I enjoy listening to Hickey talk in abstractions because it always gets grounded in practical considerations. I suspect the "actual game" is solving problems. At the end of the day, that's my understanding of why he wrote Clojure and Datomic recently and switched from C++ to Java earlier in his career.

Because Clojure was targeted at working Java programmers who might benefit from the power of Lisp and working Common Lisp programmers who might benefit from the power of the JVM, I don't really see any contradiction between Hickey's quote and Norvig's. For each, the reason to know "another language" is it helps a person solve problems.