 The players in a chess tournament recently got kicked out of a hotel. It turns out that the manager can't stand chestnuts boasting in an open foyer. Now, when I say that I'm a fan of board games, a lot of people are going to imagine me taking a game of risk a little too seriously and back away slowly. The thing is, board gaming is a much, much, much, much, much more varied and interesting hobby than just clue and checkers in the other games that you were forced to play when the power was out when you were a kid. So you take this, Galaxy Drucker. This is a game where you and your friends have a limited amount of time to cobble together a spaceship from a pile of parts. Then you all race through the galaxy and try to survive as your ships get smashed to pieces by asteroids and attacked by pirates. It's great fun. The reason I'm showing you these is twofold. First, if you're still looking for a last minute gift idea, board games can be awesome. You can find a local game shop and ask the owner what kind of game is right for you. Second, game design might save us all. I know that sounds weird, stick with me. First, we're going to talk about something called the hedonic treadmill. Hedonic comes from the Greek word hedony, meaning pleasure. It's the same root as hedonism, which is the philosophy that why not to pursue pleasure above all else in one's life. The treadmill is a metaphor for how people have to do work just to stay in the same place, mood-wise. See, the human brain is really geared towards comparison. That's why you're so good at pattern recognition. You notice things that are different and tend to ignore things that are the same. So if you have a steady stream of pleasant experiences, you need bigger and bigger highs to get the same rush of satisfaction. The same is true for pain. You know how heroin addicts have to take bigger and bigger doses as their body acclimatizes to the drug? Well, your brain does the same thing with everything, whether it's pleasurable or painful. For example, people who win the lottery and people who have limbs amputated tend to report just about the same levels of happy after six months. Now, that sounds crazy to us because rationally, we think that people who have a lot of money should be happier than people who have lost a leg. But that's just not how our brains work. So if we were trying to build a blueprint for a utopian future where everybody enjoyed their lives as much as possible, there is a neurological problem with just focusing on the things that we think tend to make people happy. That is to say, if we were able to somehow break through all of the barriers of limited resources and create a worldwide happiness engine that would keep everybody happy 24-7, we'd have to generate greater and greater levels of happiness just to keep pace with the hedonic treadmill. It's just not sustainable. Which is why I think it's possible that game design might contain our future. I mean, game design is really the science of creating systems that are self-sustaining and rewarding, not just pleasurable. Games are balanced at the sweet spot between investment and reward. There's a definite calculus that goes into making games like World of Warcraft and Pinball fun to play. Game design itself is figuring out how to maximize that balance, so you want to invest your time and energy in the game. The real distinction to be made is between a rewarding experience and a pleasurable experience. Think about it. Games aren't just constant streams of euphoria. When you're thinking hard about your next move or experimenting with a new strategy or watching your opponent trounce you, those things aren't fun in and of themselves, but they're part of an overall experience that is rewarding and makes you want to continue playing. Maybe that sort of architecture and the science that goes along with it is a good idea for things like economies and governments and even people's lives. Find a way to make the system exciting and fun to engage in, to make it rewarding, and people will want to play. Does game design contain the future of humanity? Leave comments. Let me know what you think. Oh man, comments last week were so good. So good. I tried my best to respond to specific people in the comments themselves, but I'd like to summarize a couple of overall points that I thought were very excellent. First, yes, I didn't mention Gattica, but that was kind of intentional. I feel that Gattica is more of a movie about genetic profiling and discrimination rather than what happens when people's abilities actually diverge due to genetic engineering. Also, it's true that universally useful technology tends to be democratized and to reduce in price over time, but there is going to be an initial period where only the mega rich are going to be able to genetically engineer their children, and that Gatt might never be surmounted. And finally, something that I didn't even think of, generational divides are going to be a huge deal. If we engineer our children to be smarter and faster and better than us, then how are we supposed to raise them? Thank you for watching. I'm in Costa Rica right now, so I'm not going to be able to respond to comments as quickly as I would like to, but please discuss amongst yourselves, blah blah subscribe, blah share, and I'll see you next week. Thank you.