Playing Games

For me to design a game, three things need to be true.

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It has to solve a real business problem, not a theoretical one. It has to connect dots that the player would never have connected alone. And its mechanics have to borrow from games people already know, so learning to play never gets in the way of actually playing.

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None of this was on my mind at the Baltimore Museum of Art. I was there for the gift shop.

I love museums. To me, they are the purest form of entertainment. Places where curiosity is rewarded and whimsical thoughts are allowed to wander.

I walked into an exhibition on the history of games and, by pure chance, found a facsimile of the Libro de los Juegos (Book of Games), commissioned in 1283 by Alfonso X of Castile. The Wise. The king who knew that games were serious enough to deserve a book, and serious enough to design one himself.

His Book of Games was already on my radar.

The fact that the original lives fifteen minutes on foot from my house in the mountains outside Madrid was not. Now I'm obsessed.

What the exhibition card did not mention is that Alfonso did not just collect games. He argued for them. He opened his book not with rules but with a premise: God wanted man to have every manner of happiness held internally, so that he could endure the cares and troubles when they came. Without joy as interior architecture, a person cannot absorb what the world delivers.

Written in 1283.

No fun, no gain.

Still radical.

The Book was also something else. Its illustrations depicted Muslims, Jews, and Christians playing games together, women included, during a period in Iberian history known as convivencia: coexistence. The games were the common ground. Not politics, not religion, not trade. Games.

Alfonso needed an entire kingdom to create political instability. Today, the staffing requirements appear considerably lower.

The parable.

An ancient king of India calls his three wise men and asks the question that has been making people uncomfortable at dinner parties and board meetings ever since:

Which governs life, skill, or luck?

The first wise man says skill, seso, reason, understanding.

The second says luck, ventura, chance.

The third says both of you are missing the point.

Alfonso was writing about governance. In his world, that meant business, society, and the management of human uncertainty, all at once. In ours, it means the same thing. He built a framework for navigating uncertainty that is still structurally sound 740 years later.

His own son used it against him.

The three wise men each hold up a game that represents a theory of how the world works.

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The first wise man: Reason. Seso

His game is chess, pure skill. Every result is a function of judgment, and judgment can be trained, optimized, and defended.

Lose at chess, and you can explain exactly why.

There is a post-mortem available.

There is always a post-mortem available.

Reason is the intellectual foundation of every productivity framework ever sold to a professional who deep down suspected that control was an illusion. It is the OKR. It is the strategic plan. It is the consultant’s deck, all of which assumed that the correct application of reason will produce the predicted outcome.

Reason is not wrong. It is incomplete.

The first wise man is the smartest person in most rooms. He is also the one who, when the ground shifts, keeps applying the same framework harder.

Which matters more in your current challenge: improving the process or improving the outcome?

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The second wise man: Chance. Ventura

His game is dice. Pure chance.

Outcomes are not yours to command. Circumstances arrive, conditions change. Skill is not irrelevant. It is simply not alone.

You roll.

You receive.

You roll again.

Chance is not blind faith. It is a coherent philosophical position that has produced some of history’s most interesting decisions, and some of its most spectacular collapses. It makes for excellent rags-to-riches stories.

The second wise man is not a fool. He is a fatalist with narrative instincts. He will tell you the story of how it all unfolded with the confidence of someone who never doubted the ending, because in his framework, the ending was never in question.

The trouble with chance is that it removes us from the equation entirely. If circumstances govern all, your choices are decoration. And if your choices are decoration, you are not designing your future. You are narrating it after the fact.

What would your explanation be if things had gone the other way?

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The third wise man: Sound Judgement. Cordura

His game is tables, board games in their oldest form. Backgammon. The game that holds both skill and chance in the same structure, simultaneously.

The third wise man does not split the difference. He does not say a little of column A, a little of column B. He names something neither of the other two had: a third capacity that pure reason cannot produce and pure chance cannot either.

The Spanish call it cordura. A virtue conspicuously absent from current headlines.

Sound Judgment.

Groundedness.

Prudence.

The dice determine how far you can move. Your judgment determines where.

The roll is not the plan. The plan is what you do with the roll you got.

‍Most people spend their careers favouring one wise man over the others. They become known for it. The strategist. The visionary. The operator. Then something changes and the approach that built the first half of the career stops working quite as well in the second.

In the manuscript illumination, the third figure is the tallest. Whether the painter made that choice consciously is an open question.

Wise discernment requires something harder than intelligence: the willingness to read the actual situation rather than the one you prepared for.

To know when you are in a reason moment and when you are in a chance moment. To stop performing the wrong response to the conditions in front of you.

Simply awake to which force is running you at any given moment, and acting from that awareness rather than despite it.

What are you responding to: the board in front of you, or the one you prepared for?

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The game Alfonso didn't finish: The Emperor

Alfonso also designed his own game.

At the end of the Libro de los Juegos there is an astrological tables game called The Emperor for learned men, he specifies, with characteristic lack of modesty.

Played on a round board, incorporating the movements of planets, combining everything that came before it and lifting it to a cosmological level.

He understood that games are not diversions from serious thinking. They are its instruments.

The man who built the oldest surviving framework for navigating uncertainty could not navigate his own family. His son Sancho assembled the nobles, the parliament, Portugal, Aragon, and Islamic Granada against him, and drove him into exile in Seville.

It was there that he commissioned the Book of Games in the final years of his life.

The thread I want to pick up next: what happens when a simple set of constraints becomes a way to think about uncertainty. That is the territory I am working in now.

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A game called Solo Futures Game.

It begins with a backgammon board because I had one lying around. After all, backgammon already understands what most planning exercises try to avoid: you do not control the roll. You only control the move you make after it.

The game is about the journey across the board. Back home.

Except here, home is the future.

And the journey across the board is forecasting made playable, done the Ló&Co. way.

Three conditions had to be met.

A real business problem: how do you give uncertainty a form without turning it into a planning exercise?

Dots the player would never connect alone: a thirteenth-century king, a backgammon board, and a question about what is shaping your next move.

Mechanics borrowed from a game that has existed for five thousand years, so the learning curve stays out of the way of the thinking.

Alfonso solved for all three in 1283.

Thank you for reading!

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Next month I will share the design and strategic decisions behind the Solo Futures Game. Then, in august, the final playable version will be a download for attendees of an event I have been told not to talk about yet.

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