Category: Life’s a Role-Playing Game

For the past couple of years, I’ve been increasingly feeling detached from certain things to the point that they feel meaningless or irrelevant to my life, whereas before they may have provided a lot of joy to it. At first I was concerned why I was feeling this way but recently I’ve come to the realization that this is a natural part of the process of my ongoing transformation and transition to a larger sense of Self.

The best way I can describe this is something Beau Lotto said within his book Deviate.

…if you want to go from A to B, then you must actively engage with the world. But the first step to get to B is to go from A to not-A. To be in not-A is to be in uncertainty, to experience the stimulus without the requisite meaning of the past. The key is to choose to look away from the meanings we have been layering onto stimuli. Stop your reflexive response with awareness… as one can do when one is able to see the cause of a reflex.

Beau Lotto

Basically this detachment I’m feeling is the process of me going from “A to not A.” It’s me stepping away from things in my life because they aren’t provide any substantial meaning to it like they used to (kind of like how people are stepping away from the old concept of “work” today, as it’s not providing the meaning it used to provide). But what’s strange is that instead of “looking way from the meanings,” I’m actually 1) seeing them for what they are, 2) seeing how they helped me in the past, but 3) realizing that they are no longer enough for me to move forward on my journey.

Two examples of this are movies and video games.

I used to love watching movies voraciously. Today though, I’m finding the more I look for something to watch, the more I’m seeing patterns that are old and outdated, rather than new and wondrous. Lately, it’s almost as though there is this resurgence of shoot ’em up type movies, where the lone good hero goes about killing all of the bad guys.

I also used to love playing video games. In fact, video games and their communities were integral to my development and growth as a young adult, helping me to step out of my introverted shell and really take a leadership role with things I cared about. Today though, I’m finding video game environments almost like microcosms of what’s happen in the world today. It’s like there is the same attitude in these video game communities as in these movies, everyone thinks they’re righteously the “good guys” and everyone else is the bad guys that need to be removed or controlled to make “everything better.”

As I noted above, what’s happening with movies and video games is that I’m seeing the underlying meaning of why they are so popular with people but also why they are meaningless to me now because I want to go beyond these meanings and find something deeper. To visualize what I’m talking about here, Richard Barrett has a great chart showing the various levels of consciousness and the values associated with them.

If you look at the base three levels of consciousness (1 Survival, 2 Relationships, 3 Self-Esteem), you’re looking at what Robert Kegan describes as the Socialized Mind which encompasses our basic psychological needs and core “positive” values for life, like survival, belonging, and recognition. They help us to “fit in” within society, especially when we’re young and growing up.

Note also, however, that accompanying these “positive values” are “limiting values” as well, like control, blame, and superiority. Why these are limiting values is because they can limit our further growth and development to higher levels of consciousness by addictively trapping us at lower levels of consciousness. To put this another way, it creates a situation where you feel like you (as your ego) are standing in your own way.

A way I like looking at these is seeing life as a roleplaying game and these are “monsters” standing in our way. More specifically, they relate to our monstrous fears. And to further “level up” in life and reach more evolved levels of consciousness, we need to overcome and psychologically “slay” these monstrous fears before we can do so.

What I’ve learnt with regards to my own life though is that you will feel like you have slain these monstrous fears and will have levelled up but then later in your life, these fears will revisit you at a much deeper level than you imagined. Thus you realize that the monstrous fears you felt like you had slain were just the minions of a much larger boss monster that is monumentally harder to overcome. So you have to revisit these monstrous fears and overcome them once and for all or say stuck at the level you’re at.

What I see happening with society as a whole right now is that our base psychological fears and limiting values are keeping us within a vicious addictive loop that we can’t get out of. It’s like we’re drowning but we can’t see what we’re drowning within. What’s even worse though is that people have been becoming aware of these psychological fears and addictions and have started using them for their own benefit, such as politically and economically, increasingly over the past decades.

While I won’t go into political examples, because I think they’re pretty evident, I’d like to show one example of how businesses and even an entire industry is using these fears and addictions for economic gain. I’m talking about the video game industry, as shown in this video below which explains how to psychologically manipulate your gaming customers for your financial benefit. Note that this approach is pretty dominant now in the video game industry, particularly within Free-To-Play games, as this video is from 2016.

Remember I said that most people are oblivious to what they’re drowning within? Well that’s what it feels like playing within these video games where these developers are using these techniques to psychologically manipulate their customers as players within it. From my vantage point, I basically can see all of these people around me, particularly males, being manipulated by these very same base limiting values (i.e. control, jealously, revenge, arrogance, pride, superiority) as I mentioned above.

For example, developers of a game will often market new features and items within the game as something that will help you “dominate” your opponents, thus playing into the need to be “superior” and have “control” over others, even if it means having to pay a fortune to do so. So some players in the latest Diablo Immortal mobile free-to-play game were paying over $10,000 to be able to dominate other players.

It’s no different with movies though. These lone good guy hero shoot ’em up movies are feeding off these same fears and limiting values.

Yet this isn’t how you deal with reality in real life. You can’t punch or kill your way out of life’s problems, especially wicked problems like climate change which are systemic in nature and are effectively being created by own ignorant behaviours and beliefs. In effect, as I noted above, we are own own worst enemy standing in our own way.

Humanity has become a weapon of mass extinction.

Antonio Guterres

It’s funny. There’s a common quote that a lot of gamers often use when they treat someone else rudely or discriminatorily within video games. They will often say, “it’s just a game”, as though the focal point of what they’re doing not “being real” means they can treat other people however they want. I’ve said to them though that while the game may not be real, the people playing it are very real though and should be treated with some human decency.

Lately though, I’ve realized that this “it’s just a game” quote has taken on a deeper meaning for me. I’ve realized that life is effectively a very deep psychological game of many “levels” of consciousness and most people are completely oblivious and unaware that they are playing it. In effect, gamers are often psychologically playing “a game within a game” when they interact with other players within video games. It’s just that they’re not aware of it.

That’s why I think I have this detachment with so many things I used to have a strong attachment to, like playing video games. They seem frivolous and meaningless now because I’m seeing the larger roleplaying game called Life at a deeper level now and I want to “play a different game,” even showing others how to play it as well or at least work on learning from each other within it.

Put another way, I want to play within a larger context of life itself.

And that is so because in times like these many people desperately seek a context to in which to play. All too often, we are watching other people play. We are literally paying people millions of dollars to play for us. And not just on the baseball diamond. They are playing for us on compact disks; playing for us on videotape; playing for us on stage, at the concert, on the silver screen. We pay them because they play so well. Perhaps we pay them in exact proportion to our longing to be playing ourselves, which is why they are worth more and more every year. The longing for play is the longing to take the field ourselves, to play with heart and soul as each of us has the potential. We need a lifestyle that creates a context for us to make our own music, rather than always listen; do our own dancing, rather than always watch; perform our own plays, make our own films, write our own stories.

D. Stephenson Bond, Living Myth

Maturation, fully living the pattern of development, leads to a growing sense of self. The play on the symbolic field must eventually lead to something durable and vital. Play aims at coalescing into a work, an “opus.” The structure that emerges in play is the sense of our self as a “self.” If I may suggest this subtle distinction: play, if followed to its true development, evolves in a game. In the end, play imposes a set of rules. It begins to develop into a way of life, which is to say, a myth.

D. Stephenson Bond, Living Myth

Given their newfound awareness, teenagers work at understanding who they are and what they believe in. Because of their limited experience, they often make the mistake of assuming that their characteristics during early adolescence represent permanent traits.

I explain to teens that the process of developing better self-understanding should be a lifelong endeavor. In the case of teens who are undergoing rapid growth, their character will naturally change a great deal by the time they become young adults. Further, character also changes as a result of how people react to various life circumstances.

Some of the teens who seek counseling from me for their anxiety have a similar profile. They tend to be gifted intellectually, sensitive, mature, and have different interests than most of their peers. They often find it easier to relate to adults than to their peers, or to lead activities with younger children with whom they do not expect to share interests. As a result, they feel different and conclude that something must be wrong with them, which contributes to exacerbating their anxiety.

Some teens are so consumed by their inability to choose a career that they feel they cannot move forward in life.

The suffering in our lives is often caused by wrong perceptions of life itself which, as we grow, develop, and mature, can hopefully be corrected with time. The number one misperception of life is that we have to figure it all out before we begin our lives. This is completely backwards, as though Life is a traditional roleplaying game, where we have to figure out our role, class, and abilities before we begin to play the game.

Instead Life is an unconventional roleplaying game whereby we understand our role, class, and abilities while we are playing the game itself. In effect, the greatest Adventure of Your Life is to “Know Thyself” which can take you your entire life to actually figure out. So the more experience you gain in life, the more you can level up your character and understand your deeper Self all the more.

For this to work though, it requires that we look at life as an adventure of many surprising, open-ended possibilities that we can forge on our own rather than a linear well-worn path that we have to follow and fit within.

The curious paradox is that when I accept myself, just as I am, then I can change.

Carl Rogers

Ultimately, true heroes legitimize themselves, not by anything they do, but by being who they are.

Daryl Conners

I stumbled across this interview yesterday. It’s evident that most people, including even the interviewer, are completely misinterpreting the meaning of Brandi Heather’s work around play because she’s using it within a much larger context and meaning beyond what people conventionally perceive it to be. She’s not talking about playfully tossing a football around at work but more about “playing” beyond the boundaries of the existing, outdated, rigid social structures within our society today that are effectively standing in the way of the potential creativity and innovation within us all. 

I talk in the book about our kids losing this ability to play when we standardize and structure everything but we’ve actually done it in our business and in our educational worlds as well.

Brandi Heather

And because of this dependency and addiction on having everything so “standardized and structured” with such certainty and control, thus leaving no room for people to play within their lives (in the sense of exploring and discovering who they fully are), she then goes on to indicate the adverse affect of this loss of play within our lives.

We’re seeing people unable to cope and navigate things that are new and different and unknown to us.

Brandi Heather

In reflecting upon this all, I think the only way you can make people truly aware of the power of play in their lives is by helping them to become aware of how so much of their existing reality, their world and even their sense of self-identity, are constructs of our collective playing and imaginations which become “reality” for others. But these collective playings and imaginations are not The Reality but rather just one possible reality. We can playfully imagine another, if we so choose to do so.

Steve Jobs has an eloquent quote about this below but most people misinterpret it and think it only applies to technology and physical things. It doesn’t. It applies to the social structures and cultures within our lives as well. For example, our institutions are a social construct that were playfully imagined at one time in the past and became a “reality” for us, a part of our daily lives. But we can just as easily play and imagine something new, if we so choose to do so (especially now that they are so inadequate for the times we are living within).

When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life. Have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life.

Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact. And that is everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use.

Steve Jobs

Can I use “play” as a way of simplifying the complexity and depth of vertical development, making it more accessible and understandable? If so, it means showing the conventional “role playing game” we’re playing within now, as a foundational starting point.

Something’s becoming more apparent to me. My life’s work is not literally wanting to make life like an MMORPG. Rather it’s seeing all of these different systems, methods, and concepts that when integrated together, allow you to adventurously live your life in a radically different way than the conventional norm of trying to plan it out all in advance, thus leaving no room to play with who you are.

To find out who you are, you will want to embrace adventure; you will want to discover and hone your skills and talents: you will want to become all you can become.

During the early years of our lives, while we are passing through the surviving, conforming and differentiating stages of our psychological development, we have to do two important tasks: develop a sense of self—an image of who we believe we are, and build our story—establish a set of beliefs that we can use to explain how the world around us operates. The image we create becomes our identity and the story we tell becomes our cosmology.

Our identity and our cosmology are conditioned by two factors: our parents, and the culture of the community/society in which we live. By the time we become young adults, who we think we are is a complex mixture of our own unique character overlaid by layers of beliefs we have learned about ourselves from our parents, other close family members, and the community/society in which we are embedded.

If parental programming and cultural conditioning was all there was to our character and story, then all children born into the same family in the same community and the same society would turn out the same. But this is not the case.

You don’t have to reflect for long before you realise that as far as our characters are concerned, we are all born different. We come into this physical life with inbuilt preferences, qualities, gifts and talents. You just have to observe how different siblings can be to know this is true. These differences are apparent even at a very young age. There is no scientific explanation for this: All we know is that every one of us is unique, special and different.

The parental programming and cultural conditioning we experience can either suppress our uniqueness, in which case we develop a false sense of our self, or can support us in discovering our uniqueness.

This is what evolutionary coaching is about—helping your clients examine and, as necessary, remove or reduce the layers of parental programming and cultural conditioning that have led to the creation of their false sense of self (the ego), so they can uncover and examine and explore their unique sense of self (the soul).

In other words, evolutionary coaching is about helping people find out who they really are and become all they can become—helping them to individuate and self-actualise—so they can be truly independent unique human beings and live the life their souls intended.

Richard Barrett, Evolutionary Coaching

In a game, through play, you make your own story, personal to you, with a meaning personal to you.

MMOs, being games, are driven by player actions. Narrative removes meaning from action. Offering three, four, or five different endings still removes meaning. Your gameplay experience is running on rails that are all going in the same direction, and switching tracks doesn’t change that.

MMOs should be richly-featured enough that they don’t need imposed narrative; events can unfold as a result of player action and interaction, taking individual players’ personal experiences into uncharted waters. Players shouldn’t merely get the chance to redirect the narrative, they should get the chance to define it.

The answer is that people are individuals. Some things are incredibly important to them, but not to anyone else (or at least not to many other people). In playing a game, a player can cause events to occur that might not even impinge on the consciousness of the majority, but which are a major experience to that one person. They don’t even have to be a major experience, they can be a minor experience that the player is using as a building block to construct a more meaningful story in their mind. That story may well be garbage to anyone else, but it’s not to the player concerned. They did what they did in the game because it generated (or is working towards precipitating) an event that is a continuation of the unique causal chain the player is assembling, extrapolating, appropriating, honing, and personalizing.

Games, as systems, allow players to experiment with events, picking from them the ones that make the best story for them, which will lead to the further stories that are best for them. An overall, plot-driven series of events can also do this, but by necessity it’s offering a general rather than a specific story. Games allow people to weave these plots into their own story—the one that is arising from the gameplay they are manipulating.

Games are machines for creating stories. Play them, and your imagination will construct ones that work for you.

Everyone likes stories, but they like their own stories most of all.

Games don’t generate meaning. Players and designers generate meaning. Games are the objects or tools from and through which meaning is generated, but it’s the people who generate the meaning.

The Real is Imaginary

In the real world there is nothing except subatomic particles. It’s only because you view those as collecting to form energy and matter, and interpret particular configurations of energy and matter to be “objects,” that you can say a particular thing—a house, for example—“exists” in the real world.

In virtual worlds, objects are emergent consequences of the interaction of computer code and data. People ascribe meaning to these configurations, just as they do to matter/energy in the real world. They recognize that there is a difference between this kind of object and the kind they deal with normally, so they call them “virtual objects.”

Ultimately, though, the “objectness” of anything (whether real or virtual) is nothing more than a construct of the mind.

Richard Bartle, MMOs From The Inside Out