really disliked the experience of it, I noticed how it had started to addict me. Anyway, I just, I wanted to grind to that next, I needed another hut.

I just gotta build that next hut so that I can get two more villagers so that then I can finally, you know, trap the wild beast. So that's roaming through the woods or whatever it is that I'm grinding toward. And the noticing, what I'm trying to just point out is how that is so identical to the kind of grinding that we do at work.

It's exactly identical to having some kind of a routine, you know, task-based role for some. Company, some organization, a machine, you know, being a, being a, a component of an overall system, an overall process, grinding out your part to move the overall ball down the field towards some kind of goal. And yet people will do, to your point, it's a, it's a type of fun that you have identified.

People will do that for fun.

[01:28:02] John Uke: Yeah. And it's not

[01:28:03] Vision Battlesword: very obvious all night long. And then they will hate their job of doing that exact same thing the next day for money.

[01:28:11] John Uke: And then you'll find one player who likes that and another one's like, what is wrong with you?

[01:28:14] Vision Battlesword: Right. So it's just such a fascinating, this entire topic is just so fascinating of how diverse this entire space of games, like, there's such a range of different things that we can positively identify as a game.

Everything from chess to twilight imperium, and everything in between. And there's all of these different parts of those kinds of experiences that different people will attach to as the thing that they're getting their dopamine hit from.

[01:28:46] John Uke: Yeah. So if, if you pay attention, you'll start to see patterns where like, oh, the types of games I like are, like, for example, I like high complexity games, like a lot more than most people.

So I've become very deliberate about who I invite to play those kinds of games. Where before, you know, I'm just happy to play and I just wanna get anybody into it. 'cause I think it's fun. But as I've matured, I've realized like. Oh, I'm not even gonna try to get this person to play 'cause they're just, no matter what, they're just not gonna like it.

Mm-hmm. And the game Tree bot that we've been working on, it's basically just a really quick, easy way to put people together. I'd like to, uh, have it contextual to the game where you get the gamer, the DNA of the game itself. 'cause if you get people raid a game and you know the DNA of the people, then you can know the DNA of the game based on how people are rating it.

Where you can see patterns of like, oh, people who like dominance for example. That's how we proved that Doda require is a more challenging game than League of Legends, which used to be a big debate. It was What's

[01:29:43] Vision Battlesword: Doda

[01:29:44] John Uke: Defense of the ancients? Okay. It's at moba. Um, there was a big debate where those were two very popular games and Doda versus League, and there'd be all these conflicts about which one requires more skill.

Now it's pretty well known that it's Doda. Um, but early on we were able to just look at the database and just subjectively see that players who like challenge more are rating Doda higher, for example. And then if you could do something like that with individual people, like just curating your friend groups or curating them in the context of specific games.

For example, there's like party board games, like, um, cards Against Humanity, for example, where challenge isn't really like that much of a thing. It's more about, you know, understanding people and making funny jokes and stuff. It's not like you can really optimize that much. Do you want, want

[01:30:30] Vision Battlesword: me to finish off the

[01:30:30] John Uke: last

[01:30:31] Vision Battlesword: It would be weird.

It would be weird for someone to play Cards Against Humanity. And be hyperfocused on winning, like hyperfocused on collecting the, the most number of tricks.

[01:30:43] John Uke: Yeah. And you can focus on winning, but you're so limited in what you can do. You're just basically guessing something and making a game. It's, it's like you can be focused on winning, but it's not gonna be that much different from somebody who's not trying as hard.

[01:30:54] Vision Battlesword: Yeah. It's just an another example of how different games would appeal to different types of people or different types of players, but generally speaking, if you're playing Cards Against Humanity and enjoying it and understanding what it's about, you're realizing that the, the way you win the game is by making other people laugh.

[01:31:13] John Uke: Mm-hmm.

[01:31:14] Vision Battlesword: And not so much by collecting the number of tricks. Even if, and I've certainly played rounds of Cards against Humanity where people were appearing to be very competitive about that, but at the end of the day, you feel like a winner if you are liked and

[01:31:31] John Uke: Yeah. If

[01:31:32] Vision Battlesword: you're

[01:31:32] John Uke: invited to play again.

[01:31:33] Vision Battlesword: Right.

Yeah.

[01:31:34] John Uke: Um, I'll, I'll share just the last of them since we already went so far. Sure. Um, discovery is autonomy and exploration.

[01:31:40] Vision Battlesword: Discovery. I like. Yeah, of course. Mm-hmm.

[01:31:43] John Uke: Aesthetics can be graphics and sound.

[01:31:45] Vision Battlesword: Totally.

[01:31:46] John Uke: Or the inputs and outputs of a game. Expression is role play and artistic creativity and story is characters and lore, which can be like you, like a certain character, or do you like the world that something exists in?

Yeah, and some people interestingly like, you know, like really good characters, but they don't care about the lore. Some people really like lore but don't care that much about characters, interestingly.

[01:32:07] Vision Battlesword: Right. Huh. Well, I'm not gonna get into it right now. I, I would love to break that down with you offline actually, and get like way more into the weeds on the, that entire gamer DNA structure that you've created.

But just off the top of my head, I can imagine, I'm sure you can also imagine there's even more

[01:32:26] John Uke: richness. Yeah. This isn't exhaustive or a perfect model. Yeah. It's just better than, in my opinion, other things that I've seen.

[01:32:33] Vision Battlesword: Yeah. Anything else I've heard of so

[01:32:35] John Uke: and so. It's really cool. It's useful when you're designing algorithms and stuff to kind of think about things this way.

And then in day to day life, it's so easy to get caught up knowing you personally. You're very abstract and good at seeing the frameworks in the abstract. I'm not naturally as attuned to that. If I don't have the container of optimizing human connections through software, I wouldn't know to think or pay attention to this stuff.

But having done that, like it's, I've discovered that it's a useful tool that then we can take to our own lives and help us play and buy games that we like and then curate the right kinds of people to share those experiences with.

[01:33:10] Vision Battlesword: Yeah, totally. I mean, it's just what you've done for gaming. I think it opens up a dimension for gamers to find each other that's similar to the wealth of new.

Ideas and information that we've gotten from personality assessments, like what you were talking about with Myers Briggs or Enneagram or Objective Personality System, where we can now start to identify, oh, okay, there's different types of people, and so then the ways that we sometimes discover tension or conflicts or things become, there's friction or difficulty in our relationships and our team dynamics in our work environments.

We can apply that to gaming as well to understand that. Oh, okay. I see. Why this game group, why we're continuing to have these kind of, let's just say, problems or recurring patterns or dynamics that are making the whole experience less fun for some people or for everyone. Oh, I get it. We're trying to play certain types of games and there's certain types of people here that don't enjoy those types of games or that are focusing on a specific element of it that's out of alignment with what maybe the rest of us are.

[01:34:21] John Uke: I think the. Poster child example of that

[01:34:24] Vision Battlesword: Yes.

[01:34:25] John Uke: Is in a Dungeons and Dragons group, you have role players and power gamers.

[01:34:29] Vision Battlesword: What's a power gamer?

[01:34:30] John Uke: A power gamer is like, I'm gonna level up the fastest. I'm gonna optimize my stats. I'm just gonna like beat the encounter and solve the quest as efficiently as possible.

Then you have role players who are like, I'm gonna throw a pebble at the like level 99 sleeping dragon. Like, or they're just like doing shit. Um, well that wouldn't be, they're having

[01:34:47] Vision Battlesword: fun.

[01:34:47] John Uke: Yeah. Well I guess that's not as much a role player. That's just kind of like a chaos monkey. But yeah, the point is you get very different kinds of players, and especially when we talked about gaming being potentially the highest form of art, role playing games specifically are like, I think the highest version of even that because you can bring in like props and there is acting involved and a lot of, even by gaming standards, there's a lot more space for different elements that can go into it.

And the more of that you can bring in, like the more off the rails or different kinds of experiences can exist.

[01:35:24] Vision Battlesword: Well, it's sort of like, to me, a role playing game like Dungeons Dragons for example, is the sandbox to end all sandboxes.

[01:35:33] John Uke: Yeah.

[01:35:33] Vision Battlesword: Because there's no, like, you're not even limited by the constraints of hardware, software, technology at all components

[01:35:40] John Uke: or some dice.

[01:35:41] Vision Battlesword: Yeah, I mean certainly there, there is a structure that you know, that is. Laid down to give you some constraints of, okay. You know, there's a book, right, that you can read that describes the different kind of characters or obstacles or entities that all guidelines. But within those constraints, I mean layered on top of those constraints, the only boundary of the virtual reality system is the human mind is the human imagination.

And even more than that, the collective imagination of a group, it's like the ultimate sandbox. But it's interesting because when you think of it that way, per our prior definitions, it is not actually a game in a weird sort of way.

[01:36:25] John Uke: I think it is. If the game master issues quests,

[01:36:29] Vision Battlesword: well the game master creates a game within it.

[01:36:31] John Uke: Yeah.

[01:36:32] Vision Battlesword: Is is what I'm seeing now. It is a toy sandbox. Yeah. It's a framework for games. Unless virtual reality,

[01:36:38] John Uke: packaged adventure.

[01:36:40] Vision Battlesword: Right. But the But someone has to actually create a game, and the game is defined as a goal to be achieved and a set of obstacles that prevent you from achieving that goal.

[01:36:52] John Uke: Yeah.

On one level is leveling up the purpose of the game.

[01:36:57] Vision Battlesword: Well that's a gamification within the game.

[01:36:59] John Uke: Hmm. Yeah. 'cause you really get such a massive variety of people. And that's kind of about where knowing yourself and others is so good. Because if you're playing with like a bunch of like actual literal actors, they're gonna.

Play extremely differently than a bunch of business analysts and they can find common ground in stretch and stuff, but it's kind of nice just having that sort of understanding going into a situation. For example, you said that you can like give somebody an advantage or hold back and stuff. In a way, like if you're an optimized character, you're kind of being a dick if your character is just so much more powerful than everybody else's, even if you used a fairer system to build that character.

And so it's sort of like what kind of experience do you want? And a lot of it I, yes, feel like also is contextual based on your life and about what you kind of naturally enjoy and also where are you trying to balance your life. For example, somebody who lives in an apartment where they don't, they can't like nail stuff into the walls and they don't have a lot of money to decorate.

Like might get more out of the sims than somebody who has a lot of money and owns a house where they can just literally decorate their house. So as somebody living in the apartment, they can play the sims and they can decorate a virtual house and they get a lot of the feeling and the human needs met of being able to like build a beautiful space and of self-expression without actually being able to have that manifested in like the more broader external reality.

But then you can play Sims online and you can invite your friends over to your house in the game and it's, you basically get the same thing. And it's in a lot of ways even better because you get more access to choices, more customizations. There's a lot of costs and drawbacks, but I, I think games are just like a really amazing way to do that.

And then if you do this, you could actually develop design tastes or figure out your own style. So when the time comes to buy stuff, you're actually better off. And that goes back to the skill training and the preparation.

[01:38:52] Vision Battlesword: Okay. What about cheating?

[01:38:54] John Uke: Oh, my favorite.

[01:38:57] Vision Battlesword: Your

[01:38:57] John Uke: favorite? Yeah. Um, yeah. What, what do you think?

[01:39:01] Vision Battlesword: What does that mean? Well, I, I'm just, what I, the reason I ask the question is because I do not understand it. I do not understand the motivation behind it. It does not make any sense to me. And yet I know that there's some people who nonetheless do it. And I think there was even a point in my life as a younger person where I did it.

And then at some point I evolved and realized that there is no fun in that concept for me. So I'm just curious, like, have you ever played games with people who cheated or tried to cheat? And what did you think about that?

[01:39:38] John Uke: I think as an adult you see it less and less 'cause people are better at it. No, I think it's, um, I think it's a lot related to the super ego as a child.

We're more just like, I just wanna maximize the victory that as we get older, we're more socially aware of like the group and how we're perceived and just a lot more complicated with our awarenesses. So in a way, like eventually you realize that by cheating you're just kind of cheating yourself in a way.

Um, and then you're just also just gonna carry around as long as you're not a psychopath, like negative antisocial emotions. Uh, as a result of that. Or pro-social emotions in a negative way. Um, but like, I guess cheating can be fun if it's like, you know, exciting creation and release of tension, like you mentioned.

Um, if your goals are to like, you know, maybe your life is boring and you need something exciting, or if you're not like achieving much in the outside world, but it's fun for you to achieve it in a video game world, but maybe you need shortcuts. So I don't think like cheating's a good way to go. Um, but I could see how aspects of it would be fun or at least filling needs.

[01:40:46] Vision Battlesword: Well, I could see that too, now that you mention it. I mean, in the sense of a video game, for example, like going all the way back, I'm, maybe this still exists. I'm sure there's still cheat codes that exist in video games today. But going all the way back in my personal history to like doom, you know, or, uh, some of these other old shooter games where you could put in a cheat code and, and achieve God mode or you could achieve all infinite resources, infinite resources.

Perfect. And that is fun in a weird sort of way. It's like there, there's a, there's a, there is some fun in being able to temporarily step outside the constraints. Of the game and just dominate, just experience total domination and run around and blow up everything and murder everything. And just do anything you want to do within the sandbox.

That there's some kind of fun. And that's even a part of your fun framework, isn't it? Domination is in there somewhere. Yeah. Or something

[01:41:43] John Uke: like that. Yeah. And then there's also like excitement, for example. Yeah. Excite, like things can be more exciting if you have infinite ammo.

[01:41:48] Vision Battlesword: But on the other hand, when we're talking about a social game or, or a multiplayer game, a board game, for example, I'm sure also in video games, I think there are ways that people learn and know how to cheat.

Like using pro special programs or something like that, they could probably cheat in games. It, it just seems weird to me. And I know people, I actually know, like I have friends who will actually cheat, will actually try to cheat in board games when we play. And I have to keep, keep an eye on them and just explain to them that it's like, that's not fun.

But for, for them it is. You know? And so it's just, there's an interesting other psychological piece to this, which, which for some people having achieved the status of winner, even if. They didn't adhere to the so-called rules or constraints of the game and, and, and created an unfair advantage for themself.

They still value that reward. And for me, I just don't value that reward. But I value a lot of the other things on your list. Aesthetics and excitement and discovery and connection and all these things.

[01:43:03] John Uke: It's interesting too that even breaking a promise can be cheating.

[01:43:08] Vision Battlesword: Yeah.

[01:43:08] John Uke: But if it's allowed in the mechanics of the game and the social construct tracked, that can be fun for everybody involved.

Like game thrones, twilight and Imperium, like a lot of games, it's sort of understood by a lot of, not everybody at all, but a lot of people will say like, okay, the last turn, you know, all bets are off. Like you only need to be reliable up until like it's the final grab. And a lot of times that's the only way to win.

[01:43:32] Vision Battlesword: When you say reliable in this case, you mean there's certain types of games where there are binding agreements versus

[01:43:40] John Uke: Yeah.

[01:43:40] Vision Battlesword: It's a total and it's

[01:43:41] John Uke: part of the game.

[01:43:42] Vision Battlesword: Right. So when you say reliable, you mean? Yeah. If we make a promise in this game, we are assuming that the rules of the game require that agreement to be kept up until a certain point at which point don't, or they require it,

[01:43:59] John Uke: but it's just So

[01:44:00] Vision Battlesword: contract betrayal is legal.

[01:44:01] John Uke: Yeah.

[01:44:01] Vision Battlesword: But that's a really, yeah. I like the direction.

[01:44:03] John Uke: Game of Thrones is a great example of that where. It's kind of hard to win without screwing somebody. 'cause as you're getting close to winning, everybody's gonna team up on you. Even your ally kind of probably should stop you if they're playing the game seriously.

[01:44:15] Vision Battlesword: Well, that's the whole point of a game, I think, like Game of Thrones is to, to simulate betrayal.

[01:44:20] John Uke: But you could have like an agreement like, yeah, we're allies, we're not gonna attack each other. And, and if we are, we have to give each other a turns heads up. But maybe you don't give them the turns, heads up because otherwise there's like no way you're gonna win.

[01:44:30] Vision Battlesword: And that's technically not cheating, but it may be perceived as a betrayal outside of the

[01:44:38] John Uke: mm-hmm.

[01:44:39] Vision Battlesword: Construct of the game and actually damage your real live relationship.

[01:44:42] John Uke: Yep. And then it's funny because two people could do the same thing and even just the nuance of how you do it and based on your relationship with the person, like one of them could be totally fine with it.

Another one could be like, oh, I don't trust you anymore.

[01:44:54] Vision Battlesword: Have you ever had a relationship be damaged based on something that happened in a game?

[01:44:58] John Uke: I think when younger we're just like worse at this layer of gaming, especially without super egos. So I remember like Monopoly for example, and risk and stuff.

Like people like walk away from those things, like actually genuinely pissed off at each other. But as an adult, not so much. The thing I, I, we actually made a funny infographic about the things that piss off every personality type in gaming. One thing that would piss me off is if somebody just like out of game has like some sort of vendetta where they're like, just going out of their way to attack me or like hamper me for like a reason that doesn't make sense within the context of the game.

So for example, like throwing away their chance of winning to like kind of take somebody else down. Where in a simulation you kind of wanna have like, you know, a reset playing board and like even footing and assuming that everybody's trying to maximize their self-interest of like, you know, the objectives of the game.

So somebody's throwing that out just kind of rationally, quote unquote. Um, that's something that for me, for example, that I don't like. Mm-hmm. Um, but everybody has different triggers. Like some people just don't like being rushed or like micromanaged or like whatever. And like, we've all caught these different really funny sticking points.

[01:46:07] Vision Battlesword: Hmm. What is the number one game that you've played in your life that you feel had the the most positive impact for you as a person and why?

[01:46:17] John Uke: Oh gosh. Like. My whole life just flashed before my eyes. It's

[01:46:21] Vision Battlesword: been one big game.

[01:46:22] John Uke: Yeah. It's hard to even answer video games versus board games. Lately I've been finding myself playing more and more board games because as an adult I really value the social aspect.

But at the same time, I'm also more and more using video games as a way to stay in touch with friends who aren't local, living in a lot of different cities and countries. It's a great tool. So I like my natural personality is biased towards social. I'm the type of person that likes to build some sort of like logical machine engineer type thing in exchange for like the tribe to like me.

And often what happens, the trap is that you build the thing and you're like not paying attention to the tribe and they're like, what's wrong with you? And you have good intentions, but you just do it wrong. And that's a lot of us just using our best tools and overdrive and not being balanced. So for me, the types of games that.

I find the most valuable are the ones where I had like interesting social experiences at a young age. The one that stands out would be like, war Hammer, like, uh, that was something that kind of bonded a lot of friend group and we'd just create terrain. And it was just kind of like very unscripted fun.

Ultima Online was the first massive multiplayer game ever, and I've had a lot of weird ass shit happen in that game that I'll never forget in my life. And I started, I was like 12 years old, just like, and these are the kinds of things that you can't script that make really good stories. And so for me, I think I, I already am naturally predisposed to be kind of tactical, logical strategic.

So yes, games refine that, but it's not as necessary. But the parts that really like are the parts that make me kind of get the butterflies and like, looking back on life, are those sorts of unscripted social experiences that come from games. How about yourself?

[01:48:02] Vision Battlesword: Yeah. Like you, it's, it's, it feels like an unfair question because there's so many games that have so profoundly impacted me and, and like, I feel like altered the direction of my life and I'm, I'm really don't feel like I'm exaggerating when I say that the board game go comes to mind as just profoundly, profoundly meaningful as it relates to the story of my life.

There's several video games. There was an adventure, I played a lot of adventure video games. There was one called Gabriel Knight, and it was actually the sequel. Then I played at about that same age. When you were playing Ultima Online. I was maybe 10, 11, 12 years old, and the game was set in New Orleans and it was kind of a vampire mystery game.

And in the game it was like a part of the richness of the game. You talked about aesthetics and you talked about lore as part of your framework for gamer, DNA. And so the lore and the aesthetic of the city of New Orleans, it's like going through the game. Playing the game was like a, a New Orleans adventure simulator.

Like there were just everything that you would get if you actually went physically there and explored the city.

[01:49:18] John Uke: Beautiful city, very charming and unique,

[01:49:20] Vision Battlesword: right? And so at that age, I had never traveled. I'd never been anywhere. I'd certainly never been to New Orleans, didn't understand this is a very adult game, didn't know what really what this was all about.

But I literally felt like I lived a lifetime in that city. And then later when I actually went there as an adult, it was, it was like I was coming back. It was like I had returned to a place I'd already been, even though I never visited before. It was so like that kind of experience that can happen in games, it's just so powerful where you really feel like you've gone into an alternate.

Universe dimension, lifetime in some ways, but, so I could go on and on. But the number one game I, I have to give a shout out to as far as being like, the thing that really impacted me, has impacted me the most in a profoundly positive way in my life, is a video game called DAUs X from back at the turn of the millennium, 1999, 2000 was when it came out.

And that game is a rabbit hole. It's a story-driven first person shooter, hybrid RPG. So you get to build a character and develop it through the course of the game and modify it and upgrade it and gain superpowers and things. But it, it's, it's really a secret vehicle for a really, really deep, intricate, interactive story combined with a red pill education.

Mm-hmm. In like, what's really going on in the world.

[01:50:54] John Uke: Ah.

[01:50:55] Vision Battlesword: And so for me to get that at that formative age, like right when I was like 18, 19, 20 years old, and I've played it and replayed it so many times throughout my life, it really, I did, I didn't even realize until playing it later in life in my twenties and thirties or later on in my thirties, especially how much it affected me and set me on some of the paths that I've been,

[01:51:18] John Uke: what you're talking about with Theo sex.

[01:51:19] Vision Battlesword: Yes.

[01:51:20] John Uke: It was extra meaningful because you were experiencing it like you were the one. Figuring stuff out, right? Solving the puzzles, making the decisions. If you look at the best ways to learn, they're very hands-on. Like a lot of the Greek philosophers would just ask questions. Professors, psychologists and therapists, business coaches, a lot are just asking questions.

And in a game, because it's so interactive, you, yeah, you could watch a movie and you could. Learn vicariously through the characters, but from firsthand experience, if you make the connection and forge that connection in your own brain because you're the one who thought of it, you're gonna remember that so much better and it's gonna be so much more meaningful.

Or if you fuck it up, it's you're gonna remember that so much better than if you just vicariously watch somebody make a mistake in a show or a movie. And then it ties into a lot of really even things about like archetypes and mythology where we are these very spiritual beings that have these unconscious associations and we are kind of a hive mind and we have these archetypical figures and these stories throughout different cultures and dimensions of life.

But when you put those things in a game like do sex or mass effect, those things become a lot more real and powerful and educational and embodying and empowering when you're proactively engaging with the content. And I think that's another one of the beautiful aspects of gaming, that it makes it such a high form of art.

[01:52:49] Vision Battlesword: Yes, exactly. That's exactly when we've touched on it several different times in different ways, but I love bringing everything back home to that crystallization of the importance and the power of games because of the agency that we have with them. It's completely different. And you used the word experience and we've used it so many times, but like that is the key.

It's when we learn, when we assimilate. Knowledge, information, skills, whatever it is, through experience, it's a completely different type of learning than if we are just simply being told and asked to remember or memorize facts and data. So I, I really think like that's the crux of why games, they're so central almost to our humanity in a way.

Like if you think of societies going back in history as far as you can possibly go, you know, in the historical record and then in the oral tradition before that, they've always been games and they've always been central to our development as people, as individuals within the tribe, the community, the society.

I really feel that they are an almost infinitely elegant, sophisticated vehicle for the deepest wisdom and capacity that we want to create and preserve. And there's, there's a sense of experimentation like you to, to your point with it as well, it's like going back around to the example of how we took a set of tasks and framed it one way as an assignment and I didn't want to do it.

And then we framed it differently. As a goal to be achieved and then backing into what would have to be done in order to achieve that goal. If we were to gamify it and all of a sudden I wanted to do it. It's like the exact same thing with learning with how we absorb lessons through DAUs X mass effect, or any other of these games that we've talked about.

When we experience something, it's like we integrate it into our entire being.

[01:55:07] John Uke: It's like we want to be alive. Like we don't just wanna be vegetables in the matrix,

[01:55:11] Vision Battlesword: right?

[01:55:12] John Uke: If you brain scan, like EEG scan, people watching television, the brain's like practically asleep. But that's not true for video games.

[01:55:20] Vision Battlesword: Right?

[01:55:20] John Uke: And you could be tired after working and you could be like, I don't have any energy. Like I'm just gonna like watch something. But a lot of gamers, like they're tired too and they start playing games and like you said, they can go all night and it actually gives them energy even though they're spending energy.

Right. And if you extrapolate that out over the course of years, who's gonna be better off the person who's constantly challenging themself and using their brain or somebody who's just a vegetable for many hours a day. Yeah. Not to say that movies and stuff can't be great and don't have a place, but that's where I think it's sort of the, the middle ground where some gaming into the mix is actually great if you're otherwise gonna be substituting it with some other activities anyways.

[01:56:00] Vision Battlesword: Right. That's the difference between a game and just a story. And there can be much overlap between those two things. But there's a critical difference between a passive activity versus an active or interactive activity. And I, and I'm realizing now we're coming kind of to the, to the close of our conversation, but, and so this isn't necessarily something to open back up.

Maybe we can do it in a sequel, but there's some kind of relationship between a game. 'cause you keep using the term, and I brought it up too, in that life that I feel like I lived in New Orleans when I was 12. There's something about going into a game that really is like going into an alternate life.

Like we, like it's an extension of our life.

[01:56:47] John Uke: It's so cool

[01:56:48] Vision Battlesword: into this virtual reality. So there's like a sense in which that it's, it's more life that we get to live in some way through our imagination and that there's some parallel to that. And like a dream, like sometimes like we playing a game can be kind of like having a dream in that same way that it's another dimension of our overall life experience.

And that's just so fascinating. It's like we, I feel like we talk for almost two hours now and we've barely scratched the surface of like, what in the heck are we doing?

[01:57:19] John Uke: Life can be brutal as an entrepreneur, there's a lot of high highs and low lows that get added onto that. You know, a bunch of customers are disappointed, things are broken.

People might lose their jobs. You just lost your savings. You just wasted a bunch of people's money. There's a lot of roller coastering that goes on. And the thing that I found as a pattern that gets me out when you're at those troughs is remembering that this is all just a game. And you could look at the situation and be like, oh, this sucks.

Or you could be like, oh, it's just a game. It's a challenge. I can make it fun. And I found that that's the thing that can really help one pick oneself up more than anything. Not taking everything too seriously and remembering that like life is a blessing and that we just have right now. And if you're not playing it for fun, then you're losing.

[01:58:09] Vision Battlesword: That feels like the perfect note to kind of wrap up and close on because I, I completely agree with you. You know, I think the more and more that I start to embody that philosophy that this really is the meta of all meta games, and then we just get to create these nested games within games, within games, within games, within this sandbox, simulator, whatever this universe is that we can just have fun all the time.

There is a state of continuous, ongoing play that we can embody and drop into. And it really does start with just noticing the way that these rules, many times, all of these rules that we think that we're beholden to are these arbitrary constructs that we have all collectively created to play this game for ourselves.

And that just by shifting our perspective to noticing how, oh, there's a goal and an objective here and there's a victory condition and a thing that I wanna achieve, and what if I viewed this as a state of play or a game instead of a burden or an obligation or something that I'm being forced to do. All of a sudden our reality can shift in a moment.

[01:59:33] John Uke: Life is magic. Nothing is real. Just giant game. Have fun with it.

[01:59:39] Vision Battlesword: Thank you very, very much, John. This was a really awesome conversation. Yeah, I had so much fun.

[01:59:44] John Uke: Very much enjoyed it. Thanks for having your vision. This is a really fun conversation for me as well.

[01:59:48] Vision Battlesword: Awesome. Thanks for joining me for Intentional Evolution.

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Thanks again and I'll see you in the singularity.