Everyone should have a dedicated recombobulation space.
Losing your phone, moving to a new country, breaking your leg, your laptop self-destructing, getting a concussion — all these disruptive events can be described as cybernetic discombobulation. The systems, body, habits, technologies, and databases we rely on to navigate daily life occasionally break or corrupt or become obsolete (or we break them on purpose in pursuit of growth or change or freedom).
Keep reading … it will makes sense.
In my earlier posts in this series, I wrote about the idea that willpower is less a muscle we can strengthen, and more a limited resource that we need to spend wisely. If we spend our day doing taxes (difficult), we’ll have less energy at the end of the day to resist sweet desserts or other temptations.
We all “leak” willpower to some extent, wasting our daily supply of mental fortitude on battles like staying awake when we’re sleepy, resisting food cravings, making ourselves do work we don’t want to do, enduring annoying people, etc. If we take proactive steps to either change our lives or establish new habits, these “leaks” go away and we’re left with more willpower to work on whatever we really want to work on (making art, earning money, fixing stuff, improving the lives of others — whatever our “life’s work” happens to be).
This is not my neighbor's dog.
Last night the neighbor’s dog bit me. It was just a little nip on my calf — a sheep dog’s instinct — and it took me a second to even register what had happened. Once I realized what had happened I approached the mutt (who was now peeing in my front yard) and stared him down. He ignored me, so as he dashed off I growled at him. He promptly turned and charged at me.
What draws us to certain styles, things, and types of people?
Why do we prefer what we prefer? Lately I’ve been thinking that “personal taste” is somewhat illusory; what different people “like” is actually a simple algorithm based on age, gender, and cultural trends. The majority of two to five year old girls in the United States like the color pink, fairies, and Disney princesses. (Gender stereotyping? Sure, but also observation.) Hipsters “like” single gear bikes. Hippies “like” hummus. And so on …
Beneath (or maybe mingled with) these broad demographic probabilities lies our real personal taste. For most of us, it (luckily) overlaps with the zeitgeist — others are compelled to wear Renaissance Faire clothes to work every day.
Casual Friday?
For a myriad of biological and cultural and indeterminate reasons, we find ourselves with a set of strong and weak preferences toward various foods, clothing styles, people, types of work, activities, and situations. How important is it to pay attention to these preferences?
Is it time to uprez your game?
Well-designed games, more than any other form of entertainment, directly hack into our motivational substructures. They play into our desire to achieve status, collect things, complete tasks, explore the unknown, solve mysteries, be powerful, and make tangible progress (otherwise known as “leveling up”).
Ian Bogost's Cow Clicker
Video game theorist Ian Bogost explores and satirizes this aspect of games with his Facebook metagame Cow Clicker. The game is maximally minimalistic; all you do is click on a virtual cow at regular intervals (the game that Cow Clicker satirizes, Farmville, is a mass social networking game phenomena with more users than Twitter, netting hundreds of millions in revenue for its creators). Bogost states that his game “distills the social game genre down to its essence.” His point is that game architecture can be distilled into simple psychological tricks the designer uses to engage the player. In a well designed game, these tricks are used with brutal (or in some cases, subtle) effectiveness, and the game is hard to stop playing. Some game designers have even been accused of making their games too addictive.
A good game cleverly manipulates us, playing on our various urges (competition, avarice, curiosity, desire for completion or closure). In the context of the game, our skills are a good match for the tasks at hand, and rewards are frequent and well-timed. Real life, on the other hand, is messier. Our skills are often a poor match for the tasks at hand; what we need to do is often too easy (and therefore boring) or too hard (and therefore intimidating). Rewards come unevenly and sometimes apparently randomly; we can work diligently for years or even decades and the world will basically shrug at us. At other times, we can’t believe our good luck, and don’t feel worthy of the good fortune life bestows upon us.
Are there ways we can apply the motivational energy (or dirty tricks, depending on how you look at it) used by video games to our real lives? This is one area where I completely agree with game designer/theorist Jane McGonigal (I discussed her recent thesis in my last post); I think we can. McGonigal gives a brilliant example of this technique when she describes how she recovered from a debilitating concussion. What else can we do to “reverse hack” the tricks video games play on our minds?
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