How to Play 👾
It was important for me to write that post defending the fool within us, because I'll be channeling it now.
I took only a single philosophy course at school, and instead of talking about philosophy, my professor used most of the lecture to tell us about a woman that died about a hundred years ago, someone that came out to Colorado during the pioneer days. I believe he was involved with her archaeological find. He read all her letters. When he wasn't talking about this woman, he was talking about his divorce or flirting with the students in the front row. I actually came to learn about philosophy, so.
So there wasn't much philosophy in my one course on philosophy.
I'm not well read in philosophy, but the last philosophy book I read might be my favorite book of all time, The Socrates Express by travel writer and philosopher Eric Weiner. The book has a beautiful chapter about the philosopher of its title. Socrates understood that the path of a philosopher will sometimes appear foolish, sometimes genuinely so. It is not a role that lends itself to dignity as much as you might hope.
Here, let's let ChatGPT explain it:
What I believe I can add to the discussion is the perspective of an outsider. I didn't get much philosophy at school but I got a lot of psychology, and that is philosophy adjacent. I also grew up in a very strange world, sometimes it was as if I were on another planet. Many psychology students acknowledge their choice of major has at least something to do with making sense of their own mental health experience.
I have always been interested in people and difficult questions. It is a path that started at church, when I was a young person. It took me through a bachelors and then several years as a research assistant and then 4/5 of a doctorate. Then it took a very strange turn into software and game design. So, all my life, I've been working on a model of the human experience, from the perspective of religion, psychology, therapy, and game design.
Game design? It is not widely recognized as a branch of philosophy, but it should be. The joy we find in games comes from learning how to play. The joy in life comes from the same place. The spirit of curiosity and play is strong within us, when we make room for it. Games offer a rich and engaging surface area to explore the human experience.
Sometimes I will offend people. Socrates offended people, and it led him down a path that ended with a cup of hemlock tea. People felt threatened when they believe he was attacking their gods. People might feel that way sometimes about me too. I don’t usually contradict religious gods. But I might contradict our actual gods. What do we truly worship, in America? What do we believe in so strongly that we get angry or just dismiss anyone who says otherwise?
Socrates could be a bit of a troll, but I resist the temptation whenever possible. I put a lot of thought into my words, not because I don’t like hemlock tea, but because I want to be a good ambassador for the slice of truth I’ve seen. We are experiencing turbulence, as a society. We can never hope to completely avoid turbulence but how it is experienced depends on how it is understood.
It is a perspective that I think people will find very hopeful. It is a kindness, to offer calm to a troubled heart, one that I wish to give and receive whenever possible.
I am a strange kind of hermit, the kind that actually likes people. So why am I a hermit? When I spend a lot of time around other people, my world begins to slide into incoherence. I learned all my social skills in a strange way. The first part of my life, my social interactions were entirely with family and church and neighborhood kids. I had no teachers, outside of family and church. That environment was not always healthy or safe.
Then, in my freshmen year, I went to high school. It was like stepping onto another planet and I felt like I had to catch up in a lot of ways, academically and socially, and very quickly. As if overnight, I found a way of fitting in that was always a little clumsy and yet I could talk to anyone. But I also struggled with the image I had of myself as reflected back from other people.
I remember at a young age, watching a video with some other kids, and someone remarked that I looked like this one kid in the video. I was shocked, and when I looked in the mirror, I could see it too. It was as if I didn't recognize my own face very well until that moment. I found it deeply disorienting. This might sound silly, but it was a vivid experience for me.
Do you know someone who says they never forget a face? Think of me as the opposite. It is not so much that I forget faces, I seem to recognize people who I haven’t met. One time, I thought I recognized my girlfriend at an Avalanche game so I sat down next to her, expecting to surprise her. It wasn’t really her, and that was a little awkward. I have a lot of little stories like that. The problem is that I have too many false positives, and so sometimes I doubt the true positives. When I get tired, faces start to appear strange, as if they do not fit together very well. If my brain were software I'd be looking for bugs in the facial recognition module.
Most people find me friendly, and I can connect easily. What they might not know is that it is partly out of necessity, I’m sometimes uncertain if I know someone until we start talking, and I pay close attention to whether they recognize me. I hate the idea of accidentally passing a friend like I do not know them, so I offer a little bit of familiarity to almost every interaction. You'd think that might get strange but no one has ever complained, much more often I end up with a new acquaintance.
However, there are still times that I struggle socially where other people seem to have no problem. I can be so insecure at all the wrong times. Sometimes I feel like a man child. Sometimes I become self absorbed to the point where it drains all the color from life.
Thankfully, it seems to wear itself out, and people can be very understanding. They hardly even noticed, so they say.
That’s a long way of saying I’m an odd duck, but then again, not so much. Whenever I speak with friends or family about challenges, the most common response is relating on a level that surprises us both. It almost seems like the typical story arc of the human experience is about growing enough to see outside of oneself and to recognize a little clearer the human spirit in the people around us and see something familiar.
To help me navigate life, I've developed a few little tricks, most related to some aspect of reality testing. When I've shared them, they seem to help others just as much. They come from my experience as a researcher and a therapist, but other places too, like games. If there are any lessons to be learned, that is what I hope to explore in this section— game mechanics of life.