Games
Games require losers. Games require at least one winner. Games can make losers better at the thing the game does, and sometimes that turns a loser into a winner, and can turn winners into losers if they don't keep up with the getting better. Over time, everyone in the game can get better without having any impact on the ratio of winners and losers. Paradoxically, being good enough to win can lower the incentive to get better. Jonathan Edwards, who has held the world's record for the triple jump since 1995, is ambivalent that no one has done better than he has for 30 years. Athletes are winning contests -- winning Olympic gold medals -- without needing to improve on his performance.
Puzzles
Puzzles don't require winners or losers. Puzzles can be solved by individuals or groups of individuals working together. Eunice Foote published her research in 1857 solving a puzzle about the heating of gasses.
"Using glass cylinders, each encasing a mercury thermometer, Foote found that the heating effect of the Sun was greater in moist air than dry air, and that it was highest of all in a cylinder containing carbon dioxide. She wrote, “The receiver containing this gas became itself much heated—very sensibly more so than the other—and on being removed [from the Sun], it was many times as long in cooling.”
Her sensible observation: “An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature”
Indeed.
As this wasn't a competition, many others contributed to the understanding and expanding of this observation.
The puzzle of calculus is another to which multiple puzzlers have contributed. Like much of our mathematics, the first documented references come from Egypt 4000 years ago, and show up independently in Mesopotamia, China, and India with ideas then being shared along the traditional trade routes.
In Europe. Newton and Leibniz made important advances in solutions to mathematical puzzles. and many want to frame it as a winner or loser competition to have been the "first" to "discover" calculus when, in fact, they brought out separate contributions from a stone soup of knowledge that had been added to and stirred for millennia.
Not a game.
Constructions
Since 2015, a shirtless and barefoot man has posted videos of his starting in a wooded surroundings to first make tools from the environment at hand, then use those tools to create useful things, again from the land with what's at hand. For several years, he was unidentified; didn't speak; there were no explainers. His name is known now. What he's doing appears to be authentic. His work product is what he can do alone. He's recreating the stone age, and it's impressive.
While there are no others in view, and some suggest there are none out of sight supporting him, the man is carrying the knowledge of millennia. His knowledge and skill reflect a deliberate study of these ancient techniques and the performance of certain acts repeatedly for maybe a decade before he put his camera on the practice.
Not a game: no winners or losers. There is puzzle solving for certain in order to adapt to his local surroundings. What's so satisfying to me is his use of stuff from the material world to make different useful stuff in the material world. Inside his head are the thousands of years of puzzle solvers and makers.
The house I live in was built around 1810, and while likely constructed by a cooperative group rather than a solitary individual, most of the techniques would have been the same. The crew that built my house would most likely have had iron tools, but even they may have been crafted by a local smith.
When I repair or craft constructions, my battery-powered screwdriver and chain saw are the greatest advances in small-tool technology in my lifetime. These technologies have advanced the efficiency of my work to a degree I couldn't have imagined years ago. At the same time, they require a global supply chain and an electric utility grid. Any decent storm, earthquake, or fire could separate me from that infrastructure.
If this were a game, which would win: high technology or high resilience?
What if it doesn't have to be a game? What if, we create both together?
Warm regards,
Francis Sopper
REFERENCED IN THIS NEWSLETTER:
Jonathan Edwards: https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/07/sport/jonathan-edwards-triple-jump-world-record-spt-intl
Eunice Foote: https://www.aps.org/apsnews/2023/07/carbon-dioxide-atmosphere-eunice-foote
videos: http://www.youtube.com/@primitivetechnology9550
What if: https://www.kairoscognition.com/blog/344bf953a85556d4