Nollind Whachell

I’m starting to see game developers wondering how they can add symbiotic gameplay to their games. While I’ll try to elaborate later in more detail on how to create a symbiotic environment within your social groups, I think it’s critically important to realize how democracy actually counteracts a symbiotic environment. The reason for this should hopefully be obvious.

Symbiotic groups excel in their ability to deal with rapid change or crisis because they act innately without very little communication between them. In effect, when something happens, they automatically know what to do as a group, so they just do it.

In a democratic group though, even though there is no centralized command and control to slow it down, the process of everyone voicing their individual concerns and suggestions can effectively kill any chance of rapid response because, more often than not, people end up arguing about what should be done (and hopefully this in itself is a great hint as to how symbiotic groups work more effectively).

I think another huge difference between a “typical” democratic group of today and a symbiotic group is that individuals within symbiotic groups don’t need to ask for permission from their greater group or community before they engage something. In effect, if they see something that will affect them and the greater group, they immediately engage it but also relay awareness of the situation to others. This awareness is the lifeblood of a symbiotic group because it determines the decision for self-engagement from each individual within the group without them being ordered to do so.

I’ve got a copy of the Tao Te Ching called The Tao of Power that I’ve had for many many years. And like the other books I’ve got on my shelf, it seems to be an endless resource point for self-learning. In effect, I can read a book once, put it back, and then pick it up months or even years later and learn something completely new. I love having books like that.

What I noticed in reading the book lately though was how closely it relates to this “thing” that I’ve been exploring and pursuing for so long. In effect, something related to social systems design or a natural way of life. One thing in particular, in my last reading, really jumped out at me though and I’m surprised that I didn’t notice it before (or maybe I read it but forgot about it): attitude. Here’s an excellent quote from the opening chapters of the book that explain who Lao Tzu was, what he was trying to teach within the Tao Te Ching, and how it relates to attitude.

Use attitude instead of action, and lead others by guiding rather than ruling. Manage people by letting them act on you, and not the other way around. In this way, your subjects will develop a sense of self-government, and you, as their guide, will be rewarded with their loyalty and cooperation.

What I found interesting about this statement is how attitude seems to be so critical to an effective team as a whole and not just its leader. In effect, if everyone on your team doesn’t have the right attitude then often times it doesn’t “flow” very well. Yet when everyone has the right attitude, there seems to be this thriving hive of activity and things just naturally happen without very much effort.

This directly relates to my experiences within video game clans in the past. I never ever recruited people based upon skill alone. If anything I realized, knowledge could easily be learned, particularly within the right fertile learning environment (i.e. veterans always working alongside newbies). What was important for the long lasting success and sustainability of the group though was a person’s attitude. For example, someone could be incredibly skillful, yet if they didn’t have the right attitude, they often didn’t gel with the team very well, thus causing blockages or friction within the group.

More specifically though, I discovered one critical component of this right attitude, while reading an offhand comment by an MMO blogger recently. He mentioned something about some of the best gamers within MMO games and in guilds / clans are those who are constantly thinking about how to improve their characters and themselves. When he said that, I immediately knew what he was talking about: care. In effect, if you don’t have the right caring attitude to even care about yourself then, more often than not, you’re not going to care about others in turn. Yet if you do care about yourself, then there seems to be this constant desire for self-learning and, in turn, a caring for others around you to the point that you desire to see them empowered as well.

The same applies to business environments I’ve been within. I’ve seen people with not much skill but a boundless desire to improve themselves and these people are an incredible asset to the company because you know when they do acquire that skill (which they usually do rather quickly), they usually go on to do amazing things within the company, helping others in turn. Yet on the opposite side of the spectrum, you sometimes see people who just sit around, with little care for self-improvement, and thus often little care for helping those around them. Again the right caring attitude seems to make all the difference in the effectiveness of social groups.

Before I went to sleep last night I realized something very interesting. I seem to excel (or be more optimized) in “working” environments where I have the ability to relay my acquired veteran knowledge of the system that the team or organization is immersed within.

Even more so, it’s imperative that I be able to do this in a “face to face” manner, in the “physical” presence of others. In effect, the sharing of knowledge has to be done side by side, while both myself and the other person (or people) are working on the same thing, thus allowing both of us to learn from the actions of the other. I experienced this sort of thing both within video game clans (i.e. Quake CTF, Counter-Strike) and within a business environment (i.e. FirstWeb). In both environments, I almost seemed to be like a core hub for the group, in that I was like a resource point or wellspring for others.

Another thing that I realized from this is that my journal is truly about self-learning, more than anything else. In effect, if I write a post that doesn’t at least contain one small piece of self-learning and self-realization within it (i.e. I’m just relaying existing knowledge, nothing new to me) then I seem to falter and go off track. Yet when I’m continually relaying things about self-improvement or self-learning for myself, then I seem to be able to talk till the cows come home.

What interesting in reading the above is that in both aspects I’m sharing knowledge and teaching. But the key thing seems to be that for me to share knowledge that I already know, it has to be within an active immersive environment with others around me in close proximity (i.e. within an office, within a game environment with avatars), so that those others can effectively learn by watching.

From an analytical right brain perspective, what I’m exploring often relates to the thinking, design, and maintenance of optimized complex systems, such as hardware, software, communities, organizations, and ecosystems. From a more holistic and intuitive left brain perspective, I’m simply exploring a more natural and flowing way of life.

It’s imperative to understand though that I didn’t create this design thinking or way of life, I just observed its existing patterns hidden within my years of reading and research. If anything, many people have already communicated these natural design patterns throughout the ages but often times from such a limited perspective that it’s often lost within just their area of expertise, rather than being understood by the average person.

So really more than anything, I’m just the messenger or translator of what’s already been out there. My purpose, above all else, is to try to communicate this knowledge in a simple way that hopefully everyone, no matter their background or work life, can understand. More than anything though, my hope is that even if a person doesn’t fully understand what I’m saying, there is still something within it that feels right to them, even if they themselves can’t explain it. This, if anything, is how I’ve made most of my discoveries over the years, in that I never disregarded something if intuitively it felt important or right to me, even if I couldn’t understand why at that point in time.

Ok, this isn’t working. I need to define some things here before I can start this “journey” in honest. Otherwise, I’m just going to get “lost in the woods” again and end up backtracking to where I started again. Already I see this happening, so I need to wipe the slate clean, start over, but bear the following things in mind using the “hate something, making something better” approach.

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I hate just writing about stuff that I know. In effect, if I only write about what I already know and what I’ve already realized then this journal is going to be extremely ineffective to me, almost to the point of being useless. The reason for this is that there is often a chaotic mixture of thoughts in my head, leading up to a discovery, and a journal is the perfect place to jot down all of these thoughts, in a variety of forms and structures, so I can keep track of where I’m trying to “trail break”.

The problem with this approach though, of course, is that most of what I write is probably not going to make much sense to a lot of people. So the question is do I have a public journal at all or just a private one. And yet, during my adventures of exploration, I come across things that connect with the exploration of others. So in that sense, sharing these thoughts seems like the right thing to do. In effect, in doing so, it makes me feel like I’m an explorer, delving into the unknown and leaving trail markers and notes behind for those who are also exploring on the edge like myself.

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I hate sounding like an all superior know-it-all. It’s because if I’ve learnt anything in my past explorations, at the point you start thinking you know it all, that’s the point you start closing your mind off to the world and stop seeing other amazing things to explore. In effect, it’s the point you start losing your awareness. So sure there is nothing wrong with me being a teacher or guide, sharing my information with others, but, more than anything, I need to continually be a humble student of life, always actively open to new experiences and discoveries that may present themselves daily, if not hourly.

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I hate criticizing other people. The reason for this is pretty obvious. It’s because it’s so easy to criticize or to destroy someone else’s words or thoughts. To create though, that’s difficult. Therefore, when I read or hear something that I’d like to criticize or break apart, I need to instead look at it as an opportunity to connect with that person, fully understanding what they were trying to do, and then create an alternative approach instead.

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I hate writing from a limited perspective. A lot of what I’m exploring applies to many aspects and areas of life. Therefore, the more specific I am in my writing from a certain perspective, the less useful what I’m writing is to certain people, because they may not see how it applies to them. For example, if I talk about something and explain how it relates to game design, I immediately risk making it unrelatable to people within business organizational design, even though the basic principles apply to both, plus other areas of life as well. So to avoid this, my greatest challenge is going to have to be write in such a way that it connects and relates to many diverse perspectives at once.

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I hate making myself look like an obsessed nut case. While it’s very important for me to keep focused and relay what I’m passionate about, it’s also critically important for me to relay who I am as a whole person. Simply put, if I focus too much on my passion, I’ll seem like an obsessed nut case who can’t chill out, disconnect, and enjoy real life. In reality, I have a lot of other interests and loves like nature, animals, the outdoors, hiking, biking, drawing, composing music, photography, cooking, dining, online video games, and more. It’s important for me to relay these things, primarily because that are bridges to help people relate to me which in turn can lead to a possible connection or relationship in the future.

My journal will still be inactive for a while yet but I’ll probably reopen it at a later date. You can read more about this in the News section of my site which will relay updates relating to my web design work in future.

This journal is now inactive but will remain on my site for archival purposes.

In closing, I’d just like say that sometimes to have the curiousity to discover new things, we need to have the courage to let go of other things.

I’ve been noticing some commonalities lately on the importance of filtering.

Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should.

Seth Godin: The more people you reach the more likely it is that you’re reaching the wrong people.

Progressive Disclosure: A strategy for managing information complexity in which only necessary or requested information is displayed at any given time.

Signal-to-Noise Ratio: The ratio of relevant to irrelevant information in a display. The highest possible signal-to-noise ratio is desirable in design.

Steve Jobs: And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much.

I’ve also noticed that a lot of designers don’t talk very much on their sites either…well their business/product sites anyways. I’m assuming it’s because they want to filter what they say so that their work speaks for itself. And in reality isn’t that great design? Stripping everything away so that the design itself speaks directly to your soul or emotions.

I was chatting with someone the other day about how I believe that in the future, instead of having massive plasma or LCD screens (since their environmentally unfriendly), we’ll instead have small hand sized devices that project an incredible sharp and vivid picture on surfaces around us at any size we desire.

So imagine a futuristic version of an iPod or iPhone with this technology built within it. If I’m meeting a client at a coffee shop, I can place it so the projection is cast across a small portion of the table top, so we can go over a design composite without the entire coffee shop seeing. Or if I’m at a friends place and he hasn’t seen a new movie release that I’ve already seen, I can place it so it projects it upon a large portion of the wall in his living room, thus creating a theatre-like performance (with the audio being transmitted to his stereo wirelessly).

Of course the next step is the ability for the device to not only project images like a computer or TV screen but also receive input via precise recognition of your hand movement. Initially it might be pretty basic but over time it could theoretically detect movement so precise that you could type on a projected keyboard with it. I mean imagine having your iTunes music library cast up on a wall in cover flow mode and being able to flow through your albums with your hands, almost like flicking through a virtual library of vinyl record albums.

Again this really isn’t that far fetched. For example, take a look at this video of a Hitachi device just recently shown at the CES. With another five to tens years of miniaturization, who knows what we’ll have. Oh and add in vocal and facial recognition and you’ve got something pretty cool.