Been using Beeminder for a couple of days. Yesterday I did an extra set of pushups and felt more compelled to publish my evening word vomit so that I could punch in additional data points. I remember feeling this way with HabitRPG, but there was something that ultimately stopped me from using it. I don’t want to get too excited. Let’s make it through the week, and then two more weeks thereafter. So far so good. I’m on track for exercise and writing. Need to get on track for meditation and reading. I like that I can calibrate these to have lower minimum targets. Feels more manageable.

I played orteil’s cookie clicker for a few days. I kept a tab open and pinned, and I’d get to it between tasks. I got antimatter condensers and antigrandmas and stuff, and I stopped there. I had probably sunk a couple of hours into it overall, spread out over longer periods of time.

It’s an interesting phenomenon to study. Why do it? Why bother? There’s something very compelling about it. I suppose the buzzword for this is gamification. I prefer to skip the buzzword and think about progression, growth. The cookie clicker game clearly shows you what you can eventually build when you get good enough. This is the main thing that’s missing from real life, which forces you to read, listen to stories of others, observe, study, internalize. It’s easier to work towards something when you have a very clear idea of what the end result looks like, and how simple and “linear” the progression towards that is. Really, everything just needs to learn more from games. Why is pacman so addictive? Megaman X, which teaches you to play as you play- there’s a beautiful video on youtube about this, and that video itself is a lesson on how to hold people’s attention.

Why aren’t I applying these lessons? I’m writing to dig and learn for myself before I present a coherent front to the public. I’m getting my audience to self-select itself. If you want simple reads with headers and bullet points, go away. I fully acknowledge the value of those things- I use them for work- but I’m not going to use them for me unless I feel it’s really necessary for some reason. That’s just how it is. I don’t want to waste time tidying up the messy chaotic complexity of exploration. If this means I have no readers left, so be it. I started out writing for myself, and I’m comfortable returning to that.

Anyway- so games are addictive and effective by manipulating behaviour, so obviously we should use games to keep ourselves on track on the goals that we intellectually want to achieve. I want to read more. Let’s make it a game. Hit that target in this much time. Make it small, make it simple, make it temporary, get it over and done with, then do it again.

Can’t get too excited. Failed many times before. But can’t give up either. I dreamt that I got some numbers wrong. Since I was a child I had dreams that involved me getting into trouble, often for really stupid things. Guilt was the predominant emotion. I’m often guilty, and almost always guilty in my dreams. I don’t believe in mystical dream interpretation stuff, but I do believe my subconscious mind is trying to tell me something about how I do things.

Erm, I’m running out of things to say. Shall we hop back on pacman? Sure. The moment the game starts, your character starts eating pucks. There’s a limited number of pucks on the screen, so clearly you’re supposed to eat them all. There are monsters following you around, so you’re supposed to avoid them. When you eat a big puck, the monsters turn blue and start running away from you… during which time you can eat them for extra points! Occasionally a fruit appears and you can eat that for points.

Each new thing adds a new level of complexity to the game and makes it that much more interesting. As I said in the previous post, a child will be happy simply to have control over the player character. Kids will gleefully lead pacman to his death, and then laugh or scream in amusement. They did a thing, they made something happen. The next level of difficulty is staying alive. Survival dynamic. How long can you stay alive before you die? This can be an edge of seat phenomenon. I’m reminded of the crazy guy playing left 4 dead on youtube, screaming into vent and shooting all his teammates. (Well technically he was trolling and that’s another approach to gameplay altogether. But it’s also possible… The cliche example is when a gamer brings his or her non-gamer partner to try it out for the first time. They get past the child level of controlling the character pretty quickly, but then they start screaming and dying, falling off ledges, etc.)

Once you get some degree of basic competence- and this progression isn’t linear, you can jump to the next stage halfway- you start trying to kill baddies. You stop being a feeder and be a useful addition to your team. You heal and support when you’re asked to. In pacman, you start eating the occasional ghost. Feels good brah. Once you do that reasonably well, you get most of the satisfaction the game has to offer. Sometimes you eat the fruit. To get more out of it you need to dig deep and strategizing. You need to start studying the game at a deeper level and learn its language. The holy grail for pacman is to get the perfect score, which has been done before and probably has been achieved a few times. But that’s a level of perfection that requires a ridiculous amount of relentless effort… something I don’t think I’ve ever dedicated myself to, because I can’t really think of anything that deserves that degree of effort… BULLSHIT rationalization, I’ve just never pushed myself that hard in anything because I’m afraid of failure, maybe. I don’t know what the because is. We’ll figure it out as we go.

and I just reached work so I gotta stop here.