When Identity and Games Collide

The Game of Life Podcast is Sophia Deng’s conversation series about what the games people play and love can teach us about the ultimate game, life. Her guests run from game designers and philosophy professors to elite players and memory athletes, each talking through the craft and strategy of their game and what it says about how to live.

For episode nine I talked with Sophia about The Racket: how my co-founder and I started Hoax and built an identity-bending cocktail party game for 15 to 250 players, what hosting it hundreds of times has taught me about status and social behavior in a room, and how a decade of designing and running it has shaped my own identity.