From the Advanced Game Design book by Michael Sellers: "Players tend to choose games that match their own personalities. The games we play are a reflection, not an escape, from our own identities. In this sense, people play games not to be someone they are not, but to become more of who they really are." This is really consistent with my own thinking about games. I always found it incredibly strange that some people believe play is an escape mechanism, when in fact it is precisely a way to meet yourself more fully and test (or sort out) aspects of your own personality. The escapism rhetoric comes from non-players and people who dislike games and think they are non serious. This non-seriousness is paradoxically, exactly what makes games so serious, as they are the one activity that refuses to be subsumed under varous regimes of governance. Play *is* wasting time, the biggest luxury there is. Playing is a way of remembering who you really are because it foregrounds the aspects of the personality that have to remain hidden irl for various reasons. This is why gaming can not be understood only as a reflection of capital (this is said because some games involve competition). I believe structured play is one of the few activities that are truly outside of the scope of Capital, becuse play is always voluntary and a game has its own magic circle where rules are different. Of course, one could always point to casinos and gambling as the main model of gaming, but I hold this to be a cynical view. This is not play, it is gamification. The magic circle in gambling is the union of the circle of Capital (coming in full force as immediate risk and operating neurochemically) with that of the game itself. [[The Garden of Eden Creation Kit (GECK)]]