675. Has the New York Times Become a Games Company?

Okay, I've got a riddle for you. Name something that we all do as children, something that's considered good and important, but when we do it as adults, it's often looked down on. Got it? Okay, what's your answer? That's right.

The answer is play. Social scientists have generated a lot of evidence that playing is good for us. According to one widely cited study, play contributes to the cognitive, physical, social, and emotional well-being of children. The playing of games is thought to be especially valuable.

And why is that? In 1978, the Canadian philosopher Bernard Suitz published a sly and influential little book called The Grasshopper, Games, Life, and Utopia, in which he defined game playing as the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles, which, to me at least, could sound like a definition of life itself. In both life and games there are constraints, some of them artificial, there is luck, and uncertainty, there's limited information, there are trade-offs between risk and reward, and also pressure, which tends to scramble our decision making.

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