Tribal Heritage

As much as people of more modern civilization like the US would like to think otherwise, no one can escape the deep rooted tribal tendencies we humans have. One of the reasons why sports are so popular is that we can stand behind a tribe (the Mets, the Giants, the whatevers) and stand behind our champions (the players) and stand united against those who are outside our tribe, who are against our tribe (the other team). That's how it's always been, and so long as we retain most of our original biological neural systems that's how things will remain. There's nothing wrong with that, it's just the way we are.

The concept of Flow describes the defining characteristics for experiences that human being attribute to "happiness". It actually turns out that people don't attribute physical pleasure directly with happiness (such as doing drugs, or acts of physical pleasure such as masterbation). It turns out people report most content and happy after they engaged in an activity where they can solve a "problem" to their fullest potential and be fully absorbed and their awareness is consumed in that process. (problem can be anything from listening to classical music, to having a gossip conversation, to solving a math problem, to reading, to playing a computer game (more on this later on another post))

The key features of Flow include "requires intense concentration and focus of awareness", "clearly defined goals", "frequent and accurate feedback on the performance", "challenge level closely matches the skill level" and a few more.

It turns out people can experience intense Flow when they are watching sports, especially with a lot of other people. People experience Flow when they fully aligned themselves with the goal of the group, victory of the team. When a person focuses all their awareness and concentration on the screen watching his team play and is burning with the clearly defined goal of scoring into the opponent's net, he will experience Flow. When that goal is finally met, he will, along with all the other people who have become fully aligned in the purpose, will explode in unison and experience intensely the very stuff that we most consistently attribute to happiness.

So let's take all this and discuss this situation about not being able to form a "tribe" around computer games. I don't think it's computer games has an intrinsic problem in this area. In fact we have enough critical mass of players in this country that one can without too much difficulty find others who will aligned their purpose to the purpose of a game. I think the problem we are experiencing is a local problem. We haven't really gone out of our way to recruit a group of like minded people who love the games we love. Malekan has effectively organized events and aligned people to some goals that he believes in. Watching sports, watching Lost, watching 24, etc. On the one hand those things are lowest common denominator (requires very little skill) and is easier to set up, but the fact of the matter is he has taken his time to set them up and reinforce the purpose. We have a greater challenge, first is in finding the right people who have the computer game skill set to enjoy the games we enjoy, or find games that can appeal to people with average skill. But let's face it, we have not been focusing on doing this. We have not made a "game night" where we consistently invite those with potential "chris, derek on some fighting games/sports games, paul, etc etc" and encourage alignement with our goal of playing games. We can say it's too difficult, those people are too busy, etc, but let's be honest, we haven't really organized and put that much effort into it.

The problem of "common denominator" is prevaling here. Gig and I can enjoy a DVD as much as Malekan or Justjess or Mike, but the inverse is not true for playing Call of Duty. To accomodate for optimal satisfaction of people in the house, DVD trumps Games.

We've identified our problems. Obviously the fact that Malekan doesn't play computer games doens't make him a bad person to live with. In fact Gig and I enjoy his presence a lot in our apartment. So let's A) Face the reality that with Malekan and others around the living room won't be playing games around the clock. And this isn't forced on us, this is a decision we are making, a point we are willing to concede for optimizing happiness. B) Face the reality that sitting on our asses and complain about this won't make a difference. We must act to get what we want.

So how should we act?

First we must nurture and defend our culture. And that begins with our own desire to play games. Given point (a) we have implicitly agreed to be flexible. This means that when Malekan and a few people want to watch DVD in the living room, the desire to play computer games can't be allowed to be destroyed. We must be pro-active and be agile. Most the 360 into our rooms where we both have another huge ass TV each. We have to allow ourselves to have a great time playing games without letting our existing limitation shut us down.

Second we must context for people of our culture to align themselves in. We should be hosting a weekend gaming session, or maybe even a weekday gaming session, either online or offline. We are dismissing the concept of combined online and offline community of friends that can easily dwarf the offline only community.

Third we should be actively recruiting other to join our culture. Simple fact of the matter is people are not going to enjoy playing something that they are bad at. Let's look at the case of Malekan and games. It's a very good example of something we managed very poorly. We didn't properly ramp him up on games and given him a context in which he can be successful and have a good time. Feeling alienated and inadequate, he went from moderate interest in computer games to moderate dislike of computer games. That really no one's fault but yours and mine, Gig. We screwed that one up. Let's see if we can do something about that moving forward. We should also be actively looking at games that we enjoy that new people could quickly pick up and enjoy. We need to include key players who would often be the key objectors to gaming. (we'll discuss that part more off line)

ANYWAY. Once against, a post too long, but I wanted to drive home all my points. I doubt anyone's reading this far except maybe you, Gig. ;] Let's get this rolling. We have a tribe to build and protect.