How to Win at Real Life
Games can serve as an escape from reality—but they can also shape our understanding of trust, collaboration, and what might be possible IRL. Megan Garber talks with C. Thi Nguyen, an associate philosophy professor at the University of Utah, to better understand how games can help us safely explore our current reality and shape new realities, too.
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The following transcript was edited for clarity:
Andrea Valdez: For my eighth-grade graduation gift, Megan, I asked for and received from my lovely parents the Franklin Mint edition of Monopoly, which, if you haven’t seen it, it’s this extremely baroquely designed Monopoly board that’s made of wood, and it has these drawers. It’s where you store your money, and the houses and hotels are plated in gold and silver. I had seen it on the back of a Reader’s Digest magazine, and I just had to have it.
Megan Garber: Well, first of all, this totally verifies my hunch that all the best things in the world come from the back pages of Reader’s Digest. Yes, of course.
Valdez: I mean, I still have this board game, and when I play it, I just feel so fancy.
Garber: You’re making me think now of all the games I played as a kid and what they would look like with Franklin Mint–edition fanciness. What would the Mint Edition of Twister be like?
Valdez: Oh my God, play Twister in a ball gown?
Garber: Yeah, that’s right: Twister in a tux, just as Milton Bradley intended.
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Valdez: I’m Andrea Valdez. I’m an editor at The Atlantic.
Garber: And I’m Megan Garber, a writer at The Atlantic.
Valdez: And this is How to Know What’s Real.
Valdez: Games like Monopoly and Twister, they’re pretty basic compared to some of the games we have now with very complex rules. And of course, video games, they’ve evolved to have these, you know, extremely realistic designs and high-tech capabilities. Even as games have evolved over time, this desire for play, it’s an age-old thing. You know, consider the game Go. It’s this board game that we still play today, but it was invented more than 2,500 years ago. Games are just one of the most fundamental activities that humans have. Yeah.
They’re almost primal. And because of that, they can, I think, connect us not just to each other in the moment and to each other across cultures, really, but just like you said, to the humans of the past and the cultures of the past. And, you know, I’m not really a chess player, for example, but one thing I do love about it when I play is the knowledge of how many other people across time have played that same game and negotiated the same board with those same pieces and same options for moves. There’s something, I think, almost beautiful
