HeyJaredMindful Gamer
Reflective essays on play, design, and psychology, and the ways games shape how we grow, feel, and see the world.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 2
- Latest publication
- Sep 18, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 13, 2026
Latest issues
What Follows Us Out of the Game? (opens the original)
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Last year, we started The Mindful Gamer’s Guide to Planetary Health.A potentially great series idea and I skipped over it.Excellent series management, on my part. 😅The 1st chapter looked at gaming itself: stuff like energy use, hardware, electronic waste, production, and some of the environmental cost hiding behind the systems we love to game on.I ended it somewhere else.I said games are systems of rules, resources, and consequences. That spending so much time learning those systems coul
The Least Helpful Game I’ve Ever Loved (opens the original)
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I got to the Great Crystal and it still didn’t give me a map.That’s where this starts, because it’s the moment I finally said something out loud. Not exactly a curse. More like a dejected… “damn.” The kind of noise you make when you realize the rules you assumed were in place never actually existed.For anyone who hasn’t been there, the Great Crystal is a floating (I think?) maze near the end of Final Fantasy XII. Rotating platforms. Teleport stones with names like Way Stone XX. Seemingly endless
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