It Was 3AM. I Was Eating Dry Coconut. And That's When Everything Changed.

The kitchen was quiet. The screen was still on. I was standing there eating dry coconut out of the container, not because I was hungry, more because my hands needed something to do, staring at a question I couldn't answer.

That moment catalysed a company-wide philosophy: apply game design principles to real-life transformation. This is how that happened.

The Comparison That Broke Me

In 2011, I was working at an advertising agency and felt reasonably settled, until I started noticing colleagues achieving things I wasn't. The kind of noticing that starts as observation and curdles into something uglier. I ran a self-improvement sprint: early mornings, exercise routines, online courses, productivity systems. All borrowed blueprints. None of them mine.

I crashed. And in the crash, I started playing Diablo 3 compulsively, not because it was fun, exactly, but because inside the game, the feedback loops were honest. Progress was visible. Effort had legible consequences. The game respected the player enough to tell the truth about whether they were improving.

My real life wasn't doing any of that.

The Game Told Me the Truth

At some point between the dungeon runs, the question arrived: what if I could design my real life with the same honest mechanics that the game used?

It sounds glib. It wasn't. Games succeeded where the self-help blueprints failed because they were built around clear mechanics, immediate feedback, and meaningful progression. They didn't tell you who to become, they built systems that revealed who you already were and gave you room to move.

That question launched a decade of work.

Why the Game's Feedback Loop Worked When Nothing Else Did

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent years studying what he called peak experience - the mental state where people are fully absorbed in a task, performing at their best, and reporting deep satisfaction. In Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990), he identified eight characteristics that produce this state. Two of them appear in every case: clear goals and immediate feedback.

Diablo 3 had both. Every objective was legible - find the dungeon, kill the elite, collect the drop. Every action produced an instant consequence - damage numbers appeared, experience bars moved, items dropped with specific stats. The game respected the player's need to know where they stood, and it answered that need in real time.

The self-improvement systems I had been running in 2011 violated both conditions consistently. The goals were vague - be better, be healthier, be more productive. The feedback was delayed or absent - would I know in a week, a month, a year whether the early mornings were working? That uncertainty did not build discipline. It eroded motivation. A loop with no feedback is not a loop. It is just effort disappearing into a void.

This is not a coincidence of my particular psychology. Csikszentmihalyi's research covered thousands of people across different cultures and activities - surgeons, chess players, rock climbers, factory workers. The same two elements kept appearing as prerequisites for absorbed, effective effort. Games are not magical. They are just better-designed feedback systems than most of the tools people use to try to change their lives.

Principle One: Anything Can Be a Game

Every meaningful transformation has structural bones underneath it. A stuck career. A broken team. A habit that won't stick. When you strip away the surface story, you find Monsters (specific, nameable problems), Weapons (the tools that actually address those problems), and Loot (the rewards worth earning).

The framework isn't a metaphor. It's a diagnostic. When someone is stuck, the question isn't "what should you do?" It's: what are your actual Monsters, and are the tools you're using actually matched to them, or are you carrying inventory that belongs to someone else's adventure?

Principle Two: Put The Player First

Running tabletop games taught me the most important design lesson: a system that isn't built for the specific people at your table will fail those people, regardless of how clever it is in theory. The best rules in the world don't help if they're solving a problem nobody at your table has.

This became the name, and the practice. Not "Put The Facilitator First." Not "Put The Framework First." The player. The person walking through the transformation. Their Broken World, their Monsters, their Paradise. Everything else is in service of that.

Principle Three: Play the Meta-Game

In competitive gaming, there's a concept called the meta, the current dominant strategies across the whole player base. The best players don't just get good at the game; they track when the meta shifts and update their approach accordingly. Yesterday's dominant strategy becomes a liability the moment conditions change.

Life works the same way. The habit that built the first chapter of your career may be the thing slowing down the second one. The leadership style that worked at twenty people might be exactly wrong at two hundred. Playing the meta-game means noticing when your current approach has become the thing you need to update, not doubling down on it because it once worked.

The Coconut Was the Beginning

Games model how life could function with clearer design and genuine respect for the person playing. Not an idealised version of who they should be, the actual person, in their actual situation, with their actual obstacles.

That's the commitment. That's the whole thing.

Put The Player First.

Arvindh Sundar

Serious game designer and facilitator. Runs Put The Player First, every session personally delivered. About Arvindh →

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Arvindh Sundar

L&D Consultant & Serious Games Designer

Arvindh designs and facilitates serious games for leadership development. Since 2019, he's run sessions for teams at Lowe's, Keka, Akamai, Walmart, Bosch, and others, building every game himself and running every session himself.

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