On-demand video is catnip to both parents and to children, and thus to content creators and advertisers. Small children are mesmerised by these videos, whether it’s familiar characters and songs, or simply bright colours and soothing sounds. The length of many of these videos — one common video tactic is to assemble many nursery rhyme or cartoon episodes into hour+ compilations —and the way that length is marketed as part of the video’s appeal, points to the amount of time some kids are spending with them.

These groups and pages play a critical role in disseminating Q’s messages to a broader audience and in recruiting more believers to the cult-like belief system, researchers say.“Facebook is a unique platform for recruitment and amplification,” said Brian Friedberg, a senior researcher at the Harvard Shorenstein Center’s Technology and Social Change Project who has been studying QAnon for years. “I really do not think that QAnon as we know it today would have been able to happen without the affordances of Facebook.”

ideo games also offer other rewards than the powerfully amplified outputs they give. \½en I was enticed to put in effort on The New Adven-tures of the Time Machine, new compelling elements quickly arose, beyond those connected to my real-world identities and the amplification of input I experienced. I discovered that this game, like many other good video games, encourages new ways of learning and thinking for an old baby boomer like me. I discovered new powers in myself. I felt the dawning of a new identity growing, one to be added to my other real-world identities. Of course this is true of all good learning-we gain a new valued identity that gives us new powers; it's the final hook where the repair work is fi-naJly done.

But other constraints in the horizon of intent have no external ana-logues. I may avoid doing certain things not because they aren't possible or because they are against the rules, but because I know that they are tacti-cally unwise. I could stand still in the batter's box after getting a hit in base-ball; however, I don't, because t hat would make it easier for an opposing player to tag me out. I could run straight into the maw of a boss during a boss battle; however, I don't, because I know that would get my character killed. My horizon of intent is defined not just by what I believe I can do, but also by what I believe I should do-my internal strategic constraints.

Learning how to play a game is often a matter of internalizing a set of external constraints.