Finding My Other Half

Last May I went to Camp Grounded.

It's kind of like Burning Man, except shorter, in the woods instead of the desert, and without any drugs or alcohol. Summer camp for grown-ups.

I just got a letter in the mail, one I had written by hand on the last morning of camp, addressed to me - my future self. It was enough to move me to fire up the old blog after nearly three years (oh god) of inactivity.

Dear Onyx,

I'm at camp. I don't know what to say, really. But I'll just keep writing till something comes out.

Just, good luck out there in the real world. Maybe we'll come back to camp sometime to try the next level. Maybe we'll be ready for a sweat lodge then. Or maybe we'll be learning the same lessons again, but deeper. What I really hope, though, is that you are inspired to be the person you felt glimmers of at camp, that singing, dancing, naturing, connecting, hugging, facilitating person doing what fills him up and then sharing that overflowing energy with the people around him.

You did make an impact, memorable positive traces in quite a number of people, even if you don't know who they are and they don't know you. You can have so much to give you don't need anything in return, you just want to share. When you drop the fear of rejection, the belief in unworthiness, nothing bad happens. You just feel better because you don't feel the pain of holding yourself back, just the soreness of new mental muscles you have not often exercised.

That sweat lodge. It sounds so scary. Maybe the sword needs more hammering before it is roasted and then plunged into the ice water. That's okay. There's no need to complete now. No need to finish the journey. Not every step has to be taken at once. The steps are useful because they each happen at a different time, and place.

I'm so glad to have a supportive, pretty wise subconscious for a teacher, if I may say so myself. Thank you. I love you. You are a great subconscious, by the way, and so many people would be lucky to have you.

I love you. It's okay.

I am grateful for the relationship we have, verbal mind to visual, intuitive, creative, insightful, elegant, brilliant, sensitive, loving, visionary, compassionate, and many other words, I'm sure. I'm so grateful to be sharing my life with you. We're going to live an amazing life together. It's going to be great, and terrible, but mostly great. I want to make space for you in our life, the space you need and deserve to flourish and make our life, and the lives of those around us, great.

Love,
Onyx

As I wrote the last paragraph, I found tears streaming down my face and I was struck by the tangible sense that there were two distinct beings inhabiting my consciousness and that they - we - were lovers. Verbal and nonverbal. Conscious and subconscious. Critical and creative. Masculine and feminine.

My nonverbal self had felt so trapped and neglected, and it took this intense, three-day camp experience to realize that I was being a bad boyfriend to my feminine self, and that I was suffering greatly for it.

Of course, awareness is only the first step. Only now, nine months later am I beginning to put into practice some of the tangible changes that I have been so desperately needing.

If you are wondering what may have happened in the last few years to cause such an imbalance in the first place, you may find some clues here and here. :p

Camp Grounded has another session coming up in May, if you'd like to experience it for yourself. Sadly, this may be the final session of Camp Grounded, as the founder, Levi Felix (aka Fidget) succumbed to brain cancer earlier this year.

If you're at all interested, make sure to sign up soon!

See you there. ;)

Deconstructing Artificial Emotions

A while ago, Daniel Cook wrote a game design article about how to provoke artificial emotions in players. His suggestion: give players a physiological nudge somehow, raising their heart rate, getting their adrenaline going, and then provide contextual cues about what emotion they should be experiencing at the time. And apparently, the players will be tricked into thinking they're actually experiencing the emotion you've set up.

Are all emotions are artificial?

I don't know, but I have noticed some interesting patterns through my own introspection.

Anger and sadness and frustration and despair, before they solidify into these emotions, start out as an indistinct feeling of tension inside. It is possible to focus on this tension before it is nudged - by my own assumptions and expectations - into one of these negative emotions.

The thing to remember is that the tension is all internal, in my own mind, and not somewhere outside in anyone else or any thing.

At the point where I notice this tension, before it becomes a full-blown, directed emotion, instead of reflexively reacting to it, fighting and getting defensive, I can listen to the motivations behind it. This is empathy. It's a lot like Aikido, except with emotions instead of physical attacks.

First of all, I can think of what expectation or fear or desire or need is causing this tension that I feel, and then, even further, I can think about what need or tension is behind the other person's actions or speech if another person is involved. Maybe this will help me resolve the tension or at least let it pass through me without escalating into something bigger.

One thing that sometimes helps me dissipate dangerous levels of tension safely is to listen to very fast, energetic music while lying down with my eyes closed. After a while, I can transition to more calm, repetitive music while I try to empty my mind of the assumptions and beliefs that are directing my tension outward.

Those who can maintain their composure and relaxed attitude even in difficult situations have probably mastered this ability to release internal tension before it manifests as emotion.

Books, Portals, Doorways in the Mind

Continuing the discussion from my art museum notes, on books.

The cover of a book, a portal, is treated as a symbol by the brain. It stands for that which it contains.

And if there is some anxiety or aversion to the content beyond this gateway, the brain will find it easy to project its fears and assumptions onto this cover without ever opening it again to see what is really there. Symbols are whatever one projects through them - they will never talk back to refute one's ill-founded assumptions.

So if you want something to be seen or read that someone holds some reluctance towards, don't leave it out, closed, a symbol easy to dismiss. Instead, leave it open.


There are activities that are good, but are seen with apprehension or distaste by the mind, reducing the entire activity to a symbol, replacing the book with the cover. There are also cases in the reverse.

A better analogy might be doors - hints or suggestions thrown up by the mind, that seem appealing but lead to unfulfilling courses of action.

For example, I might think of a positive memory or feeling associated with deviantART. This is like a door - it then stands for all of deviantART in my mind. I am compelled to pass through the door and go onto the website.

But the experience I get there is not what I had hoped for, not what compelled me to go on in the first place. But of course by the time I am past the door enough to discover this, I can hardly find my way back.

I am very glad that I have been able to identify this behavior pattern, because now I can consciously choose not to open whatever doors look nicest, but to predict what will actually be a fulfilling course of action.

All those fairy tales and stories about the path that looks easiest, the path that's actually most treacherous - maybe they were actually about this.

BrainHex - A New Player Model

You know Richard Bartle's four player types - like Achiever, Explorer, Killer, and Socializer?

Well, I just found out about a new player model being tested right now, from Chris Bateman, author of 21st Century Game Design.

It's better, because it has seven player types instead of four! :p

But seriously, I like it. I think it has the right amount of detail to be descriptive, while also being simple enough to easily grasp and use. And it's supposed to be based on neurobiology, more or less.

Thus, it is called BrainHex. Yay! :D

What's it good for? One useful benefit is, if you're making a game with a team of other people, you can more easily anticipate arguments about the design if you know the type of each team member. You can predict what biases each person will have, and what sort of design decisions they'll be more inclined to support.

Even if you're working on your own, it can help you understand what sort of games you'll be better at designing. What sort of fun do you get out of games? That's probably the kind of fun you'll know how to make.

Plus it's fun to find out what type you are, in a silly kind of astrology way. You know.

You can take this really quick survey to find out your player type.

I'm a Seeker. A Seeker-Socialiser, to be precise. :)

"You like finding strange and wonderful things or finding familiar things as well as hanging around with people you trust and helping people."

That means I'm a cat and a dolphin. :)

That there's an iconic representation of my hippocampus and hypothalamus. Apparently my favorite parts of my brain. :) Endomorphin and oxytocin for the win! :D

I always knew I was the Explorer type. But I'm also very introverted, so until I took this test, I never seriously suspected that I could also be a Socializer. But I am. I derive great pleasure from cultivating connections and collaborating with talented awesome cool people. And realizing this is an eye-opener for me. I feel liberated at last! :D

When I first posted about this on the Mochi forum, I found that a lot of developers there are either Conquerors or Masterminds, or both. I wonder why that is.

What are you?

Find out and let us know! :D

Kevin Kelly Quote on Thinking and Evolution

Tunneling through randomness
"Some students of the human mind make a strong argument that thinking is a type of evolution of ideas within the brain. According to this argument, all created things are evolved. As I write these words, I have to agree. I began this book not with a sentence formed in my mind but with an arbitrarily chosen phrase, "I am." Then in unconsciously rapid succession I evaluated a headful of possible next words. I picked one that seemed esthetically fit, "sealed." After "I am sealed," I went on to the next word, choosing from among 100,000s of possible ones. Each selected word bred the choices for the next until I had evolved almost a sentence of words. Toward the end of the sentence my choices were constrained somewhat by the words I had already chosen at the beginning, so learning helped the breeding go more quickly."

Exactly.

"What will the next words be that I write in this chapter? In a real sense I don't know. There are probably billions of possibilities of what they might be, even taking into account the restriction that they must logically follow from the last sentence. Did you guess this sentence as the next one? I didn't either. But that's the sentence I found at the end of the sentence."

You can't know exactly what you are going to think next in your head, because if you did you would have already thought it. But you still think; the thoughts make sense and you know that you made them yourself.

Kevin Kelly Quote on Body and Mind

No intelligence without bodies
"For better or worse, in reality we are not centered in our head. We are not centered in our mind. Even if we were, our mind has no center, no "I." Our bodies have no centrality either. Bodies and minds blur across each others' supposed boundaries. Bodies and minds are not that different from one another. They are both composed of swarms of sublevel things.

We know that eyes are more brain than camera. An eyeball has as much processing power as a supercomputer. Much of our visual perception happens in the thin retina where light first strikes us, long before the central brain gets to consider the scene. Our spinal cord is not merely a trunk line transmitting phone calls from the brain. It too thinks. We are a lot closer to the truth when we point to our heart and not our head as the center of behaviors. Our emotions swim in a soup of hormones and peptides that percolate through our whole body. Oxytocin discharges thoughts of love (and perhaps lovely thoughts) from our glands. These hormones too process information. Our immune system, by science's new reckoning, is an amazing parallel, decentralized perception machine, able to recognize and remember millions of different molecules."