In 2023, my rough idea for a second book was something tentatively titled “The Creator Game.” I had a vague sense that it would be about the creator path and playing a game, and I went down the rabbit hole of games as a whole research area. I listened to this podcast with C. Thi Nguyen on Ezra Klein’s podcast, which led me to his book, Games: Agency as Art (you can also read his papers, which are very similar, for free here).
I loved the idea of a game as a way of practicing agency, and it got to the heart of what I was thinking about with my tentative title. Here are some quotes that stood out:
In ordinary practical life, we usually take the means for the sake of the ends. But in games, we can take up an end for the sake of the means. Playing games can be a motivational inversion of ordinary life.
And when we play games, we take on an alternate form of agency. We take on new goals and accept different sets of abilities. We give ourselves over to different—and focused—ways of inhabiting our own agency.
We can change our in-game ends easily and fluidly. We can adopt new ends, which will guide our actions for the duration of the game, and then drop them in an instant. When we play games, we take on temporary agencies—temporary sets of abilities and constraints, along with temporary ends. We have a significant capacity for agential fluidity, and games make full use of that capacity.
In some sense, the motivational world described by traditional economics—one in which identically motivated rational actors compete with one another—is false in the actual world, but true in game worlds.
I sense work, especially paths like mine are all about embracing a game stance toward the world. How do you take agentic actions with different kinds of work, at different times, in different phases of your journey? This is incredibly hard, of course, as the biggest challenge is the presence of infinite options.
The Creator Game never became a book. I ended up writing Good Work instead, which sort of spun off from some of the ideas I started in that draft. But I still like this passage I wrote for it on Nguyen’s ideas, so I thought I’d share it here.
Create your own game
“In life, the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game; the challenge is to figure out what game you’re playing.” —Kwame Appiah
C. Thi Nguyen is a professor at the University of Utah who studies the philosophy of games. While his analysis focuses on the experience of playing games like sports, board games, or role playing games, I believe that his ideas are a perfect way of thinking about life on an unconventional path.
In his book Games: Agency as Art, Nguyen argues that one of the most interesting things about games is that they allow us to “take on an alternate form of agency.” Embracing a pathless path is similar. It is a rejection of the default path game we grew up with and about a search for an alternate game that better suits us. It is about finding a set of conditions in our life where we can express agency in ways that are more aligned with the person we wish to become.
By thinking about our path as a game, we can loosen our grip on needing to know what we are doing and have a bit more fun with what we are doing. Just like we might take on the persona of the aggressive deal-maker in Monopoly, we might imagine ourselves as less or more ambitious with certain things we are working on. As Nguyen says, “games let us experience forms of agency we might not have discovered on our own.” And as such, we can look at “experiments in living” in the same way: playing with different modes of living exposes us to different possibilities for our lives that we might not have otherwise discovered.
This has been my experience over the past seven years on my own pathless path. At every step along the way, I’ve underestimated the possibilities that might emerge from experimentation. Halfway through writing my book, I was having a conversation with an entrepreneur, Sean McCabe, who had spent several years taking every seventh week off. He had done it to deal with his tendency to overwork. While I didn’t really have any challenges with overwork, I thought it would be a fun non-work experiment I could write about. For the next year and a half, I took every seventh week off with no work and wandered, reflected, and read and spent time with Angie and friends. I expected that most of the benefits would be an increased sense of contentment. While that did happen, what actually happened surprised me. The new schedule kicked off one of the most prolific and transformative stretches of my life. During that stretch, I completed a freelance consulting skills course, finished and published my book, relaunched my podcast, wrote more than I had in my life, and developed a better relationship with ambition.
The challenge with doing things like this, especially at first, is actually seeing something you see as fixed as something variable. Before I had tried this experiment, I had been seeing work through the lens of a workweek. I looked at the number of days or hours I worked as the most important variable to tweak. And I was good at it. Some weeks, I worked only a few hours and others I worked more. After this experiment I started to think much differently about work. What was the ideal “work month” or “work year”? What is the ideal rhythm of work over a period of five years?
When these kinds of insights appear in my head I am absolutely delighted. I love when I am exposed to different ways of thinking about my path. And this is something people don’t think enough about. To some degree if you are going to opt out of the default path, you need to find some joy in finding the edges of possibility on your own journey.
At the highest level, the game I am playing can be summed up with a question: What is the most expansive life I can build without living within the constraints of the default path?
What is the highest level question that guides your life?
My question gives me an interesting constraint that enables me to experiment with different ways of structuring my life and work. For me, I can explore the possibilities of life much more than I felt I could on the traditional path. While Nguyen argues that games allow us to “try out” different modes of agency, I would argue that on a pathless path, you are forced to adopt new modes of agency. This is ultimately one of the biggest things that holds people back from leaving the default path. To thrive on a pathless path, you must see this forced agency experimentation as a feature and not a bug.
For the creative dreamer, this is an incredible opportunity. For hundreds of years people would risk ostracism and even death to share things that mattered to them. Women would create fake names or identities just to publish books. Now? You can literally write a book in Google Docs and upload it for sale online for free.
It is a great time to be alive. We have more opportunities to do creative work and to do it on our terms than ever before. But trying to do it while still operating with the assumptions of the default path is a losing strategy. Great work and great art emerge from doing things consistently over a long period of time and our best chance for pulling that off is finding a game that allows us to continue to learn and experiment such that we can play the long game. More simply, great work comes from being on a path that we actually want to be on.
More highlights
Striving play
Let’s call that striving play. In striving play, goal and purpose are skew. An achievement player plays to win. A striving player acquires, temporarily, an interest in winning for the sake of the struggle.
We must pursue the goals of the game wholeheartedly, putting our larger purpose out of mind. In other words, we must submerge ourselves in a temporary agency.
Recording agency
Games turn out to be part of the human practices of inscription. Painting lets us record sights, music lets us record sounds, stories let us record narratives, and games let us record agencies.
Once we can write something down, that enables us to more easily study and refine it. And this suggests another possibility: that games can be a way that we collaborate in the project of developing our agency and autonomy.
Games and ordinary life
The scoring system creates the motivation, says Knizia (Knizia, quoted in Chalkey 2008). The scoring system tells you whether you need to collaborate or compete with the other players. And the scoring system helps shape how that interaction will go.
Self-employment doesn’t have rules.
But games also offer one more promise. They can function as a refuge from the inhospitality of ordinary life. In practical life, the world is mostly fixed, and our values, relatively inflexible. Most of us cannot help but desire company, food, success.
The world tells us we must eat, so we must find a job and pretend to ourselves that we enjoy it.