In the Company of Games
I have in my keeping, a small sliver of psyche named Ywen, that lives in an online game called wow.
She has an odd family tree; although she is an elf, her relatives are gnomes, trolls and taurens. Sometimes they meet for mischief. As a rogue by trade, she has a number of devious abilities and, with her offbeat relatives (you know who you are), they play a game within the game where the object is to capture the flag of enemies. The enemies resist mightily. Chaos, death and resurrection and fights with magic, swords, curses, arrows, bombs and exploding sheep ensue. The world is richly textured and the gameplay is real-time interactive with 10 other slivers of human psyches on each side in this mini-flag-game. In the larger game there is a world with two continents to explore and varied adventures in a population of over 6 million humans. Virtually larger than some small countries are physically. There is an economy, crafts and professions.
It is as addictive as any drug for some. Easily understood, given how addictive television is, and in wow we are a star in the cast. We influence through our actions the very nature of the program. There is a sense of accomplishment, of learning skills and becoming more powerful in relation to other characters and the environment. There are social fabrics.
Alas, none of which carries over into the "real" world.
Mostly we dive into the pool, submerged in the experience, and then pop out again to carry on our lives. For the majority it's an exciting option for entertainment, more engaging most times than the passive experiences of more conventional media.
And it's infinitely fascinating to me how we interact with our environment, our fellow man, and even ourselves through technology. It wasn't fire that Prometheus gave humans, it was the tools and technique for creating fire. It was a model for technology that would allow us eventually to see the microscopic and macroscopic, to harness energies, and to understand more of our world than our unamplified senses and capabilities could encompass. Yet we have a love/hate relationship with technology. Almost any new tech is viewed with apprehension. We have both a deep-seated fear and an inbred fascination of the unknown. Got to love the ambiguity of the human race.
Segue
I was once asked during an interview, what I thought of ambiguity. It was one of those jobs where things aren't black and white; they wanted to know if the applicant could handle a role with conflicting directions and priorities. I said I liked it and I didn't. I got the job. Even though I had to interrupt the interview following mine to retrieve my umbrella which I had forgotten. It was raining and that's the only umbrella I brought.
In an interview before this, for a different job, I actually had to excuse myself in the middle. Outside the interview door was a maze of cubicles set out in a building like a huge warehouse; the job was working with AI, an interest of mine, but during the passage through the miles of cubicles to the interview room I started reacting badly to the whole energy of the place. Talk about yer yucky Feng Shui. And five minutes into the interview, while I was answering all the questions passably, I suddenly bolted towards the door mumbling god knows what. Without an escort, and being directionally impaired in any artificial environment (in forests, which I grew up in, I can find my way in the dark, miles from the starting place) I darted around like a rat in a maze trying to find my way through the cubicle-hell to the exit. Which wasn't marked. Bad mojo. But I finally escaped. And none too soon.
Summary (as if there was a point to this mish-mash)
There is mystery, I believe, woven into the fabric of every experience, both the odd and the obvious; I frequently am reminding myself not to come up with answers, they just funnel my experience ---they stop the questions/wonder that opens the door to the next room. A mystery is not something to be solved, it's something to experienced (a wise poet once said.) In the end, that's all we extract from existence. Our experiences. Regret nothing, explore everything you are capable of. Seek greater capacity to feel and know rather than greater security or permanence. 'cause life is too important to take seriously. We don't need to figure it all out, the more ambiguous a thing appears, the more likely you are assessing it correctly.
And that's all the thoughts I have about that right now.
She has an odd family tree; although she is an elf, her relatives are gnomes, trolls and taurens. Sometimes they meet for mischief. As a rogue by trade, she has a number of devious abilities and, with her offbeat relatives (you know who you are), they play a game within the game where the object is to capture the flag of enemies. The enemies resist mightily. Chaos, death and resurrection and fights with magic, swords, curses, arrows, bombs and exploding sheep ensue. The world is richly textured and the gameplay is real-time interactive with 10 other slivers of human psyches on each side in this mini-flag-game. In the larger game there is a world with two continents to explore and varied adventures in a population of over 6 million humans. Virtually larger than some small countries are physically. There is an economy, crafts and professions.
It is as addictive as any drug for some. Easily understood, given how addictive television is, and in wow we are a star in the cast. We influence through our actions the very nature of the program. There is a sense of accomplishment, of learning skills and becoming more powerful in relation to other characters and the environment. There are social fabrics.
Alas, none of which carries over into the "real" world.
Mostly we dive into the pool, submerged in the experience, and then pop out again to carry on our lives. For the majority it's an exciting option for entertainment, more engaging most times than the passive experiences of more conventional media.
And it's infinitely fascinating to me how we interact with our environment, our fellow man, and even ourselves through technology. It wasn't fire that Prometheus gave humans, it was the tools and technique for creating fire. It was a model for technology that would allow us eventually to see the microscopic and macroscopic, to harness energies, and to understand more of our world than our unamplified senses and capabilities could encompass. Yet we have a love/hate relationship with technology. Almost any new tech is viewed with apprehension. We have both a deep-seated fear and an inbred fascination of the unknown. Got to love the ambiguity of the human race.
Segue
I was once asked during an interview, what I thought of ambiguity. It was one of those jobs where things aren't black and white; they wanted to know if the applicant could handle a role with conflicting directions and priorities. I said I liked it and I didn't. I got the job. Even though I had to interrupt the interview following mine to retrieve my umbrella which I had forgotten. It was raining and that's the only umbrella I brought.
In an interview before this, for a different job, I actually had to excuse myself in the middle. Outside the interview door was a maze of cubicles set out in a building like a huge warehouse; the job was working with AI, an interest of mine, but during the passage through the miles of cubicles to the interview room I started reacting badly to the whole energy of the place. Talk about yer yucky Feng Shui. And five minutes into the interview, while I was answering all the questions passably, I suddenly bolted towards the door mumbling god knows what. Without an escort, and being directionally impaired in any artificial environment (in forests, which I grew up in, I can find my way in the dark, miles from the starting place) I darted around like a rat in a maze trying to find my way through the cubicle-hell to the exit. Which wasn't marked. Bad mojo. But I finally escaped. And none too soon.
Summary (as if there was a point to this mish-mash)
There is mystery, I believe, woven into the fabric of every experience, both the odd and the obvious; I frequently am reminding myself not to come up with answers, they just funnel my experience ---they stop the questions/wonder that opens the door to the next room. A mystery is not something to be solved, it's something to experienced (a wise poet once said.) In the end, that's all we extract from existence. Our experiences. Regret nothing, explore everything you are capable of. Seek greater capacity to feel and know rather than greater security or permanence. 'cause life is too important to take seriously. We don't need to figure it all out, the more ambiguous a thing appears, the more likely you are assessing it correctly.
And that's all the thoughts I have about that right now.
pretty interesting mish-mash
ReplyDeleteI wonder what that interviewer thought as you mumbled out...ROFL..THATS HILARIOUS.
ReplyDelete