You Have Been Trained to See Play as a Waste — That Training Is the Real Waste
The productivity religion cannot measure what is already complete.
When I was young, I played Sword and Fairy and The Legend of Zelda.
There were times I’d sit down to play, then look up and find the window had gone dark.
That moment wasn’t the feeling of being unable to stop. It was that stopping had never crossed my mind — not because I was addicted, but because the thing itself was enough. It didn’t need any other reason.
It took me a long time to understand what that feeling actually was.
Growing up, games had a bad reputation.
They corrupt your ambitions, hurt your studies, waste your time. Even now, many people still feel in their bones that games aren’t serious — at best a pastime, a way to relax, something you’re allowed to touch only after the “real work” is done.
Behind that judgment sits a very clear logic:
Does this produce anything? Can it be exchanged for something? What valuable goal does it point toward?
By that logic, games are nothing. You finish Zelda — your résumé doesn’t gain a line. You live through a story in Xian Jian — your bank account doesn’t gain a cent.
It produces nothing.
Therefore it has no value.
But this logic has a blind spot it can’t see.
Real games — not the kind that trap you with rare equipment, force you online for guild wars, or let you pay to crush other players with raw numbers, but the kind that keep you there simply because the thing itself is good —
In those games, the relationship between means and end is reversed.
You set a goal: defeat this boss, solve this puzzle, finish this journey. But that goal is really just a reason to keep playing. What you actually want is the experience of pursuing it. Being immersed in that world, solving one problem after another, feeling the world respond to you.
The goal is the means. The process is the point.
And games never lie to you. They don’t say: clear the final level and your life will improve. They don’t say: keep going and you’ll be rewarded. They only say: there’s something interesting here. Do you want to try?
Real life doesn’t work this way.
You want a better life, so you go to work. You want security, so you accumulate. You want some distant result, so you trade the present for it — one process you don’t enjoy after another, in exchange for a future that may or may not arrive.
The means is painful. The purpose is somewhere else.
Now is for later. Process is for outcome. The thing you’re doing right now doesn’t matter in itself — what matters is what it can be exchanged for.
This logic is so familiar it’s become air. It became obvious, became the standard by which everything is measured.
Including games.
But judging games by productivity logic is like judging work by game logic —
Are you having fun at your job? Are you immersed in the process of working?
Most people would find that question absurd.
Because work isn’t for enjoyment. Work is for results.
But the reverse is equally true —
Games aren’t for output. Games are for the process itself.
Two different logics, native to two different worlds. Use one to judge the other, and of course nothing lines up.
We have lived inside the logic of now is for later for so long.
Long enough that we’ve begun to believe a thing has no meaning unless it points toward some external goal. Long enough that we’ve forgotten there’s another way to exist — one where the purpose lives inside the process, not somewhere beyond it.
Games didn’t teach us to escape from reality.
In the gaps of real life, they preserved something that had almost disappeared —
Worth it in itself.