The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game

REINER KNIZIA IS SOMETIMES CALLED the Mozart of German game design—the bizarre prodigy who effortlessly churns out these elegant, profoundly original game designs. As the German and larger European board-game scene was heating up in the 1980s and '90s, Knizia was sitting on top of it all, spewing forth hundreds of new games.

In a lecture on his game design process, Knizia said that the most important tool in his game design toolbox was the scoring system, because it sets the player's motivations in the game. Scores tell the players what they'll want during the game. And this is the heart of how game designers shape our actions—and how those actions will feel—in the game. A scoring system specifies motivations for the player to adopt.

You can make a game out of the simplest things: a few rules and a goal. One of the more elegant modern game designs is The Mind. The game is comically simple. There's a deck with a hundred cards in it, numbered from 1 to 100. For level one, you shuffle the deck and deal each player one random card. The goal is for all players to work together as a team to play the cards in order, from lowest to highest. But there is one single, glorious catch: You're not allowed to communicate. You can't talk, signal, grunt, or gesture to each other. You have to coordinate wordlessly to play those cards in order. If you can do it for level one, you go up to level two: Reshuffle the deck, and deal two random cards to each person. For a four-player game, you win the game if you can beat level eight—that's eight random cards dealt to each person, to be played out in perfect order, in total silence.

The game asks you to do the seemingly impossible: to be telepathic. And then it teaches you how that's actually possible. You play the game by developing a shared sense of timing for how long you should wait to play a given card. And you can get very good at it together. Your group can play these wild, precise sequences in lockstep tempo. It will start to feel like you can touch the inside of each other's brains and hear a collective clock ticking.

How does The Mind accomplish this little miracle? What's it made out of? There are two basic parts to the game. First it gives you restrictions: The game strips away all your normal avenues for communication. Then it gives you a goal. It tells you to play these cards in sequential order. Out of these simplest of pieces, the game shapes a very specific set of actions and challenges—and through those, it shapes a mental state.

This is the peculiarity at the heart of games: They tell you what to desire. And we players are fluid enough that we can let those scoring systems shape our desires. We can slip into alternate motivational states like a new set of clothes. We have the ability to start a game, find out what will get us points, and then—for a period of time—care intensely, exactly as we're told to.

It's not just that a game tells you what counts as winning for this game. It sets the deeper meaning of winning. A game can tell you whether you're selfish or part of a larger collective. Start up The Mind. The game tells you you're all on a team together, and you win or lose as one. Now your desires are unified; you are a perfect coordinated unit. Start up another game, like the classic first-person shooter Quake III Arena. This video game throws you into an online arena, where you score points by killing other players. Now you are an unapologetic psychopath, a being of pure selfishness, dodging, whirling, bouncing grenades down the hall, head-shotting people as they come down the corner.

Start up another game: Go outside and play a game of pickup basketball. Now you're divided into teams, and the basic shape of your cares shifts to match. It doesn't matter that Tessa is your best friend; she's on the opposite team now, and your job is to steal her passes and block her shots. It doesn't matter that in ordinary life you hate Sam. He's on your team now, and if he's open, you pass him the damn ball. Because for a period, your goals and Sam's goals are aligned.

Games play around with who you are, what you care about, and the basic shape of your relationships to other people. Games reach into you and give you a new form of agency, and you can, for a while, become completely absorbed in that new agency. And what enables that, in crucial part, is the clarity, the simplicity, and the unambiguity of the scoring system. Games let somebody else design a new self for you, for you to slip into.

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PERHAPS THIS SEEMS UNNERVING, LETTING another human being inside our heads to tinker with our goals. But this goal manipulation can be relatively safe in games. Because often in games, the goal isn't what really matters. We adopt the goal in order to experience the process. The beauty is in the struggle.

This is a very specific kind of orientation. Let's give it a name: striving play. In striving play, you try to win not because winning is important, but because the act of trying to win gives you a delicious struggle. In striving play, you don't really care about winning in a lasting way. You temporarily induce in yourself a desire to win, so you can enjoy the process of trying.

Striving play involves a motivational inversion of ordinary, practical life. In normal life, we struggle in order to attain some goal that we really want. In striving play, we adopt a goal in order to have the struggle that we really want.