Play Is Serious Business

Diego’s worldview on games, hobbies, and mastery

There is a version of adulthood in which interests are gradually surrendered until only work, maintenance, and opinions about the parking remain. Diego would like to file an objection. Preferably after this game, because the board position has become interesting.

Play is one of the ways he inhabits a life he wants to keep. It provides pleasure, absorbing complexity, social contact, skill, and continuity with earlier versions of himself. Some of it has taught him things useful elsewhere. Much of it needs no such defense. The point of getting to have a future includes being able to play in it.

The cardboard has a history

Magic: The Gathering is unusually central. It has been a hobby for decades, a world of remembered encounters and accumulated knowledge, and a way of bringing an enormous appetite for complexity down to the size of a table. In July 2026, Diego described more than thirty years of play and seventy-eight decks, along with meetings with players, collectors, creators, and a world champion he remembers tying.¹

He enjoys the scale of the collection, and he enjoys being astonished when someone else’s is larger. The same post introduces a New Zealand collector with:

There is always a bigger fish.¹

The comparison escalates, in his telling, until it requires a megalodon. It is a highly specialized aquarium.

But the emotional meaning of the cards is clearest in a much quieter post. In August 2020, Diego opened the portion of his collection that had survived a theft years earlier. He had avoided it because seeing the survivors also meant confronting what was gone. Reopening the box brought back cards and decks he had grown attached to:

Magic was how I learned about markets, trade, and many other things.

It was more important in my life than all other games combined.²

The post begins with a precautionary description of itself:

Cw: weird, ridiculous, emotional, pointless perhaps. But honest.²

This is part of what a portrait must preserve. Someone who writes about minds surviving physical destruction can also grieve a lost collection. The cards carry particulars: this deck, that trade, years of play, the texture of an earlier life. Replaceability in a marketplace does not erase the experience of having built something over time.

There is no need to pretend these are only investments. He says he played intensely for fun, and the post’s longing is for restoration of a beloved world. Money enters as a means of bringing the cards back. The attachment came first.

A game can keep yesterday available

By April 2026, Diego was explicitly describing Magic as a way of maintaining continuity during rapid change:

I use magic as an anchor when something new is changing fast because magic is something I've been doing for 30 years.³

The surrounding post concerns his immersion in new biological technologies. The contrast is between an unfamiliar future occupying his attention during the day and a familiar game receiving him again at night. He can investigate something disruptive without every part of his experience becoming new at once.

That role sits comfortably beside his appetite for novelty. He does not understand a new interest as an eviction notice for an old one. In a 2025 comment correcting someone’s picture of him, he says:

I don't switch hobbies i accumulate them.⁴

The list that follows includes philosophy, anthropology, ecstatic dance, Burning Man, plushies, and flute playing. Different pursuits come forward at different times, but the repertoire grows. The metaphor is less a television channel being changed than a house acquiring rooms. If he is currently playing a flute, the Magic table has not ceased to exist.

This is also why a future full of new possibilities appeals to him. He can imagine acquiring additional modes of enjoyment without wishing to discard every old one. Progress need not require amnesia about what was already good.

Intelligence needs somewhere enjoyable to go

Games are an excellent fit for a mind that wants complicated things to manipulate. They offer combinations to discover, decisions to make, mistakes to notice, and visible improvements in skill. Unlike certain cosmic problems, the next turn usually arrives in time for dinner.

In his 2022 reflection on progress, Diego wondered what could supply a continuing sense of advancement when familiar life goals no longer seemed to offer it. He singled out:

Tennis, ping pong, volley, surfing, Magic, and any other standardized game, are areas where I can improve.⁵

This does not turn every hobby into an achievement contest. It explains one of their pleasures. The scale is human: you can get better at something, experience the difference, and then play again. A life whose largest projects concern enormous numbers can still contain domains where progress is local and satisfying.

Magic also taught him to think about value beyond a thing’s immediate function. In a 2021 comment, he recalls expecting differently priced editions of functionally identical cards to converge in value. They did not:

I was wrong, the collectable aspect and rarity makes cards far more valuable.⁶

He then brings the lesson into a discussion of money and the role of historical associations. The game has become part of how he understands the wider world. But he did not need to discover this application before being allowed to enjoy the cards.

Even without them physically present, he can entertain himself with the mental world they open. A short 2022 post on the benefits of being a nerd offers slime molds, army ants, tectonic plates, and then a final fallback:

If none of that works, you can always create a Magic the Gathering deck by heart.⁷

The airport may have delayed the flight. It has not confiscated the internal deck builder.

Please bring another player

Much of Diego’s play is social and physical. He likes tennis, table tennis, Ultimate Frisbee, dance, and activities that get him moving with other people. In September 2020, he issued a neighborhood invitation with the title “Games Games Games!” His self-ratings ranged from confidence at table tennis to uncertainty at basketball, and the invitation ended:

Reply here or message me if you're down for one of those! I'm tired of spending too much time at home!⁸

He is willing to join some games without knowing whether he will be any good. He wants the activity and the encounter. A court or table supplies a reason to get together, a structure for interaction, and something to do besides negotiating whether people should ever make plans.

He also wants these forms of participation to continue across age. In 2019, writing about older people at dance events who could still outdance him, he stated simply:

I want to be one of these people.⁹

The aspiration is to retain access to the activity itself: to remain capable of joining the dance rather than being permanently promoted to the chair beside it.

That desire reaches beyond any one sport. He wants a broad repertoire of ways to engage the world, bodily as well as intellectually. The person who can spend a long time thinking about a game also wants to leave home and play it with you.

Adulthood does not own the swing

Some of Diego’s strongest statements about play concern the rules people internalize about age. In May 2024, he noticed himself judging activities he still wanted to do because he was no longer twenty-one. A swing in a park helped expose the absurdity:

Yesterday, I saw a swing at the park I often walk by, and I remembered that I can, in fact go on the swing. I went there and swung a little bit. It was very liberating.¹⁰

Even someone who had considered himself tolerant of his own Peter Pan qualities had been quietly narrowing his permission to enjoy things. He names Nintendo, Magic, jet skis, Mario Kart, and South Park. None had become intrinsically unappealing. He had begun asking whether he was still supposed to like them.

His answer is emphatic:

Except for physical impossibility, aging should not determine the things I don't allow myself to do. That is completely insane.¹⁰

He wants to remember this at fifty, seventy-nine, and eighty-seven. The specificity makes the wish charmingly practical. Future Diego is being sent a memo: you have permission; do not let the calendar forge your signature on a surrender form.

An earlier comment had compressed the underlying refusal into a sentence:

Maturity is almost always the excuse of a soul for why losing color is ok.¹¹

And in June 2024, reflecting on pursuits he had suppressed while trying to be useful to the world, he wrote:

There's a lot of things I skipped in service of the world which I'm now able to return to.¹²

The following examples were flutes and Magic. The return is not an embarrassed lapse from an otherwise serious life. It is recovery of some of what that life was meant to make possible.

If you leave this room knowing only that Diego has a very large card collection, you will have missed its larger contents. He wants skill without mandatory drudgery, complexity with enjoyment, continuity without stagnation, and adulthood without the compulsory bleaching of curiosity. He wants to keep learning new games. He also reserves the right to remain attached to an old one for an unreasonable amount of time.

Given his preferred lifespan, the definition of unreasonable may need revision.

Further doors

• “Reopening the Magic Collection That Survived a Theft” (2020): the emotional history of the cards.
• “Why Being an Academic Nerd Beats Being Rich” (2022): portable enjoyment through curiosity.
• “Live as If You Didn't Know Your Age” (2024): refusing age-based prohibitions on play.
• “Peptides, Magic, and the End of Obesity” (2026), opening paragraphs: Magic as an anchor across change.

Continue: Go Somewhere Strange