I want to take a couple of vomits to answer a bunch of questions I’ve collected over time, mostly the earlier vomits.
“What’s the difference between meaningful and meaningless interaction?”
Is this a useful question? I suppose a lot of it has to do with context. An interaction is meaningful when it introduces something significant to the table. When it changes your mind about something, gives you a new way of looking at something. An interaction is meaningless when it doesn’t change anything. When it’s business as usual.
What’s interesting aout this is– how something feels and what it actually is are two different things. An interaction can seem meaningful but actually have no significance. An interaction can seem pointless but actually change something in some way. And in both cases, “meaning” is judged from some frame, from some context. What is meaningful to one person can be meaningless to another.
“What is it about games that is so compelling, and how do we engineer our lives to take advantage of the game mechanics?”
I asked this in the context of trying to figure out why I play games especially when I have more important things to do. I think it has to do with feedback. We can think about slot machines as an extreme case, or freemium games like Tap Titans, Adventure Capitalist and such. Those games are particularly interesting because they’re addictive despite a lack of story. They’re literally just about game mechanics. Keep pressing, keep clicking. Get feedback, get larger numbers. It’s especially gratifying when you get ‘stronger’ and you start making bigger and bigger hits, and it feels like you’re more powerful. But you’re really not. you’re just… getting good at pressing a button in some way. And games give us these artificial contexts in which everything is very neatly nicely ordered and structured, rewards come in a very predictable fashion.
How do we engineer our lives to take advantage of these mechanics? That’s much harder, it seems. Because life isn’t all neat and tidy like a video game. We don’t always know what the potential outcomes will be, what good things will happen, what bad things will happen. We can have rough ideas, but it’s not so concretely guaranteed. (Although when we’re playing a game, there’s always a chance that the power supply might mysteriously run out, or the game might crash. It’s interesting that we don’t let these thoughts faze us. Unless I guess we know that these things happen over and over again, so much so that we might refuse to play altogether. A sort of learned helplessness.)
So the challenge is to be willing to play a game that we know may crash. And to figure out the reasons why things crash, and then reverse engineer those things so the likelihood of crashing is greatly minimized. (I’m thinking about health things here. Sleep, exercise, meditation and so on. We need to recognize that these things are a part of what keeps the game from crashing, and that the game is really fun if we have it set up properly.) But we don’t play a game just because it doesn’t crash. We play because it’s fun. What’s fun about games?
What I think Adventure Capitalist and Tap Titans have taught me– growth. Growth is addictive. As long as you’re growing– bigger, stronger, etc– you’re still in the game. (This might explain why people who get into fitness often seem to go all-in, going from casual jogging or lifting to saturating their Instagram feeds with pictures of their bodies, getting all the likes. It’s a kind of growth. It’s a kind of addiction, but a relatively healthy one so we encourage it. If everybody in the world did that, we’d probably be relatively better off compared to all the other unhealthy addictions and compulsions we must probably be indulging in.)
Of course, there are all sorts of other elements. I tried to write a blogpost about this once. There’s story. There’s immersion (and c’mon, life is the most immersive experience there is… if you’re paying attention. And it’s very easy to get distracted and not pay attention. But that’s a mind skill to be developed, and it’s no different from learning to type on a keyboard.) When we’re starting out, we can’t quite control outcomes. We can’t magically increase our running speed or productivity at work or whatever it is we want to get better at. That can be disappointing. But what we can do, early on, is keep track of the work we put in. Reality is physics, it’s cause-and-effect. If you consume more calories than you expend, you’ll gain weight. If you expend more calories than you consume, you’ll lose weight. The math is easy. The psychology is hard, the habit modification is hard. But so early on there’s no point trying to change everything. You just want to keep track of it. You want to see what is happening. You don’t need to be throwing shinkuu hadoukens and shit– you just need to figure out what each button does. What is left, what is right, what is up, down, punch, kick.
So I personally am getting utility out of writing word vomits every day. And doing 5 pushups everyday, and meditating for 5 minutes, and so on. I haven’t gotten better at these things yet, but it starts by keeping track. And I’ll probably want to continue keeping track for a long time, maybe a year. It starts with one day, one week, one month. And I should reward myself lightly for keeping track, I should feel good about it, because that’s the basic framework that I can build off of. Once I’m keeping track of what I’m doing, I can start thinking about what I need to modify, what I should double down on. And I can set goals that I’m confident I will enjoy achieving, and work backwards- what are the steps from here to that goal? What are the mysterious black boxes that I don’t understand, and who can I ask for help?
All of this needs to happen somewhere. I liked doing it in notebooks, but I’m also mostly doing this in a mix of word vomits, workflowy notes, trello, stuff like that. But you want to have a log of how all of these things are changing. On hindsight it’s really glaringly obvious, but it’s not so obvious when you’re moving forward. It’s really hard. But there’s no game more worth playing, is there?