The Game of Life: Pixel Patterns, Gamification, and Peter Pan
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Welcome to the Game of Life!
Are… you… ready?
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LEVEL 1 (training) — Conway’s way, or life in pixels
In the 1940s, Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann explored different computational models at Los Alamos National Laboratory to study crystal growth and self-replicating systems. Their work led to the development of the first cellular automata. That sounds like something that rains from comets to destroy humanity, but essentially means grid-based computer models with cells that have a specified number of states.
In the late 1960s, British mathematician John Conway used such cellular automata to create a model with complex, unpredictable behavior. This led to the Game of Life, which appeared in 1970, a simple grid-based ‘game’ with four simple rules.
If a cell in the grid has less than two neighbors, it dies.
Two or three neighbors → survive.
More than three neighbors → die.
A dead cell with exactly three neighbors → comes alive.
You can play Conway’s Game of Life here.
In essence, these rules are biological processes, stripped to their bare bones: underpopulation (starvation), survival, overpopulation (crowding), and reproduction.
Surprisingly, even simple ‘seeds’ can evolve complex patterns that show emergence and self-organization. As recent as 2023, new mathematical discoveries were made in the Game of Life. Some of the popular patterns in Conway’s Game of Life are known as spaceships and gliders. This one, for example, is known as a heavy-weight spaceship
And this is the Gosper glider gun, which was the first illustration of a finite pattern with unbounded growth in Conway’s game — a pattern that goes through repeating cycles and doesn’t die. The Gosper glider gun sends out gliders every 15 ‘generations’.
Darwin concluded his Origin of Species with,
… from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
Conway showed that all we need for a complex virtual world of endless patterns is a few pixels on a screen and a set of simple rules.
LEVEL 1 COMPLETE
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LEVEL 2 — Numbers, humans
Fortunately, we’re people and not pixels. Conway wanted to create a simplistic simulacrum of life on a computer. Let’s flip that around and inject gaming elements into our lives: gamification (I’ve already written about playfulness in a broader sense as well as its role in happy relationships).
Gamification, in the technical sense, is the introduction of game design elements (points, badges, progress bars, levels…) in systems and processes to enhance them. Shallow gamification is simply layering a few elements on top of systems/processes, while deep gamification involves the redesign of existing core processes.
Initially, gamification found its way to education, where both types of gamification appear to improve performance, and deep gamification also improves intrinsic motivation. Even just framing something as a game increases students’ interest and enjoyment. Since then, gamification has spread its formerly pixelated, now VR tentacles to many more fields, such as healthcare (including mental health), fitness, and even business innovation.
In the book with the revealing title, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, game designer and researcher Jane McGonigal makes the case that games can improve society and well-being, and even help us find meaning and community. Collect enough XP, and *sparkles* welcome to the utopia (or protopia?) level. That might sound optimistic, but, in many cases, gamification works.
Why? A systematic meta-review that looked into this question found that,
Gamification can illustrate goals and their relevance, nudge users through guided paths, give users immediate feedback, reinforce good performance and simplify content to manageable tasks. Gamification mechanics can allow users to pursue individual goals and choose between different progress paths, while the system can adapt complexity to the user's abilities. Social gamification elements may enable social comparison and connect users to support each other and work towards a common goal.
Is it just me or did that sound ever-so-slightly creepy? Nudge, reinforce, simplify, social comparison… Are our games-that-aren’t-games conditioning us? If they are conditioning us to absorb information more effectively, care for our health, and so on, that may not be a detrimental development. However, gamification has a dark side too. Addiction, optimizing for scores without actually improving what you were hoping to, privacy concerns, unfair comparisons… What gamification proponents ignore is that most games have winners and losers.
Then what happens when we gamify increasingly more aspects of life in a society that is already obsessed with quantifying everything? How many calories have you eaten today? How many steps have you taken? How many boxes did you check on your to-do list? Your sleep quality was only in the fiftieth percentile. You’re 79% recovered from your workout (and you missed two this week). Your Substack isn’t growing fast enough and that engagement rate… Want to see how it compares to the average? In our lesser moments, we even rank each other on a scale of one to ten.
We’ve gamified dating1 too. It’s less overt, but the swiping, the superlikes, the sparkly apps… Tell me a dating profile doesn’t look like a game’s character sheet. Age, size, skills, resources. Pick me to join your party of two (or more) as we make our way through the grizzly2 dungeon of life.
But life isn’t like a game. Right?
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LEVEL 3 — Final boss, Peter Pan
All games must have a final boss. What if that final boss is life itself? What if life is a game?
It is tempting to see it that way. After all, gamification and games are based on psychological and biological processes we’re all sensitive to: motivation, (variable) reward, resource acquisition, social comparison, and so on.
Go to school and literally collect points on tests so you can get a badge that we call a diploma or degree. Ascend through a few more levels, and your badges qualify you for certain jobs. There, collect more points to get a promotion and transform the junior to senior in your job title as part of a character upgrade. There’s a social part to the game too. Assemble a crew and score enough social points to be cool. This will load the dice the next time you have to roll in the dating game — partnering up is a numbers game, haven’t you heard? Then take the coins collected in the job game to buy a house and start a family. Check. Level complete.
As with gamification, the uncomfortable question is how much this involves (social) conditioning.
It might sound facetious or cynical to see life like this, but the common perception of ‘adult milestones’ is quite persistent3 across gender, age, and social class — completing education, becoming financially independent, working full-time, living independently, getting married, and having children. That’s it. The (idealized image of) adult human life has six levels to complete.
Sounds… limited. As if life ends after having children. Or as if having children is necessary for a full life. Or getting married. Or working full-time. Or, or, or…
This is the point where people will mention Peter Pan syndrome — Millennials and Gen Zs are living at home longer, staying in education longer, marrying later (if at all), and having kids later (if at all). They’re not speedrunning through the game of life; they’re paradoxically burning out while slowrunning it because they want the maximum score on an increasing number of side quests.
Don’t they want to ‘grow up’?
Hold on. *pulls up big boy pants*
Peter Pan syndrome is not really a thing. Or rather, it is not a diagnosable condition listed in the DSM-5 (the bible of psychological conditions with diagnostic criteria). It’s a combination of narcissistic traits and a lack of responsibility, conceived as a marketing term for the 1983 book The Peter Pan Syndrome: Men Who Have Never Grown Up. That’s not what’s happening with (most) Millennials and Gen Zs. Instead, they are questioning the game they’re in. What if life is not just about job, marriage, kids4? What if there are secret levels? Cheat codes5 and easter eggs? Why assume that adulthood must look the same for everyone? Why so eager to silence the inner child?
Questioning the common idea of adulthood doesn’t mean shirking responsibility or moving through life like a toddler with a temper tantrum6. It means that socioeconomic shifts and evolving sociocultural pressures change the obtainability of adult milestones, which, rightfully, makes people question what their adulthood should look like. Your adulthood will look different from the adulthood you witnessed as a kid because the world is different. With every iteration, the game changes. The levels are labyrinths with moving walls and increasing entry fees.
That’s the thing isn’t, it? Life is an aggregate of wicked problems. In contrast, most games are what’s technically known as kind learning environments, with rules, clear conditions of victory, and, often, direct feedback mechanisms. Life is not a simple single-player game. The only way to conceive life as a game is as an incredibly complex MMORPG, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game7.
Except that there are no extra lives.
We will only take the game to the next level together, even though billionaires, politicians, and captains of industry try to nudge us ever deeper into hyperindividualism so that we snarl at each other instead of standing together against systemic injustice.
Before our avatar fades, I’ll leave you with the aspirational words of screenwriter Shelagh Delaney,
Life is a game - sometimes serious, sometimes fun - but a game that must be played with true team spirit.
Thanks for playing along.
GAME OVER
IF YOU COULD START OVER IN LIFE, WOULD YOU?
Click the hearts and buttons and invite other players to buy me extra Substack lives…
(If you’re a fellow newsletter writer and think your readers might appreciate my writing, you can recommend Subtle Sparks, if you are so inclined…)
Welcome to generic dating app! Choose a male avatar. Swipe. Swipe again. Repeat. I’m sorry you’re out of lives. Aaah, here comes the ghost(ing). Upgrade to a paid plan! Delete app? *sad noise* Game over. (Jaded? Me? Oh, please…)
Always choose the bear.
These are findings from America and, more generally, WEIRD cultures. I’d love to hear other takes.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with any of these milestones, but that doesn’t mean we can’t question their intrinsic necessity for a full life (which will, of course, differ between individuals). How many things in life do we do to collect more social points, or career points, or…? And to what extent does that align with what we actually want? Wait… I’m too young for a mid-life crisis, right?
Be rich, beautiful, or talented seems to be a decent cheat code.
Those temper tantrum toddlers probably run for president.
Stay tuned, because I have one or more posts coming up about our online avatar parts, probably including phoenixes and gremlins.
YES.
When I was in high school we did the muscial "The Roar of the Greasepaint the Smell of the Crowd" its a musical based on the "haves" (Sir) and the "have nots" (Cocky) and the story is about economic status in the UK in the 1960's. In the play Sir and Cocky are playing "the game of life" and Sir keeps switching the rules, as Cocky tries to find a job or woo a girl. Its a really interesting musical and it really highlights some of the problems with gamifying life. In the story there is a third character that beats Sir simply by ignoring the rules, which shifts the dynamic between Sir and Cocky. If you know the song "feeling good" and its many versions- its originally from this play.
I also wanted to add that I love your writing style, it has a great balance of feeling intimate, like a conversatoin, being informative, and I think we have a similar sense of humor! Really great article, I look forward to reading more of your work!