Day of the Tentacle
Every game—game here understood as any strategic interaction among rational agents—has a life cycle: games kick off, develop, and eventually come to an end. Games typically tend to be pictured as just ludic, brief exchanges—super mario bros, football, chess, tennis—but games are basically anything where a set of parties having stakes of different kinds engage in a collective endeavor, where strategies from any stakeholder can modify the outcomes, for the benefit of some and the equivalent detriment of others (zero sum), or for the benefit or disadvantage of all. Games can go on for years, or decades.
Our jobs are, strictly speaking, games. We engage in a relationship with an entity who contracts us, where we develop a sinuous, three-dimensional path that we call “career” in a way it best matches our interests or needs, but also shaped and constrained by the interests of the entities contracting our services—and of course by factors such as our education, the socioeconomic context, etc. Such involved interests may not always align well, meaning that there will be intentions from different sides to steer things according to what they want, creating eventual frictions if strategies collide. We, worker agents, have some ideal picture in our heads of what we like, what fulfills us, but then the other agents involved—the contracting agents—may think differently. And, to make it more interesting, each parties’ true intentions are usually hidden, and the power balance is seldom evenly distributed.
A game as a cashier, a software engineer or a surgeon kicks off the usual way. A job application, interviews, mutual scanning, and reaching an eventual agreement to start performing the task—game is on. Game progresses, things happen, and as they happen, players’ motivations and perspectives evolve, making them take decisions to alter the course of the match accordingly. Altering the course, or the intention thereof, signals that there is an endgame of sorts to be avoided because, if reached, marks there would be no incentive to play anymore for some player. At least not if the current rules and objectives stay.
Every game, every gig, every job, has an endgame. Whether you like it or not. Whether you’re consciously aware of it or not. Whether you feel comfortable thinking about it or not. But it’s there. We all know what conditions and situations mark that it is game over for us, all other things equal. This does not necessarily imply that reaching the endgame equals quitting. It means that, should the endgame be approaching or even met, whatever the situation is—needs to be redefined to give players’ the incentive to pass to the next level. What can an endgame look like? Maybe we are not learning anything new anymore, or not given enough new challenges. Maybe the compensation is not sufficient.
In video games, the “level” concept is very familiar. A level is any space available to the player during the course of completion of an objective. Video game levels generally have progressively-increasing difficulty to appeal to players with different skill levels. Each level may present new concepts and challenges to keep a player's interest high. Every kid from the 90s—like me—remembers the thrill of passing levels of Doom or the glorious Day of the Tentacle. As Oasis’ song ‘Hello’ goes:
Nobody ever seems to remember
Life is a game we play
(Talking about the 90s)