Travis Eneix

It is helpful to have a guide along the path. One that I enjoy working with is my future self. The me at the end of my path who has been through the trials and tribulations, dealt with our defects, and leads the most effective and realized life we possibly can. This particular guide conception appeals especially to me because it is so inherently compassionate and forgiving about my screw ups. My mistakes are his.

I also happen to be a long time game enthusiast. The reason why that’s important will become apparent shortly.

It is also important not to become identified with this future self, not to mistake the horse for the cart.  But, having a goal in life is always better than not.

The other day I came across a blog entry linked from LifeHack.org. The piece, What to do with your life, was written by Mark Wieczorek, and is on his blog site - MarkTAW.com. In the article Mark makes reference to Game Theory, a branch of mathematics founded by John von Neumann. I won’t repeat his entire excellent article here, but this is the section that catches the crux, for me -

“What if life isn’t about winners and losers, what if there was some third path that could satisfy everyone? Salesmen, negotiators, and specialists in conflict resolution call this the “win-win situation.” A position where neither side compromises, and both sides get what they want.

The revelation came to me in the form of a question. “What if there was something I could do now that would make me happy today and make he happy 10 years from now?” Instead of fighting with myself, can I ally with myself and think of something that will make both of us happy?”

So, there you have it. Life is a game, a contest between two players looking for the best outcome. A win-win situation would serve all the most, and would give the highest possible reward. The players are Me-now and Me-future.
The idea of what is best for both me and my future self is a powerful one. A story from a meeting I attended almost a year ago is useful here - A man who had experienced a weight loss of in excess of 250 pounds was passing the ubiquitous hostess stand and a twinkie caught his eye. For a brief moment he considered getting it. After all, he had over five years of recovered living by that point, what harm could one little twinkie do to that accomplishment. He decided to think of it as a gamble. If he lost the gamble he would slide back into the black places of obsessive eating, gain back all his weight (and likely more) and lose the life he had fought hard to have. If he won he got… a twinkie. The payoff did not seem worth the risk to him. Nor to me either.

From the perspective of playing the life-game from above we can look at the same choice as, what good would the twinkie do the now-me, and what good would it do the future-me. The answer is the now-me would win a brief moment of taste bud bliss and emotional food black-out. In Game Theory terms we can give that a value of 1. The future-me would lose. He would win a memory of a brief moment of enjoyment (value 1), but would lose 16 months of abstinence (value like -300 or something), and would lose out on feelings of not-guilt (value -1000 easy) for a net gain of -1299. Plainly the outcome is pure suck.

Using the mental shift of seeing life as a game also has the added benefit of decreasing the stress associated with the stakes being so critical. Yes, living life well is of utmost importance, but seeing it as a life and death struggle, or a reflection of self-worth adds stress which needlessly muddles thinking on and weighing of options. No, life isn’t just a game, but making a mental game of it helps to keep it fun.

I have an account on Second Life, but don’t play as much as I used to.  I originally got the account to research an idea for a science fiction novel involving virtual reality.  Second Life is odd, and in many ways not a classic game in the sense that there are no hard-and-fast measures of who wins and who loses.  Some call it a glorified chat room, and it is that and more.  I’ve been a party guy, a club owner, a bouncer, a toy manufacturer, and a t-shirt designer in SL.  Mostly I’ve been social and enjoyed interacting with others in a world that is almost completely of the denizen’s making.  But, for the most part it is a chat room and the worst elements of high-school level drama come out in SL combined with the telepathy like capability of passing notes in real time that cannot be intercepted (in the form of private chat messages and group tells).

I’ve seen a LOT of weird stuff in SL and a lot of jaw dropping drama.  But, the best to date did not happen to me.

A real life friend of mine recently discovered SL independently of me.  I showed her the ropes a bit, but she has been way more active than me of late.  She’s made some friends online.  One of them she began a dating romance with.  She entered into the situation cautiously as this other girl had recently lost her SL partner.  Partnering is the SL term for marriage.  And, when I say lost I do not mean they broke up.  This woman’s partner had been killed in a car accident, and the partner’s mother had logged onto the partner’s account to let her online friends know.

Pretty heavy stuff.

My RL friend is a sensitive soul and treated the whole matter with a great deal of respect.  She opened herself to this other person, and consoled her while they explored their new relationship.  Meanwhile the deceased partner’s online friends erected memorials and went about the grieving process.

Then the ball dropped.  The partner came back from the dead.  In a move that showcases the limitations of being mired in reality that day time soap operas must labor under, the partner returned.  She sheepishly explained that she had pretended to be her mother logging on because she thought that faking her death would make ending her partnership easier.  She claimed that she had been feeling like she was spending too much time online and needed to cut back.  Apparently, she rethought her decision and decided to return, realizing she missed her online community.  Only through the mask of online assumed identities could such a thing have been so convincingly pulled off.

And, the best part?  All of this ex-corpse’s friends were ok with it.  And, the girl my RL friend is involved with has forgiven the recently un-deceased and gone back to being her partner.

All of this occured over the space of days.  Seriously folks, you can’t write material like that.  It takes truly magnificent imaturity to put that level of mess together.

The moral of the story?  I’m not sure.  But, it certainly does highlight nicely some of the ways that SL is NOT RL!

John August had a GREAT post on his site that hit home for me on a multitude of levels, Seven Things I Learned from World of Warcraft.

I’ll repeat his bullet points here, but you should go to his post for his detailed expansion of them. Well worth your time if you are into gaming, achieveing your personal goals, or getting more organized.

1. Kill injured monsters first
   When facing multiple bad guys, the temptation is to go after the one who’s hitting you hardest. This is often a mistake. That injured razorback, the one who is running away? He’ll be back in 15 seconds, likely with other baddies in tow. So take a few clicks to kill him now. Once he’s dead, you can focus completely on the guy who’s smacking you.
2. Grinding is part of the game…
   In WoW parlance, “grinding” is the process of killing a bunch of fairly easy monsters, one after the other, strictly to rack up loot and experience. There’s no adventure to it, no real challenge. It’s tedious and mindless, but it’s often the fastest way to level up, which is why everyone does it.
3. … But grinding is not the game
   It’s easy to confuse what you’re doing with why you’re doing it. Just remember: you’re not paying $15 a month to kill the same set of spawning critters. Grinding is a means of achieving a specific goal, whereas the game itself is supposed to be entertaining. So once you level (or get enough deer skins to fabricate that armor), stop grinding and start exploring.
4. Give away stuff to newbies
   You start the game with almost nothing: a weapon and the shirt on your back. Each new piece of gear you accumulate is tremendously exciting. Cloth armor seems luxurious. But as you level up, that early gear becomes increasingly irrelevant and basically worthless. It’s not worth the trip to the store to sell it. So don’t. Instead, run back to the newbie lands, find the first character of your class, and hand him all the stuff you don’t want. It will take two minutes of your time, but give the newbie a tremendous head start. (Not to mention building your karma.)
5. Keep track of your quests
   WoW is refreshingly open-ended–you could spend all your time skinning bears, if you felt like it. In order to provide a sense of structure, the game helpfully provides quests: multi-step missions, generally to collect, kill or deliver something. While the system does a solid job tracking these official endeavors (”13 out of 25 tusks”), most of the time what you’re really trying to do (”find a better shield”) is frustratingly amorphous. The trick is to identify these unofficial quests and break them down into distinct steps:
   • browse the auctions to compare prices
   • pick preferred shield
   • sell off unneeded linen to raise needed cash
   • bid

   At any given point, you may have 10 of these pseudo-quests, and unless you take charge of them, you’re liable keep running around, cursing your stupid shield.

6. Storage is costly
   Perhaps sensing that messy teenage boys are a key demographic, World of Warcraft won’t let you leave something on the ground. If you don’t pick up that fallen warhammer, it will vanish, never to return. So one quickly learns the importance of storage: belts, bags, backpacks and chests. Unfortunately, there’s never nearly enough space, and adding more becomes ridiculously expensive. (That’s by design, clearly. The developers want to minimize hoarding.) So always keep in mind the carrying costs. If you never use that second bow, get rid of it, and use those slots for something you need.
7. Overthinking takes the fun out of it
   Remember, the game is supposed to be fun. Yes, you can spend hours pouring through the forums, finding exactly the right talent tree. Or you could wing it: explore some new lands and kill some big monsters. Obsessive planning won’t make the game more enjoyable. It will just make it more like work.

Great article over at the DIYPlanner site about Refueling the Muse. The bits about World of Warcraft playing, and surfing Google for Zombie videos are particularly close to my heart.

In the book Zen in the Art of Writing, Ray Bradbury has a great essay on the care and feeding of your Muse. Too often, in modern society, we look down on the type of free exploring we do as children. Ray Bradbury recommends this is exactly how we need to operate in order to attract, feed, and care for our Muse. The Muse can only work with what it is given, so allowing ourselves many diverse, and sometime pointless, experiences is an ideal past time if we want to make sure our Muse has fertile soil in which to plant its seeds.