“[…] what do you think games do? What are they about?” [asked Jedao.]
                The flippant answers weren’t going to be right, but [Captain Kel Cheris] had no idea what he was after. “Winning and losing?” she said. “Simulations?”
                -Yoon Ha Lee, Ninefox Gambit

                Years ago, in college, I started playing pool–and ended up liking it!–because “Do you want to play pool?” seemed like a more socially acceptable question then “Do you want to hangout and see if maybe we’re friends?” In graduate school I’ve played a lot of board games for a similar reason: I like the games, and I especially like the space they make to spend time with people. Although that’s not all they do: they also end up frustrating. Sometimes they encourage a kind of competition that ends up changing my interactions in ways I don’t like. Although that’s not all they do: they play out little versions of reality. What if we were kids trying to crack someone’s codes (The Initiative)? What if we were a group of explorers lost below ground (Sub Terra)? And of course, that kind of “what if” also isn’t all games do.
                I love Yoon Ha Lee’s playful (and in context, deadly serious—if you read the book you’ll see) explanation of games because it opens into answers behind answers. What a game does, what it’s about, depends on how we engage with it. How we pick it up. I’ve been thinking about that today because I’ve been playing games on boardgamearena.com and just getting more frustrated. But then again, the way I’ve been playing, I wasn’t enjoying the time with other players. (In 2020 boardgamearena.com was a wonderful and bizarre way to share twenty minutes with people social distancing all over the world). The way I was playing, I wasn’t relishing how a simple set of rules makes different strategies possible. I was playing as I worried about the other tasks I had. Playing as a kind of pretend avoidance, or as the pretense of doing something while I worried about being productive. Yoon Ha Lee reminds me that “playing a game” isn’t always an answer for what I’m doing. It’s also the beginning of a question: what’s that “doing” about? What are all the different things that “doing” might do?