For the first ten or fifteen years of my career, beginning during the dot-com era, I worked as a game designer and theorist. Some of my most well-known work made the case that games and simulations could be tools of persuasion. I wrote an influential book called Persuasive Games, about the idea that games could make arguments by presenting playable models of how the world should work. I started a design studio of the same name; we made games about airport security, workers' rights, tort reform, fast-food restaurant operations, hotel management, even pandemic flu. The future seemed ludic—until it did not. We got social media instead.

I had seen games' seriousness as a function of their content, of what they were about, even if that aboutness was produced by a new structure of computer models. But what if that was wrong? What if the power of games came from their nature rather than their content or their form? That led me to look more seriously at play, an activity games share with many other devices, from guitars to steering wheels. You can learn to play anything, I argued in the book I would eventually write on this subject, called Play Anything, and that meant that anything whatsoever had the power to bear the meaning and delight and fun of games.

That was a decade ago now already. Since then, I have moved even further from play, toward the sensory encounter with the physical world as a source of undervalued and substantial meaning. That idea is the subject of my new book, out this summer, The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life. This talk connects some of my thinking from my scholarship on play to these new interests, offering something of an island on the sea between what I used to think and where that thinking has evolved. Along the way, I'll explain play, fun, creativity—concepts you probably think you understand better than you really do.