The sale of the building was profitable, like everything we do. The secret to becoming rich on a massive scale is to always do things that make you rich on a very small scale. At the time, I wanted to be closer to my husband, to my children, and to their school. This was before the divorce.
The Nylo Corporation makes games, first and foremost, but we have tendrils in all sorts of entertainment. What makes a game good? What makes a game substantial and rewarding versus merely entertaining? What makes it deep and nutritive to the intellect, something that one can return to in order to learn lessons about life, abstracting some kind of deeper meaning from the rules, mechanisms, and dread mathematics that put players into conflict with each other and themselves?
A good game is overwhelming and all-consuming. It requires a person to focus on it exclusively, inviting one to weaponize one’s intellect and personality completely. It requires you to be logical and to execute strategy, but also to be flexible and to learn from momentary setbacks, changing your plans in the face of new information. It requires you to be social and to make alliances, or else to go it alone in the face of unified opposition for the thrill of being a game-steering villain. A good game becomes its own world, colonizing your mind and invading your dreams. It leaves you no space to worry about your mundane problems. A good game is totalitarian, using every part of you.
This is what business has become for me. Running the Nylo Corporation is a very good game.
I have a bedroom right off my office. It’s actually much nicer than the bedroom in my Townhouse in Carroll Gardens. I think this is because it gets cleaned once a day (sometimes twice) instead of once a week. There is absolutely no evidence of me here. I get obliterated every morning after I wake up and I leave. The room is always fresh and clean.
My bedroom has a massive bed with black silk sheets. Nearby is a custom-built gaming table and an extensive gaming library. Caravaggio prints adorn all four walls and an original Jeff Koons balloon dog stands on a pedestal by the door to the bathroom. The bathroom is how I like it: prison style. A drain sits in the floor beneath a massive waterfall shower, with water that runs hot and forceful. There are two marble sinks.
I sleep here more often than I do at home. When I sleep here, I am always the first one at my desk and the last one to leave.
Never leaving work is one way I have managed to stay in charge of Nylo, despite nearly constant threats from inside and outside the company. Have you ever seen how a runty cat is able to dominate a much bigger cat? It climbs to the highest possible point in a room and watches the bigger cat constantly, making sure it can’t relax. The runty cat strikes whenever the bigger cat tries to eat or rest. Eventually, the bigger cat succumbs to a state of exhaustion and crippling feline anxiety.
There is a fully stocked kitchen on the same floor as the office. Executives have access to the personal chef, but I sometimes like to make elaborate sandwiches and pasta dishes late at night, just for myself. I leave the leftovers for the assistants, and sometimes they even eat them, effusively praising my cooking with bootlicking adulation.
My ex-husband never liked the food I made—never even lied about liking it.
“Why cook?” Ben would ask. “We can eat anywhere we want in this whole city every night of the week. We can get Central Park hot dogs delivered to us at four a.m. Why bother cooking? Why go through the psychodrama of cooking and doing dishes?”
“Because I like it,” I would say. “Because something from my hands goes into your body.”
“I can cook,” he’d counter. “I used to cook for a living. Is doing laundry going to be your next hobby?”
“‘How much sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child,’ etcetera, etcetera,” I would mumble.
“King Lear said all that because he was going crazy.”
One of the other attributes of a good game is that there isn’t much luck involved. Variance is the technical term. The more variance there is, the less true skill is required and the less one’s strategies need to focus on trying to beat the other players at the table and instead just involve trying to cope with the whims of destabilizing existential uncertainty.
Like your mom blowing her brains out in the White Room on Scavenger Hunt Day.
Just because there isn’t any luck involved doesn’t mean a game is inherently good. Take chess, for instance. Along one vector, chess is considered a perfect game. With the exception of who goes first, there is basically no variance involved in chess. Each move that one makes is unique, creating an entirely different situation from game to game that creates new challenges and the opportunity for creative solutions.
However, even very simple computers are better than the most elite chess masters, mainly because chess is a game of math and variables, and human beings can’t hold as many variables in their heads as machines. We can’t possibly be cold enough to beat an algorithm whose only goal is to win, an algorithm that can’t even take pleasure from victory or feel despair from a loss.
A truly good game requires you to draw on your humanity, on your skill at manipulation and reading people,
