Gaming is both about freedom and constraints—it’s about making free decisions under strictly constraining rules, while real life is about making decisions of which we don’t know if they are really free, under extremely mysterious rules.
Quotes about decisions
In every case, however, wargames are helping their creators and participants to learn something useful and important about the decision-making environments they represent.
Both board games and video games have enormous power to induce empathy, to induce players to step into someone else’s shoes. You’re not just reading about someone’s thoughts and decisions, you are making the decisions. So the nature and texture of those decisions is what causes people to achieve a deep realization and understanding.
I had come to conceive of a game as being like a machine to translate the player’s decisions into physical reality.