3. as Bernard Suits says, to play a game is to voluntarily take on unnecessary obstacles for the sake of making possible the activity of overcoming them -- C. Thi Nguyen once again phrases this beautifully: "Game designers have sculpted these little action universes so that we can step into them and just have this ecstasy over and over again." it is so cool to have players also be able to add their own constraints on top of the game designers constraints to compose and create new games (like speed running) on top of it