There is always a curious tie at some point between the fall and the creation. Taking the ghastly risk is the condition of there being life. You see, for all life is an act of faith and an act of gambling, the moment you take a step you take an act of faith because you don’t know if the floor will give under your feet. The moment you take a journey, what an act of faith. This is the most powerful thing that one can do, it is to surrender. Love is an act of surrender to another person, total abandonment, which is quite mad letting things get out of control like that… The course of wisdom to let go is to commit oneself, which is quite mad. Which brings us to the conclusion that in madness lies sanity.
After watching, I started thinking about how men have been retreating into video games. So, since I was a top ten World of Warcraft raider, does that mean I did this more than most? Let’s find out!
Our questions are; What was happening during that process of supposed retreat? Moreover, what is happening to people during this process? So, using my own story here, like a detective following up on the truth we will figure this out.
To understand that we have a great article here that asks the question why are task management applications not as popular as things like Pokemon Go, Fortnite, or World of Warcraft? For example, if people put that kind of effort towards something good for themselves and those around them, the world would be a much better place, right?
From this, I started to wonder, why, since we are thinking about gamification to complete life’s dreams here. The question then arose, “why would someone retreat away from doing the tasks that will lead to having their dream?” Well, let’s dive in here, with Francis Wade and his article, What Designers of Task Management Apps Can Do to Catch Up with Pokemon Go. We will explore why this is interesting from the perspective of escaping or more specifically, the escape that video games offer, which in this context is just one outlet for “retreating from one’s responsibilities.” Hence, this is our link to task management, fun, and retreating.
Here is a perspective to kick things off that approaches scheduling from the idea of creating the day that you want for yourself instead of being a slave to the tasks you need to do. That way you can view the things that you are doing as things that you want to do and have to do. This will help an unbelievable amount if you stick with it. This is one thing that you can do to create a sense of predictability in a world of chaos, something like a bastion to protect against the stress of the world. Starting from somewhere is as good a place as any as the fool shows us. Yet, this is where all things begin and as we press on we become more adept at forming things like routine and habit as we previously discussed. Just like being a baby, the fool is a great way to look at the beginning of life or a starting place for anything. As pointed out by Francis Wade in his studies of task management, technology, and how that integrates into our daily lives starting from learning to perspective to software.
He points out that at the beginning of our life we start in life with a mental calendar as just who we are, we learn to use our mental capacity to be able to take on more, which is limited by our ability to manage the flow of this, and we upgrade with technology that makes sense for us and us available like a calendar or a task management system.
Learning to be a sophisticated player of any game is something that most people want in some form. This starts early in life when we learn about something called a time demand, which is something that “I will do in the future”. We then take these on because there is a reward at the other end of completing something. The article goes on further to point out that over time we build up our mental capacity to hold more demands and the ability to manage them comes along with that. We can use technology to scale this or collaborate with others.
Our life is a monumental effort of increasing capacity, learning of ability, and further use of technology in the endless cycle of balancing effectiveness and efficiency. It’s a tedious process that involves a large number of variables. Yet, it is looking like, the further we dive here, that anyone can get to where they can retrain to a point where they become self-defining, reliant, and can train themselves to do anything. This future person is just an action and a spoonful of sugar away it seems. At the end of this can be a life where we are someone that is, “trained appropriately and are sophisticated”, where our actions are aligned with proper socialization and are intrinsically valuable, or we just check out of “the game”.
See through the game ~ Alan Watts
Another note here is that fun lies between assertiveness and aggression. A good example is when kids line up for rough and tumble play where you can tell if people know the difference between them. A place where getting hurt exists and where it doesn’t. Like a football field, there are those on the field getting hurt and there are those in the bleachers watching from a safe distance. The people in the stand are watching aggression being tempered within a structure of rules which represents assertiveness. This process is part of the development of the brain or motor that knows how to achieve what it wants. We have so many opportunities to learn what works for us and a great place to start with the understanding of what fun can be is to understand what assertiveness and aggression are and how like two banks of a river they represent the boundaries that encompass fun. It is often when we understand things or at least rechannel them, then it becomes an environment for learning and change.
two impulses each person has concerning apps they download: 1) an intention for it to make a material difference and 2) a hope that the experience might be interesting and even fun.
2 schools of thought
Discouraging companies from focusing too much on the features and benefits of their software, products, and services. Instead, they should help users improve the way they try to do their core jobs.
The second school of thought is that the best solutions to customer problems are, by definition, gamified. In other words, they offer a deeply engaging, entertaining experience in which customers’ actions are linked to obvious feedback. This response encourages more actions, setting up a compelling cycle that is hard to break.
Note:
A properly gamified system has the following core attributes which support this cycle:
– Objective goals
– Easy to comprehend score-sheets
– Feedback mechanisms
– Autonomy to make choices
– Coaching
Proposal
I suggest that each of us should try the research on various products or more likely we should try out different things on our selves to make sure that a product can stick. Without the personal alignment of tools and making them work for you, no product can do the job we are hoping it will do because this comes from our motivation, capacity, and ability. We should achieve some kind of personal mastery through this path of trying new products or new approaches which will directly affect our outputs in life. It would be nice to see that this does not require an application; however, the nostalgia of gaming, gaming a system, and set up do have quite the impact on the mindset and perspective like cooking dinner with others has on the taste of the food for everyone that participates. In summary, try to truly participate in your own life and that is like a persona and a car. Try to be the one at the wheel directing the car instead of the car driving you where ever it wishes.
Mindset, Perspective, and Discipline!
