9 out of 10 monkeys believe they are not behind glass

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From here:

Battle With ‘Gamer Regret’ Never Ceases
By Clive Thompson Email 09.10.07 | 2:00 AM

In retrospect, maybe I shouldn’t have looked.

I was 10 days into playing Dungeon Maker: Hunting Ground — a little RPG I reviewed here last month — and I was poking around the “settings” menu. I noticed that it had a “time played” option, which shows you how long you’ve been toiling away at the game. Curious, I clicked it.

Thirty-six hours.

Upon which my heart sank into a fathomless pit. Thirty-six hours? How in god’s name had I managed to spend almost four hours a day inside this game? I should point out that this was not the only game I’d been playing during that time. I’d also been hip-deep in BioShock and Space Giraffe, so I’d been planted like a weed in front of my consoles for hours more.

This is a missing-time experience so vast one would normally require a UFO abduction to achieve it.

So the question of the column, and possibly the question of my eternal soul, is: Is this good thing? How much does it change the architecture of your life to spend that much time playing games?

The dirty secret of gamers is that we wrestle with this dilemma all the time. We’re often gripped by what I call “gamer regret” — a sudden, horrifying sense of emptiness when we muse on all the other things we could have done with our game time.

Frequently, it’s precipitated by those ghastly “time played” counters. The “played” command in World of Warcraft is the worst. I’ve known gamers who nearly went into shock after discovering they’d spent an entire month in-game each year. (According to Nick Yee’s research, amazingly, this is the average — 20 hours a week of play.)

My gamer regret usually takes the form of drawing up a humiliating list of other, potential activities I’ve forgone. I could have … volunteered at a local hospital! Learned a language! Cleaned up my rats’ nest of an office! Gotten a head start on a new writing project! Hell, I could have just, you know, played the guitar or something. Wouldn’t that have been a less howling waste of my precious time on Earth?

Sometimes I think the inky depths of gamer regret are linked, in a fiendish calculus, to how totally awesome the game is. The higher you rise, the lower you fall. A really superb game sweeps you into its embrace because it offers a seductively controllable alternative to life. You’re wrestling to master a system — a war, a puzzle, a mystery — that is enormously complex but, unlike the rest of our lives, actually masterable.

I see why some people with blogs have gotten in trouble with past, present, and future employers or even family and friends. Once your caught, your caught. The wall, so to speak, has been broken down between your anonymous self and your known self. People, anonymously or not, find out about your blog (like it is something new that no one has ever done before), and check up on you digitally with rapt fascination.

So you have to make a choice. Continue to rant your deep dark subconscious mind or journal on paper away from other eyes. I guess there is a bit of voyeurism in blogging… allowing google to search you, allowing technorati to back you up, allowing pingbacks and trackbacks to other articles and other blogs. A digital crumb trail.

But I don’t do it for voyeurism. I do it for a record that I am here in some context. That the person that I am exists as more than a number in the social security index in D.C. or a statistic in our Gross National Product tally. I hate the fact that I will live in this crazy world, and for all intents and purposes, any record of passing will be in facts and figures and not in any sort of impact into the culture itself. So I do it for the small insignificant splash in the big digital ocean. My pebble may not make waves, or even ripples in the ocean, but nevertheless, my pebble is there.

In my opinion, it is completely ok to choose to keep the rants, be honest, seem shallow and rude, and be damned who reads it. The blog is in existence for my benefit, not others. It is a way for me to vent or share or point and laugh, and it is a great method for catharsis all around. And it allows me to introspect my own opinions and find fault with the calls I have made in writing it all out. My blog, to a certain extent, helps me grow.

So the wall thins… my work life, my private life, and my blog are starting to overlap a little.

And that is ok in the long run.

Just another ripple.

From here:

People don’t care about you. This isn’t because people are mean or hurtful, but simply because they are mostly focused on themselves. Consider this hypothetical pie-chart showing the variety of thoughts a typical person has:

In this example, 60% of thoughts are self-directed. My goals. My problems. My feelings. Another 30% are directed towards relationships, but how they affect me. What does Julie think of me? How will boss evaluate my performance in the next review? Do my friends like me or see me as irritating?

Only 10% in this model is time spent in empathy. Empathy is the rare event where one person actually feels the emotions, problems and perspective of another person. Instead of asking what Julie thinks of me, I ask what is Julie thinking.

Within that 10%, most people then divide attention between hundreds of other people they know. As a result, you would occupy a fraction of a percentage in most peoples minds, and only a couple percentage points in a deeply bonded relationship. Even if you are in another persons thoughts, it is how your relationship affects them, not you.

The entire article is so worth the read.

I think the dynamic between perception and behavior is a forever interesting subject. People put forward a unique face to the world, whether be at work or at church or with friends, and have a completely different face with family or other friends. Situations it seems forces people to adopt a facade, a set of behaviors that can seem almost two faced if they ever came to light.

Some would argue that many people are genuine at all times in all situations, with only one face presented. The more I think about it, the more I think it is a lie that people tell themselves so they can sleep at night. It is human nature to have different personalities… it has allowed us to adapt to the ever changing environment while allowing us to survive the brutality of human relationships.

We are all singular individuals contained within our own meatspace, consciousness confined behind a the thin layer of bone, with only our words, our actions, and our behavior to speak for it.

A cruel joke it seems. Why broadcast telepathy was not a standard component of the human race, I will never know. Because if we had the ability to let the consciousness speak directly without invading other’s own consciousness, things would be so much better on planet earth.

I know that I present multiple faces to the world. I have two that I recognize easily.

I can be the Recluse. The individual that seeks to think more than act, and when it acts, the movement is defined and precise.

I can also be the Friend. The fount of opinion and hearsay, the one that spends energy on relationships and focusing on interactions.

At work, people see the Friend rarely, and when they do, they are shocked or confused how a dick like me could ever be an enjoyable person to be around. Most of the time, I am the Recluse. My focus tends to center on problem solving and resolution, which often pushes the human element right out of the picture. To me, fixing a problem is far more important than talking about the problem.

To others, they think the opposite is true.

And that is a source of strife from those that hate the Recluse (the one that gets things done) and love the Friend (the one that can’t get jack done). I am sure they ask why there has to be a distinction. I think a defining line has to exist for me… and it is because I only have so much energy. I want to expend my energy efficiently, and the Recluse is great at that. The Friend is what I allow when I have something left over to give.

I spend alot of time worrying what others think of me when I am in my Recluse mode. I know that I am a more effective employee when I am a Recluse, and I know that things work out better in the long run if I do it that way. I have had seven years to figure that out at least. Speed wins.

But I know I can come off as a total dick. When in reality I am not. But it is the perception that fucks me. I am being perceived as a dick, so I am a dick. So based on the perception, do I modify my behavior? I have tried a couple times to see if it is doable, and based on the outcomes, I don’t think it is. I have to live with the fact that yes, sometimes I am a dick. It is not that I do not care about others (I think I am fairly empathetic), but the fact is, often I can’t let empathy get in the way of doing things right. It feels sloppy to me.

Just a messy way to get things accomplished, if they ever get accomplished at all.

So I spend some time apologizing here and there. I think the only reason that my behavior has not gotten me in any significant trouble is because people see the results. They see the gains. A few eccentricities on my part, here and there, have not garnered enough negative press to stop the game. However, I know that it has totally screwed me in my future at my current job (because perceptions rarely change or shift). I am at the end of the line.

Which sucks, because you either compromise who you are or compromise who you want to be. Those that don’t have to make that choice are lucky.

The rest of us just have to deal.