We have quietly started to surrender our thinking. At work we let AI draft,
decide, and summarise; when we want to learn something new we accept the AI overview at the top of the search page, which can be confidently wrong more often than we admit. Each individual hand-off feels efficient. The accumulated effect is that we practise judgement less and less, and the muscle is atrophying.

This talk makes the contrarian case that games have become more important precisely because of this. A game is one of the few experiences left that
refuses to do the work for you: you cannot prompt your way past a boss, you have to read the system, form a hypothesis, fail, and adapt. You experience a
narrative instead of having it summarised. Puzzles, strategy, and difficulty are
not entertainment garnish anymore. They are deliberate, voluntary cognitive training at a time when everything else is removing friction.

I will connect three threads — cognitive surrender at work, the trap of a frictionless experience across your life, and the active problem-solving games demand — and argue that designing for productive struggle is now a feature, not a bug, in tools, teams, and life. You will leave able to spot where you have surrendered judgement, and with a concrete frame for deciding when friction is worth keeping.

Target audience: data/AI practitioners, builders, and leaders who use AI daily
and are uneasy about what it is doing to how they think. No gaming background required.
Format: 25-30 min talk; also works as a 15 min lightning.
First public delivery: new for 2026.
Technical requirements: slides + projector, audio for one short clip. No live
demo.
Takeaways (3): where you have surrendered judgement without noticing; why the frictionless life is not good for you all the time; a frame for when to keep friction on purpose.