In her book Thinking in Systems, Donella Meadows writes:

QuoteWe can't control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!
I already knew that, in a way. I had learned about dancing with great powers from whitewater kayaking, from gardening, from playing music, from skiing. All those endeavors require one to stay wide awake, pay close attention, participate flat out, and respond to feedback.
. . . Living successfully in a world of systems requires more of us than our ability to calculate. It requires our full humanity---our rationality, our ability to sort out truth from falsehood, our intuition, our compassion, our vision, and our morality.

~ Thinking in Systems quote

I was having a conversation with paulby in Paradise about this and noticed that the particular word Meadows uses, "require," is not (necessarily?) the method by which one should go about designing a game for this type of play. Rather than "requiring" awakeness --

here I will define awakeness as the state of "staying wide awake, paying close attention, participating flat out, responding to feedback, using our full humanity (our rationality, our ability to sort out truth from falsehood, our intuition, out compassion, our vision, and our morality)" --

Rather than "requiring" awakeness, the dream ideal goal is INSPIRING awakeness, which one may also perhaps understand as aliveness, or even to some degree 'the flow state' (or even 'mastery'?). If a game does not acknowledge awakeness in some way, I am very rarely inspired to achieve or maintain awakeness, but "requirement" is not the best or only way to inspire me to get there.

Inspiring awakeness.