 You know, some people tell me Snake went out of style with no KIA phones, but I think it's going to be trendy again in a few years. Until then, I'm playing the long game. I'm pretty sure that US Building Code requires that at least one closet in every home should have a dusty copy of Monopoly, a game that's more than 80 years old, with older versions stretching back more than a century. Odds are, you've probably played it at some point, most likely at a fairly young age. Only you didn't actually read the rules, so you didn't know that when you land on a free space and choose not to buy it, you have to auction it off, so your game took two hours longer than it should have, but regardless, have you ever really considered what Monopoly is trying to say? We all sit down around a table, each starting out with enough money to purchase a fair amount of land, and spend an hour clawing over each other to buy up property, to renovate blocks of houses into hotels, and drive up the rent necessary to stay there, with the ultimate goal of eventually owning so much of the city, and making it so expensive that you're the only one with any money left. The game was first designed by a woman named Lizzie McGee as promotional material for Georgia's land tax reform, and it originally came with two sets of rules, the monopolist rules we're mostly familiar with, and a second set that was supposed to demonstrate how adopting Georgia's policies would change the ultimate outcome of the game, increasing the wealth of all players instead of just one. Think about that for a second. There are 275 million published copies of a work of political propaganda calling to revolutionize our existing structure of land ownership and taxation, and if you're like the modal player, this is probably the first time you've thought about what it might be trying to say. We mostly just talk about how it's not a very fun game. Monopoly isn't unique in the way it renders an audaciously blunt manifesto almost totally invisible. It's incredible how labeling something a game grants it a unique exemption when it comes to the interpretation of media. There's an implicit agreement between game designers and players that if you suspend your existing values for a little while, chase the things you're told to chase, care about the things you're told to care about, and if you do it the way you're told to, you'll have a good time. Usually that's not a big ask. You want me to spend an hour deeply invested in solving a fictional murder? Awesome, that sounds like a blast. You want me to build a super efficient virtual widget factory until, or maybe a little after bedtime? Hell yeah, let's do this. Even when the values of a game explicitly conflict with our own, we generally expect a comfortable distance between the two. Like games that ask us to role play as the bad guy go to great lengths to avoid, minimize, and abstract the actual evil parts of the evil hijinks we're simulating. It would be weird if the rules of risk asked you to meditate on the nihilistic horrors of industrial warfare on a global scale. The framing is more that war is really just a coat of paint slapped on the outside of a purely recreational activity, that you could replace continents with petri dishes and the soldiers with bacterial colonies and get the same experience. That's actually a great idea. Monopoly and games like it can sneak a set of real meaningful ideas under our radar by pulling that unique trick that only games can pull. Okay, I know you care about your stuff, but just for a little bit, let's pretend like we're all competing landlords only concerned with trying to put each other out of business. Still, and there are going to be some spoilers in this episode, so if you're worried about that sort of thing, please check out the timetable in the video description and skip past anything you don't want to know. There are a few games that challenge our expectations about what games are, how they work, or what meaning they might have. Papers, Please makes the player choose between refusing to help desperate migrants and a game over screen. Undertale breaks the fourth wall to shame players who make especially violent or cruel choices. Brenda Romero's board game, Train, rewards players with victory points for building and optimizing train lines, but near the end, it becomes apparent that those trains are intended to transport prisoners to Nazi concentration camps. Of course, there's nothing stopping you from engaging with these works the way we usually engage with games. You could realize that you've been building Nazi death trains and just keep chasing victory points as though nothing's different. But after the game's twist, many players do a 180 and try to sabotage the well optimized machine that they've been building to ruin whatever progress they've made. That wouldn't make any sense unless the game's temporary values couldn't be totally contained within its fiction, unless at least some of those values appeared in the same space as and came into conflict with the player's own values, the ones that are supposedly put on pause because it's just a game. Of course, that doesn't imply that spending an afternoon playing risk means that you have a secret longing for a world war. But some people cling tightly to the notion that games are self-contained vehicles for idle amusement and nothing else, that by their very nature, they can have absolutely nothing to say about how the world is or how it ought to be that persists once the box is closed. Judging from the large number of think pieces and critical analyses about the games that we've mentioned, that's obviously untrue. Like any work of media, they can challenge us to reflect, analyze, compare, contrast, interpret, and decide for ourselves what we think about how they made us feel and what they're trying to say. Still, it's understandable how someone might play Monopoly their whole lives and never really see the big flashing neon sign that says, Renterism will destroy society, mistaking that overt political message for one of the other bits of the game we're supposed to stop caring about once we stop playing, like Monopoly money. That invisibility field around what games say and mean gets shifted into overdrive when you start talking about flow. If you recall episode 56, which I made eight years ago and has the worst audio out of any episode I've ever made, sorry, psychology researcher Mike Tick-Sutney High has spent decades developing and popularizing his theory of flow, a cognitive state of being in the zone where time and self-awareness melt away and an activity seems like it's doing itself. In a flow state, it feels like your skills are exactly matched to the difficulty of some challenge. Right in the sweet spot between stressful and boring and your mind and body are perfectly attuned to just execute. The theory of flow has become more or less a given when it comes to game design. Microsoft Studios experienced researcher Sean Bering claims good game designers and good game companies are already explicitly or implicitly taking these flow characteristics into account. You've probably felt the result of that design focus if you play video games. Studios spent an enormous amount of time analyzing how best to give players feedback and fine-tune the level of difficulty to encourage flow states in their games. One of the commonly cited characteristics of flow is its capacity to recapture impulses for analysis or critical thinking. While you're pushing a payload with your overwatch team, all the game's visuals and feedback loops and whatnot are carefully tuned to help you achieve some sort of flow. If you have any thoughts that aren't simply about helping your teammates or steamrolling your opponents, there are probably thoughts about strategy, tactics, how to deal with that one somber that keeps hacking you, essentially how to get into flow and elongate the time you spend there. They probably won't occur to you in the middle of a match to waste cognitive energy on questions like why the writers decided to put Junkertown in Australia, if blue is really the best color for the UI, maybe whether it would actually be better for the world in the fiction of Overwatch if you didn't push the payload. Chiksetmihi claims the tendency of flow to quiet or arrest those sorts of questions is one of its main benefits, saying repeatedly we question the necessity of our actions and evaluate critically the reasons for carrying them out, but in flow there is no reason to reflect because the action carries us forward as if by magic. It's almost as though the whole notion and experience of flow was custom made to complement and intensify the way games can hide meaningful ideas and values in plain sight. In fact, flow itself is often characterized as occupying the same value-neutral position that games supposedly do. A pleasurable, self-contained activity that doesn't really mean anything beyond its recreational or instrumental value. It's capacity to grant respite and produce good vibes in almost any context. That doesn't mean that people don't think flow is important. Positive psychology researcher Stephen Kotler asserts that flow is what makes life worth living, but even at that scale it's hard to find a critical analysis of what flow, in and of itself, means. What it's saying. Beyond, hey, have a great time. For example, flow is intrinsically active. You only really get that rush of excellence and execution if you're doing stuff. Calling shots, making moves, progressing towards a goal. You don't get flow from peaceful equilibrium, rustful contemplation, satisfaction with the state of things as they are, although that's totally a valid thing to desire. This implies that games designed to encourage flow are also, to some degree, extolling action and growth over acceptance, encouraging us to strive and climb towards something better rather than enjoying what's already there. Flow states are also inherently unifying. They quiet or silence any internal conflicts about which of our many desires we should be trying to satisfy at any given time. They can certainly feel good to throw the full force of your being into an activity without reservation, but deliberately cultivating that state says something interesting about whether it's desirable to contain multitudes. Many of the best things in life are bittersweet, but you probably won't feel them while you're getting perfect T-spins in Tetris. Flow-like games also heighten the player's feeling of agency, of being in control of the game's outcome. This is actually kind of funny when you consider how much time and effort goes into fine-tuning mechanics to make that feeling possible. The sensation of being in charge is meticulously assembled for us behind the scenes, allowing us to relish in an illusion of self-determination rather than noticing the way our choices were selected for us before we even started playing. The experience of flow is also very individual. There are meaningful and pleasurable ways to experience a transcendent loss of self in a community, a political movement, a religious or spiritual connection with something greater, but flow is very much about you and your relationship with an activity. The outside world and anyone else there melts away until it's just you and your tetrominoes. I said I will be down in a minute. That is an interesting set of values. It certainly gives some teeth to seemingly innocuous assertions like flow is what makes life worth living. It's even more interesting when you start to think about the trend of gamification, a movement to reimagine otherwise boring, unrewarding or tedious activities so they feel more like games. Fickset behind himself contributed a lot to the gamification craze as an advocate for what he calls a politics of enjoyment, suggesting that games and flow states have the potential to liberate us from otherwise intractable drudgery. Many businesses and organizations have taken that vision and applied it to encourage certain behavior. Professor Lee Sheldon gamified his classes, reframing homework assignments and exams in the context of an RPG with experience points instead of letter grids. Ford and Honda put little digital plans on the dashboards of their hybrid cars that grow when you drive in a fuel efficient way. All sorts of health and to-do list apps use the language of points and levels to make exercising every day or completing tasks feel less like work and more like a game. And those are just the overt ones. When you look at stuff like YouTube, Twitter, TikTok or Instagram's various point systems and feedback mechanisms, it's hard to avoid seeing ways that those platforms have tried to render our whole social experience down into a fun little game of likes with their own uses of flow. That puts us in an interesting position. We started this episode noting how games often have more to say than we usually give them credit for and how flow likewise may be saying something that's largely concealed by the way it's supposedly agnostic about the activity that produces it. When we look at these things closely, we can see that neither is infinitely flexible. There's no game so devoid of meaning that we can't examine it under a critical lens and find some meaningful point it's making whether or not it intends to. There's no flow-like experience that will lead us to disengage from the activity producing it to consider the architects of that experience and their goals or any number of other things. That implies that the proliferation of both games and flow as a target of game design are shaping the world and our experience of it in very specific ways that we, by and large, don't tend to think about very much. Maybe there's something fruitful to be gained from holding them at arm's length, asking insightful questions about what they might mean and not taking, I'm just a game, as an excuse. Thank you for listening all the way to the end of this episode. Now please, collect a No Strings Attached $200 as you pass go. What kind of games deserve more critical scrutiny? What positive or negative role do you imagine to accept me high as Flow Theory might play beyond, wow, it sure is fun to do my taxes now that they're more like Tetris? Please, leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to follow, subscribe, and share, and don't stop thunking.