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.
Everything I do now came out of that kitchen. Which sounds far too neat, so let me tell you how it actually went.
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.
My 2011 self-improvement sprint broke both rules at once. The goals were mush - be better, be healthier, be more productive. And the feedback was nowhere. Would I know in a week whether the 5am starts were working? A month? A year?
That uncertainty does not build discipline. It quietly eats it. A loop with no feedback isn't a loop. It is just effort disappearing into a hole.
And this isn't a quirk of my own head. Csikszentmihalyi's research ran across thousands of people, cultures and activities. Surgeons. Chess players. Rock climbers. Factory workers. Same two things, every time.
Games aren't magic. They are just better-designed feedback systems than almost anything we hand people who are trying to change their lives.
The Worldview: Life Is an RPG
Every meaningful transformation has the same structural bones underneath it. A stuck career. A broken team. A habit that won't stick. When you strip away the surface story, the same sixteen elements are always there - a Hero in a Broken World, the Monsters keeping them stuck, the Big Bad behind those Monsters, a Quest worth taking, the Weapons to fight with, and the Loot and the Level Up waiting on the other side.
That is the Put The Player First framework, and it 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 Weapons you're carrying actually matched to them, or is it inventory that belongs to someone else's adventure?
Anything that involves growth maps onto it. And once you can see your life as a game, three tenets tell you how to play it.
Tenet One: Pick the Right Quest
Focus before you charge. Of all the quests you could take on, only a few actually move you toward the life you want. In 2011 I made the opposite mistake - I tried to fight every Monster at once. Fitness, career, discipline, productivity, all on the same morning, all borrowed from someone else's campaign. The right quest first, started now, beats ten quests half-done. That's the lesson the crash taught me before the game did.
Tenet 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.
Tenet Three: Play the Infinite Game
You're not playing to win once and stop. You're playing to keep growing. Finite players try to beat the game and end it; infinite players know the Big Bad returns in a new form and play on anyway. Part of that is watching the meta - the 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, because yesterday's winning 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 infinite game means stepping back to ask whether you're still on the right Quest, still fighting the right Monsters - and being willing to redraw the map when the situation changes. Paradise from the last campaign becomes the Broken World of the next one. That's not failure. That's progression.
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.
With love from Bengaluru, this is Arvindh saying over and out.
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