Last summer, I ranted and raved about wildlife safety in the context of the nesting swans at the Public Garden. Well, today I admit: I was wrong. I was wrong! The swans were nice all last year, nothing happened, and because of their good behavior, they were invited back for an encore performance this year (1).
When I first noted the return of the swans this past spring, I wondered if they would recognize the park. Although it has been a few months, the space is more or less unchanged from what it was back then. People were lounging about or strolling slowly along the paths. The trees were starting to show green and the recently planted tulips added dashes of color throughout the space. If I were one of those swans, I thought, I would feel like I had returned home.
There was only one thing off about the scene. I struggled to immediately place my finger on it...but then...it dawned on me...
Pokemon!
The only thing different about the scene from a year ago was the absence of Pokemon Go enthusiasts. Back then, they overran one section of the park the game designers had designated as a Top Secret Special Nerd Zone or something. I would walk through the park and step through, around, or over the masses of humanity focused on snaring their fifth Jigglypuff of the hour (2).
It was a strange experience to suddenly have this large crowd to walk in. From the time I was laid off in January, I had been walking more or less unobstructed through the park. All of a sudden, this game started and my life became more crowded.
Back then, I spent a lot of time on my walks thinking about what to do. A book about creative work prompted this thinking. It suggested I reflect on my childhood and determine what I gravitated to.
Early on, I found this task difficult. Part of the problem was the original Pokemon game. I realized I enjoyed playing so much as a ten-year-old that I didn't have time to 'gravitate' toward anything else. The deeper I dug into my recollections, the more frustrated I became. Instead of discovering deep truths about what I gravitated to naturally, I encountered distraction after distraction which likely prevented me from doing so. I recalled all the video games I played. I remembered an awful lot of (or 'a lot of awful') comedy shows on TV (3). One year, I watched professional wrestling!
Part of my frustration, I think, came out of unmet expectations. I thought back to childhood expecting to discover untapped sources of inspiration. But instead of finding evidence of my budding creative genius, I discovered an idiot clutching his Game Boy or drooling in front of network FOX at eight o'clock on weeknights.
Around this time of deep personal reflection, the Pokemon Go craze kicked into full gear. I talked to a friend about the game and we ended up comparing our childhood experiences of Pokemon. After a short while, he pointed out to me how I did not play the game properly in any sense. The goal of Pokemon is to catch all the Pokemon. My method was to handpick the six I wanted from the start and ignore the rest. Even as a fifth grader, the challenge of frugally building a team with an optimal balance of strengths and weaknesses appealed to me at some fundamental level (4).
The way I played Pokemon was loosely related to what serious gamers refer to as 'Metagaming'. At the risk of oversimplifying, metagaming is using out-of-game information to play the game itself (5). I think I was doing the opposite: using the game's information to play something outside the game (Meta-living?). Instead of coloring within the lines of the game's parameters, I was using the game as a means to explore my interests by defining challenges on my own terms and finding creative ways to overcome them.
When my friend pointed out my spectacular failure to play Pokemon properly, I noticed how I sought out video games with a built-in challenge of building teams. I enjoyed arcade-style games like NBA Jam, fighting games like Mortal Kombat, or shooter games like Goldeneye, but the games I spent the most time on were sports simulations offering game modes for wannabe coaches, managers, or owners. In these games, I enjoyed the challenge of planning for the long-term through investing, optimizing, and managing.
Other examples came from outside video games. When I started a fantasy football league in junior high, I invented a set of rules to ensure continuity over multiple seasons. Unlike the other leagues in my school, teams in my league built year on year instead of starting over from scratch each summer. It is no coincidence that my favorite book was Moneyball, Michael Lewis's account of how to build a baseball roster using data analytics.
Lewis, in his recently released book The Undoing Project, points out that how people do something is often more important than what they do. For most people, what they do is dictated as much by circumstance as it is by self-determination. But the way people approach the same activities day after day is usually influenced by personality and inborn traits. I thought this was a very thoughtful insight. When I compare my experiences from childhood against it, I see the idea in action.
But I don't think its quite so simple. There are certain environments or situations overwhelming enough to shove aside a person's natural inclinations. I'm reminded here of a favorite essay from Chuck Klosterman's Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs about video games. In this essay, Klosterman writes about how his six-year old niece comes up with all sorts of backstories for her dolls: where they went to college, what friends they had, what their favorite colors were, and so on. But when playing The Sims (a life-simulating computer game where players directly control characters in a virtual world) she made no attempt to flesh out backstories for her characters.
It's not immediately obvious why this is. Maybe the game tapped into a desire to explore every bell and whistle in a novel world. To do this properly, Klosterman's niece needed to fully immerse herself in doing so. Once she learned everything, it's possible she would have resumed her storytelling ways.
But I suspect her natural creative impulse (or perhaps an innate curiosity about the lives of other people) was stifled by the overwhelming sensory stimulation of the computer game. Her immersion into learning the controls and general distraction provided by Mortimer's inane conversations prevented her from doing the creative work required to conjure up backstories for her digital toys.
For me, the problem with Pokemon Go is the full immersion it demands of its players. Instead of thinking about the game, a player is asked only to respond to the stimulation of the virtual environment. Some gamers shut themselves out so completely from the world around them that they have wandered into traffic, offended others with their behavior at sacred sites, or run over pedestrians in their cars while playing the game.
If I were introduced to Pokemon through this most recent edition, I do not think I would have imposed my own personality to define success on my own terms. Instead, I fear the glittering novelty of the game world and the rewards on offer for the fully immersed player would have stifled my creative instincts, tuned me out from the outside world, and made my experience of the game less rewarding overall.
My experience with Pokemon as a child was positive because the game never distracted me from continuing to explore what I found interesting. As it turned out, the game was just another area to which I applied my instincts and nurtured my skills. The game was never so absorbing as to force me into exchanging my own sense of creativity for maximum points, rewards, or 'likes' earned on social media. The lack of public leaderboards tracking top performance prevented me from becoming aware of the game's strictly defined parameters of success.
I did not start this post with any ideas about the negative side of video games. My general feeling toward video games is positive. I've learned quite a bit from playing these in the past and I do not believe things have changed all that much since. With the way games are evolving, I bet people learn more from today's games than I ever could have hoped to from those of yesteryear.
As video gaming shifts toward the model shown by Pokemon Go, however, I suspect the elements of inspiration and creativity I once drew from the game will become more difficult for gamers to find. At a point, too much stimulation forces the mind to use up all its attention on just navigating the environment. When people need to calm down, they don't go to a club with flashing strobe lights; they go to a pond where little kids terrorize pigeons (6).
The challenge for those designing tomorrow's video games is to stimulate without overwhelming. It seems like an impossible task. Pokemon Go, despite all of my poo-pooing in this post, set all kinds of revenue records. A game sells by stimulating, perhaps evidenced by how the best-selling Lego sets on Amazon overwhelmingly favor specific models over generic bricks (most of which have been discontinued by the manufacturer, as well). It is hard to understand the value of building blocks when all we ever get to see is the finished structure.
The right amount of stimulation is probably seen back where this whole essay started. When I walk through the Public Garden, the trees and the flowers and the people and even those swans force me to pay some attention. But not too much. If there was too much to distract me, I would not have the mental space to think and ponder. It would be hard to generate even the simplest ideas. Eventually, I fear I would lose the ability to do so.
That feels like around the right target for a video game: stimulating enough to pay attention to the virtual world, not quite enough to take up all the gamer's mental space. Otherwise, the game's cognitive benefits are lost as the fine line between distraction and stimulation is crossed.
Footnotes / imagined complaints
1. Hah! As if...
I was wrong last year but I know I was right. Having nesting swans in the Public Garden is a terrible idea. Terrible, terrible. Look into their eyes- these birds are pure evil.
That said, the swans were just as good this year. I recently saw tourists posing to take pictures with them.
2. I'm surprised the swans made it all year...
If the swans went berserk like I predicted, the most likely target would have been one of these Pokemon Go players. It probably would have started with a gamer on their phone absent-mindedly stomping a swan egg flat or something.
One thing I noted about the Pokemon Go thing was how it made (some) cell phone users aware of how they looked while on their phone: exactly like one of the gamers they were making fun. Some doors, once opened, never close.
3. You just got prank'd!
Thanks to Youtube, I did not need to settle for just remembering the shows- I could actually watch clips or entire episodes.
4. More Pokemon talk...
I'm sure others did different things with the game, too. One hugely popular variation of the game involved building up teams to bring into 'battle' against other players. But the 'catch-all' purpose of the main game was obvious to perhaps everyone except me. I mean, the official slogan of Pokemon was 'Gotta catch em all'!
My strategy helps explain my still-encyclopedic knowledge of the game. To handpick the six characters I wanted at the end, I needed to know a lot about all the characters. And since my memory is very strong, I still retain a useless amount of knowledge about the game.
I used to tell people 'I've forgotten more about Pokemon than you will ever know about anything'. This ridiculous (and often alcohol-fueled) statement was proven false over the past week: I realized I have not forgotten anything about Pokemon. Just over the weekend, I probably rattled off fifty separate sentences filled with game information I had not considered in over fifteen years.
5. Met-a-gamer lately?
Like a meta-anything, it is really hard to explain Metagaming in one sentence. As a prefix, 'meta-' is too 'catch-all' (that expression again!) to lend itself to simple definitions. When I researched metagaming, the huge variation in what constituted examples of the metagame was overwhelming.
The best example of this is Metta World Peace.
6. Although if everyone is already at the pond playing Pokemon Go, maybe these people go somewhere else...?
The other analogy I considered here was how people prefer working in coffee shops instead of bars. The basic activity of having a drink while working is the same. But most find it harder to ignore the greater sensory stimulation often found at a bar.
If I ever blog for a living, I promise to write one post a week from a bar.
