The Rules We’re Playing By

I’ve been playing Baba Is You, created by Finnish developer Arvi Teikari. At first glance, it looks childlike: a small grid, a handful of simple shapes and words arranged into sentences that appear to describe how the world works.

It doesn’t take long to realize the sentences are not descriptions at all. They are the rules themselves, and they can be moved.

“Wall is Stop.”

“Rock is Push.”

“Flag is Win.”

Shift the words, and the logic of the world rearranges in real time. The wall no longer blocks you. The rock becomes you. Even the goal can be reassigned.

What looked fixed wasn’t fixed at all.

What seems simple at first reveals itself as something more exacting: a system in which the rules are visible and open to revision, provided you are willing to question your assumptions and try again.

When a solution comes together, it brings a particular satisfaction — not the dull sense of passing time, but the keener feeling of having met something on its own terms and risen to it.

The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen has spent years thinking about what games are, and what they ask of us. He does not place them outside of art; he treats them as a distinct form of it. Where a painting gives you something to look at, and a film gives you something to watch, a game gives you a set of conditions under which to act.

The beauty is not only in the object; it emerges in the quality of your participation.

A well-designed game does not guide you step by step toward a conclusion. It establishes a structure — a set of constraints, permissions, and relationships — that makes certain kinds of action possible, while ruling out others. Not every move will work, but the ones that do feel earned. 

Whether we call it a game or a sport is beside the point; soccer, rock climbing, and charades all belong to the same family in this sense. Each removes something — hands, tools, speech — and in doing so reveals a more refined form of movement, balance, or expression. The rules are not there to limit you so much as to shape the conditions under which something meaningful can happen. 

We might imagine freedom as the absence of constraint, but anyone who has ever faced a blank page or an undefined brief knows how quickly that kind of freedom can collapse into drift. Well-chosen constraints do not reduce freedom; they gather it, and give it somewhere to land. 

This is as true in design as it is in games. Design, at its best, is a system of agreements — one in which what is shown, what is said, and what someone actually experiences all point in the same direction. Those choices shape how something is understood, and whether it can be trusted.

But Nguyen’s thinking extends further, into less comfortable territory. 

Every game contains a way of knowing whether you are doing well. There is a goal, and usually a score — a system that translates action into a clear signal of success or failure — and with it, a certain ease in measuring progress.

In life, the things that matter most resist that kind of reduction. What counts as meaningful work, or a life well lived, or a relationship built on trust cannot be cleanly measured; these things are contextual, evolving, and often ambiguous.

And yet we reach for substitutes.

Yesterday, The New York Times published a list of the thirty greatest living American songwriters, drawn from hundreds of names offered by critics, musicians, and industry figures, then narrowed through long and reportedly heated conversations. It’s an impressive exercise, and a revealing one. Faced with something as expansive and subjective as music, we attempt to settle it — to rank, to order, to arrive at something that can be pointed to and agreed upon.

The impulse is human.

Followers, likes, views, growth — numbers that offer the appearance of certainty without requiring us to decide what actually matters.

Nguyen calls this value capture. It begins as a convenience, a way of tracking progress, but over time, the measure begins to stand in for the thing it was meant to represent.

You start by wanting to learn a new language, and find yourself chasing the streak. You start by wanting to communicate, and find yourself shaping words around engagement. You start by wanting to build something meaningful and find yourself adjusting the work toward what performs.

What began as a way of keeping track becomes something closer to a proxy for success, and then — without noticing — it becomes the thing you are working toward.

This happens because numbers are easy to compare, but in order to be comparable, they must flatten what they measure. They cannot hold context, judgment, or whether something is right; they can only tell you what happened.

And gradually, the work begins to shift — not all at once, but through a series of small decisions that are easier to justify than to fully stand behind. You produce more, but feel less certain about what you are putting into the world, and the question turns, imperceptibly, from “Is this right?” to “Will this perform?”

It’s a subtle change, and one that’s easy to miss. 

In work of all kinds, the pattern is the same: it often begins with something intact — a way of seeing, a way of working, a standard that is felt if not declared. Over time, it may be pulled toward what can be made visible as success — toward looking like a brand, producing the signals of progress.

More content, more presence, more polish — all of it measurable, all of it defensible, and all of it, at a certain point, slightly beside the question that matters. Not whether the numbers are increasing, but whether the work still carries the intelligence it began with, and whether that intelligence is something a person can actually encounter.

A game gives you a goal, but the purpose of playing is not the goal. It is the experience of working within the conditions the game creates — the thinking, the challenge, the delight when something clicks into place.

In the same way, a brand may have goals — growth, recognition, success — but those are not its purpose. The purpose is the work itself: how it is made, how it is understood, and how it meets the people it is meant to serve. There is a difference between something that performs well and something that remains true under pressure. One is shaped to produce results that can be counted; the other is shaped to be recognized, remembered, and returned to.

You recognize that difference, even if you can’t immediately explain it, which leads, inevitably, to a question that is both simple and difficult: 

Is this still the work you meant to be doing? 

Not the work that performs well, nor the work that is easily measured, but the work that is yours. 

Because we are always, in some sense, inside a system of rules. The only real question is whether those rules are chosen — or whether they have begun to choose for us. ✦

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