This is just going to be a note. I have noted that a simple game can be a 5 hour one-time amusement or last through an entire month. What keeps the thing interesting is the challenge it presents or you are able to make for yourself. Understanding, beating higher difficulties, comparing with other players. Streaming culture has shown us that there is value in a professional player, sports too. A recognizable and entertaining thing can become a lifetime endeavor. This makes the game just that - entertainment but on the other hand develops it further with every new milestone beaten. What happens for the player is probably just being in the zone. The right challenge, scaled to increasing proficiency. The possibility to sell content around that activity just allows them to do it for longer. I think as a society we can only gain by giving people time to develop and share their passions. They will do things better, we'll have more entertainment and there will be more, more proficient people in many disciplines, because skills you hone for a game or sport also carry over to other aspects of life. Game is really a placeholder word, because the exact same mechanism applies to science or craftsmanship or art. Recently we're talking a lot about compute as a proxy for money. In an automated world, compute (and electricity) are a direct measure of economic output. I think there are other possible conversions of value. Passion for example might be a proxy for productivity. Curiosity, asked questions, number of tackled challenges in a row. In other words: mastered difficulty. If you can beat a game that is difficult for most people at the hardest difficulty, you have what it takes to beat anything that is deemed difficult because you have the time, energy, persistence, vision, single-mindedness etc. necessary to do that. Being a good gamer is possibly also a proxy for value. I think we'll need such a discussion because the financial value chain might not be able to give enough societal value to people anymore. If anything economically valuable can be done better by automata, we either need more economy, which has limits because not everything is a sellable product. Or we need to start recognizing value beyond money, make it equivalent. That is the multiverse idea. Let the min-maxer explore Leags of Legends and the Hikikomori become a legendary guild boss in some MMO. Let the guy with nightmares paint and the woman who hears voices compose choral masterpieces. Let them all trade their value, inside their niches and with the world at large. The metawerse is a market for value in the broadest sense, the one our economic worth is based on being only one of them. Learning life slowly, I'm realizing the value of "sticking with it" only in my 30s. I was going through life, reading books, watching videos, quickly, broadly, with FOMO and remembered nothing. Journaling, meditating, repeating helps. But do you learn less this way? Is this just a middle-aged person's way to postpone the effect of aging a bit? A young guy in uni doesn't need to reread the same page of content 10 times, once is enough. Maybe it's just the inevitable fate of humanity? I don't know. But I do know that it is more enjoyable not to chase the next idea, the newest fad, to not try everything and finish nothing. It's more economical too. The other day N told me he likes our bookclub. Even when he reads a story between important life talks, doesn't really know what to do with it, forgets, when we talk it makes sense, we ask questions, discover background, are curious for what follows. We remember better and connect to what we already know. We also build friendship. A single book lasts us several months and becomes the beginning of growth rather than an end in itself. There's undoubtedly some minimum level of stuff you need to look at to be a well rounded modern human. But after that, anything goes and the important thing is your passion and curiosity, the habit of asking more and more questions. What causes these questions doesn't really matter, everything overlaps anyway. And that gets truer by the minute. Today you can play a game on one screen and run ChatGPT on the other and seemlessly learn while playing. To be clear you can build a feedback mechanism around any activity, a community of likeminded people let's say, meet regularly, talk about what you're doing and the inputs will never stop. In other words you can set up systems that will always challenge you so that you will always enjoy the activity you do. It might be predefined difficulty levels, communities, the act of connecting fields, invention and creativity, realizing a dream in the world. Step by step you build up your skill, you climb the difficulty ladder of life until you reach god-mode and the rules of the game cease to be limits and instead become guidelines for shaping the unknown.