When you see someone in a good movie deal with a problem that is facing them, that provides you with a possible pattern of action that you can carry out should you ever face a similar problem in your own life. Experiencing a good drama, whether in the medium of video, literature, or music, feels meaningful because those dramas provide you with patterns of action that you can utilize in your own life. Your brain is attuned to identify meaningful activities. I believe that what makes a game feel fun is exactly the same as what makes any other activity feel meaningful.

When Peterson describes the state of mind where one is engaged in something meaningful, it sounds nearly identical to the state of having fun: you lose track of time, are completely invested in what you are doing, and all the suffering in your life seems to fade away.

Jordan Peterson’s lectures on Personality and Maps of Meaning has been incredibly enriching, and as a result I’ve been thinking about what makes games meaningful. We don’t know what happens next, we just know that it’s next.

That’s the test, both for the game itself and the community: what happens when a close-knit group, where everyone knows each other, opens its doors to the rest of the world. It is, to use a word you’ll almost never see in video game writing, intimate. Every game is different, and every game is shared with someone else. This idea is partly literal: SpyParty is a multiplayer game, after all. “…this game of bite-sized espionage is too strange and refreshing to merely enjoy: it has to be shared.” Afterwards, I wrote an essay about the game and its community called Shaking the Hand of Someone You’ve Shot, in which I said the following: The fun of a secret lies in knowing you’ll get to reveal it someday.Ī couple of years ago, I flew to Seattle to volunteer at the SpyParty booth for PAX West. But it’s not sustainable, because a bigger, better part of you wants to share it. In discovering the Next Big Thing while it’s still Next and not yet Big. You get the satisfaction of knowing something interesting that other people don’t. For five years, I’ve been keeping a secret.

Spyparty maps