“You can never get enough of what you don’t need to make you happy.” — Eric Hoffer
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Guys and Dolls
My client has lived an unstable life, solitary and combative, but things have gotten much better. His life still revolves around the wilderness, his dog, and his All Terrain Vehicle. I was seeing him every month and then he went dark.
I had no other contact information for him except the police, and they’re not his friends. Something happened and I figured he might be dead. As it turned out, he became social and, after two months, I heard from him, and this is what he wrote:
“Don’t be concerned. Still chasing girls or should I say they’re chasing me. Latest one I just dumped. Should I give up on them?”
I told him that he expects too much of people. He doesn’t understand them and they don’t understand him. More helpfully, I told him to model his high standards and not be bitchy or angry just because he feels he’s misled or misunderstood. That’s just the baseline. Everyone should follow that advice and few people can.
All one can do is model the behavior to which you aspire and invite other people to join you. This is an offer, not a demand and it should not be contingent. But then, when other people fail you, be clear of mind and don’t wait around.
“Do you want to be right or happy?” — Dr. Phil
This shopworn saying implies your sense of what’s right is selfish. This may be true, but it’s bullshit advice. If you have any sense of value, and if you have any value for yourself, you must believe in what’s right and do what’s right. If you veer toward what makes you happy you’ll find yourself doing what makes other people happy, and that rarely has a positive outcome.
Doing what feels wrong just insures that you’ll keep cutting checks to your relationship counselor. Don’t stay attached to what isn’t right. There is no happiness in what feels wrong; and don’t listen to Dr. Phil.
Games
My Kickstarter campaign has failed. Failure is good, as I tell my clients, and I can see the value in its failure. I created a great board game that included several key concepts, but it did not look like other games and that, I am sure, is why it did not attract sponsors.
Readers are told not to judge a book by its cover, but authors learn covers make all the difference. The truth is that people do what they like and don’t think much. The result is that people buy garbage and don’t even recognize it. They buy garbage because they like garbage, and that’s the way it always goes.
Years ago I went to a national game conference in Atlanta and brought some of my games. What I saw was disappointing. There were two tiers: big publishers selling repackaged junk, and little publishers selling new ideas.
The junk salesmen were themselves junk. They had no vision, no power, and no interest. The small publishers were trying to push the boundaries. They were trying much harder but they weren’t doing much better.
I brought my 3 and 4 dimensional games, sculptural games, morally twisted games, and games with many overlaying layers. These are games that didn’t look like other games and it would be hard to see how they could be cheaply mass produced. You can see snapshots of my games here.
https://www.mindstrengthbalance.com/alternative-education/games-system/
The games at the convention were either card games or standard board games built of tiles with tokens and dice.
It’s so easy to put more art into games that I wondered why I was the only one suggesting it. Was it that the large publishers were not interested in innovation, or was the market unable to appreciate it? It is both of these things. And in this regard game publishing does not appear much different than book publishing, both of which largely produce and are only interested in derivative products.
Pop Art and Junk
Art begins on the other side of commodity. Despite the reputation of the skilled artisan, art doesn’t require much skill but it does require insight. Pop art comes from adding insight and design to common objects, like a shoe or a soup can.
Board games are commodities with potential. Traditional board games have virtually no art. They have bad graphics and juvenile themes.
The publication of Settlers of the Catan, in Germany in 1995, started a trend toward games with less competition, more structure, less randomness, and more thought. This trend has not grown much beyond where it started.
At the same time there was a burgeoning of computer animation, video games, and fantasy themes in comics, children’s books, TV, and movies. There’s not a lot of variety. In board games the fantasy trend has emerged as monsters versus heroes fighting random battles. This has not evolved much further.
Board games, like children’s books and movies, replay the same themes. If there has been a change it’s been the juvenileization of adults. The political trend is to make adults more childlike. This has been going on ever since there were governments.
Education, Art, and Insanity
Exploited children grow into disabled adults. Insanity may seem like too strong a word, but disabled adults foster disabled families which leads to all sorts of mental illness. Remember that despite some metabolic dysfunctions causing mental disability, no structural cause has been found for psychological illness. For all we know, all mental illness is learned or triggered by one’s environment.
It would be nice to say, “Playing games keeps you sane,” but I don’t believe that. What I do believe is that by paying more attention to how things work you come to understand the role you play in the situations in which you find yourself.
You can use the most powerful intellectual tools physics has to offer and still understand things no better than when you started. In contrast, you can understand a game by studying it and, while it may be unimportant, it will reflect the mind of the person who created it.
Playing games teaches us more than studying science, which is why children would rather play with toys than study books. I also believe today’s teenagers are learning more by playing MMORPGs (Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Games) than by going to school, but that’s not really saying much.
Of course, art is the best teacher. Not looking at it but making it. Art is productive play.
When my client asked if he should give up on them—meaning women—my answer was that he was playing the wrong game. In all cases, the prevailing player is not the winner in any game, it’s the person who designs the game. He needed to rewrite the script.
The biggest misconception in the playing of games is the zero sum concept, that there is always a winner and a loser. In reality, everything is an exercise in understanding how things work. Games are just simple mechanisms that can embody useful concepts.
My Kickstarter Campaign ends tomorrow night, the night of November 7th. The campaign will not reach its threshold so the game will not go into production. However, I have offered to make ten games by hand, which I will number and sign. I’ve listed them for CA$250 each. I will still make these games for those who sponsored them.
These hand-made games will be more hand-made than I planned, as I will have to print the cards myself and skip the production box. If you’d like to get this version of the game, you still can. It’s called “Clients v/s Architects game (Deluxe),” and it’s available here, at the bottom of this page: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mindstrengthbalance/clients-versus-architects-conquest-or-collaboration/rewards
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