John Conway on Games and Puzzles

This John Conway quote is from an interview done by David Suzuki for the TV series "The Nature of Things." The episode this clip appeared in was entitled "Mystery and Magic of Mathematics: Martin Gardner and Friends." Suzuki: What is the relationship between fun math and serious math? Conway: So I do some serious mathematics, but I also do games. And for me, they are very similar. When you play a game -- if you learn to be good at it -- you find what it is you should have been thinking about. That's really rather subtle... and that's what we do in mathematics. Puzzles, for instance: What are puzzles? They're something where you can do something that you didn't think you could do. Source: http://concise.britannica.com/new-multimedia/mp4/newdim025.mp4