Picking up Flow again - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book about optimal experience - and reading through it tonight, I happened on this passage which made me think of the postmodern condition

Anomie - literally, “lack of rules” - is the name the French sociologist Emile Durkheim gave to a condition in society in which the norms of behavior had become muddled. When it is no longer clear what is permitted and what is not, when it is uncertain what public opinion values, behavior becomes erratic and meaningless. People who depend on the rules of society to give order to their consciousness become anxious.

Thinking about this in the context of games. Games are not fun without rules.