what is the portal in this essay? i think the wild thing is that we play fake games with ourselves. we cargo cult ourselves. we do inert things to avoid doing ‘active’ things that might cause things to change which might be disruptive, since change is painful and scary
play fake games, win fake prizes?
i want to know what fake games i am playing with myself, so that i can cut them out and play real ones instead.
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I have a vague memory of several instances of this growing up: a group of children are playing a game, and someone’s parent asks them to include a younger kid. “Let him play!” (I’m thinking particularly of boys and video games, but this can also apply to ‘real life’ games as well.) The older kids grumble and protest, because they know that the younger kid doesn’t fully understand the game that they’re playing, at least not to the same ‘level’. If they’re playing soccer, for example, the younger kid might simply be interested in kicking the ball, and not really understand that there are goals to be scored and defended against. If they’re playing Halo, the younger kid may not understand that there’s some team objective like capture the flag, and simply be interested in pressing buttons on the controller. They might be causing friendly fire incidents and hurting their own teammates, but they don’t care, they’re simply having fun playing. What’s fun for the low-level player is frustrating and disruptive for the higher-level players. (It could maybe be argued that it’s only frustrating for slightly higher-level players, whereas super-enlightened lvl 999 ultra-high players or something have learned to surf the chaos of low-level beginners, and enjoy the mess that involves. Off the top of my head, Kung Fu Panda comes to mind, with Master Oogway operating at an even higher level than Master Shifu.)
Sometimes a very enlightened group of kids might collectively agree to prioritize the younger kid’s fun, effectively putting aside the game they were intending to play. More often than not, if my memory serves me well, what typically happens is something like a muddlesome compromise– like in the case of soccer, the primary game falls apart, and the kids ‘devolve’ into kicking the ball around. It’s not quite ideal, but it’s what often happens. It’s similar to what happens, I think, when someone with ‘bad vibes’ joins a group, and nobody really knows how to handle it, or wants to. The primary game ‘devolves’ into something ‘lower level’. Sometimes the group eventually breaks up and maybe reconvenes somewhere else. Lots of communities and even organizations seem to have lifecycles where they eventually accumulate an excess of blundersome ‘low-level’ players, aren’t quite able to metabolize them, and become stale/zombified or even collapse entirely.
With video games, some kids figure out a clever solution of giving the younger kid a controller that isn’t actually plugged in. (“Give them a fake job so they don’t mess anything up” is an approach that’s used interestingly in other situations, too.) If the kid is sufficiently young enough that they can’t tell the difference, I honestly think it’s not a bad idea, especially if it’s done in a way that’s inclusive. I’m reminded of bass virtuoso Victor Wooten talking about how he was born into a musical family, and how even before he learned to play any instrument, his siblings would still involve him in their play, and he would jive along with a toy instrument– and this wasn’t mocking or dismissive, rather it was intended to get him familiar with the musical environment.
I believe this whole train of thought about levels of play began for me while I was reflecting more broadly about the games I am playing, my own levels of competence in those games, any conflicting sub-selves I might have at different levels of development, and so on. I don’t really want to keep getting self-referential and talking about my essays in my essays, but it seems like maybe the only way out for me here is through… so let’s talk a bit about the games of writing, tweeting, essay-writing and so on.
I’ve been tweeting a lot for some time now. I’m good at it. I enjoy it. I enjoyed it even when I didn’t have an audience, and now that I do have an audience, it complicates things somewhat, because it’s easy to enjoy the thoughtful engagement that I get from posting basically anything on my mind. The opportunity cost here is– if I’m not careful, I can end up spending all my time on twitter for days, weeks, months on end, and not spend much time working on more substantial things that I’d like to be working on. And here we could get into a side-debate about revealed preferences and “do I really want to be writing essays, or am I just pretending to myself, while actually I want to be tweeting?” – but for me that’s not something I feel much confusion about. I’ve written a couple of books, and I’m really glad I did, and if I could press a button to retroactively erase half of my tweets from the last 2 years and write the equivalent volume of text in essays instead, I would do that. But since I can’t, the next best thing I can do is to simply prioritize essay-writing. Which is what I’m trying to do here.
Actually I’m thinking it would be worthwhile to simulate a conversation between Essayist Visa and Tweeter Visa…
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Separately, I was thinking recently about “goldilocks zones”:
