The Pleasure of Entrainment

If entrainment is a form of pleasure, it is a pleasure at once structural and experiential, both mathematically regular and playfully flexible. Entrainment is not a phenomenon completely unique to games, but it does come very close to identifying the curious structural pleasure that all game experiences seem to contain: the meditative patterns of Tetris; the turn-taking, clacking cadence of Billiards; the rhythmic shooting pattern of Space Invaders; the pulsing flow of cards, hits, and chips ...

 The Collector's Fallacy

There’s a tendency in all of us to gather useful stuff and feel good about it. To collect is a reward in itself. As knowledge workers, we’re inclined to look for the next groundbreaking thought, for intellectual stimulation: we pile up promising books and articles, and we store half the internet as bookmarks, just so we get the feeling of being on the cutting edge. Let’s call this “The Collector’s Fallacy”. Why fallacy? Because ‘to know about something’ isn’t the same as �...

 Learning is Intrinsic to Games

As one gamer has said, “In a game, you want to learn because you’re playing it, and if you didn’t want to learn, why would you be playing it?” (Selfe & Hawisher, 2007, p. 1). For this very reason, games are uniquely powerful tools that help teachers understand how to build empowering lessons and shape how students experience learning. Each game is a curriculum unto itself; each game is a unique engine that can reengineer learning experiences. Every game gives the player an opportu...

 The FLOW State

How does it feel to be in "the flow"? Completely involved, focused, concentrating - with this either due to innate curiosity or as the result of training Sense of ecstasy - of being outside everyday reality Great inner clarity - knowing what needs to be done and how well it is going Knowing the activity is doable - that the skills are adequate, and neither anxious or bored Sense of serenity - no worries about self, feeling of growing beyond the boundaries of ego - afterwards feeling of trans...

 Questioning Air Pollution

How should a living organism live? When spring arrives, you open your doors, the wind blows in. The smell of flowers fills the airand colors come back to lifeSometimes when it rains or when it’s foggy out. You can’t help but breathe the air deep into your lungs and experience the feeling of small water droplets filling them up. Both piercingly cold but also pure and fresh. In autumn, you would spend a whole afternoon with a loved one doing absolutely nothing, basking lazily in the sun....

 Cerebration Sessions

No two people exactly duplicate each other’s mental stores of items. One person may know A and not B, another may know B and not A, and either knowing A and B, both may get the idea—though not necessarily at once or even soon. Furthermore, the information may not only be of individual items A and B, but even of combinations such as A-B, which in themselves are not significant. However, if one person mentions the unusual combination of A-B and another the unusual combination A-C, it may w...

 Science Does Not Rob Life of Purpose

Presumably there is indeed no purpose in the ultimate fate of the cosmos, but do any of us really tie our life's hopes to the ultimate fate of the cosmos anyway? Of course we don't; not if we are sane. Our lives are ruled by all sorts of closer, warmer, human ambitions and perceptions. To accuse science of robbing life of the warmth that makes it worth living is so preposterously mistaken, so diametrically opposite to my own feelings and those of most working scientists, I am almost driven to...

 "Cosmos" Converts

I’ve met secular humanists who grew up in evangelical households, for whom Cosmos was their first exposure to a scientific way of viewing the world. Dad was a difference maker. He reached out to people. He took them by the awe and wonder we feel over the most important questions we can think to imagine. He pulled them away from blind faith, away from pseudoscience, toward a deeper, richer understanding of the universe. And he did it with compassion. He didn’t berate people or make them f...

 Our Relationship to Our Thinking

I invite you to pay attention to anything—the sight of this text, the sensation of breathing, the feeling of your body resting against your chair—for a mere sixty seconds without getting distracted by discursive thought. It sounds simple enough: Just pay attention. The truth, however, is that you will find the task impossible. If the lives of your children depended on it, you could not focus on anything—even the feeling of a knife at your throat—for more than a few seconds, before you...

 Longevity Leads to "Balkanized" Relationships

this culture’s structure of feeling could also be called balkanized. Gender therapy and speciation were both parts of the longevity project, and the combination of the three created a new structure of feeling that is often characterized as fractured, compartmentalized, bulkheaded, firewalled. Usually longevity itself is identified as the primary force driving this; until now, no one has had to integrate a personality in its second century (or more), and often it is experienced as an existen...