I really like this style of post. So thanks for writing & sharing this!
Your life is, in some sense, a series of definitions of success.
First you’re in early school, and success is defined for you by a handful of adults...
More insidiously, you’ll like it. Creating your own definition of success feels scary; enacting it feels impossible. The fact that school lays out neat little hoops for you to jump through is a feature.
Yeah, I developed a pretty negative view of school & university because it felt like, in retrospect, I had been taught a bunch of wrong lessons like this.
Something I want to add here, though, is that some hobbies have the same problem where they strongly advertise their own definitions of success, similar to school.
I have spent a significant portion of my life on video games, for example. And to expand on my comment from here, one disadvantage of games is that they make it very very easy to adopt their definitions of success. They’re neatly separated into matches and levels; they have campaigns; there are meta-game progressions like achievements and daily quests, and so on and so forth. Everything is so conveniently pre-packaged into tasks and projects at various scales, and so it is (or at least I find it to be) very easy to unintentionally adopt that set of tasks and goals as one’s own, at the expense of whatever else one would have come to care about.
Another style of hobby with a related problem is anything built around collecting stuff, like trading card games. Related Gwern essay: What is the Collecting Mindset?
This is more a collection of tangential thoughts than a reply, hopefully it’s fun anyway:
Recently I used @Raemon’s deliberate practice thing on snakebird. It felt really good, if tiring, and I beat the bonus levels that had previously escaped me. Then I went back to monster’s expedition (which I’d previously gotten maybe halfway through the main levels, and no bonus levels). It didn’t feel like I could apply the same procedure, and in general I found ME less fun than Snakebird because, among other things, the problem weren’t as well defined.
I beat the main path on ME, decided finishing the bonus levels wasn’t fun, and went on to baba is you. So far I’m very bad at it, but it feels more like snakebird than ME in important ways.
I do try to stick to video games that have natural disengagement points, rather than one-more-turn syndrome. My natural response to getting stuck on a puzzle or frustrated in games like Celeste is to quit and come back later, so they’re rewarding without being sticky for me.
But also, I have a friend who banned herself from playing The Sims, because the times she wanted to were the times it was the worst idea.
Anyways, I claim it’s fine for my leisure activities to provide artificially concrete goals as long as I recognize that that’s what’s happening. Used properly I think this helps me handle more fuzziness in the rest of my life. But I usually stick to very concrete games that require little metacognition, because that resource is scarce and I don’t want to spend it on leisure.
My natural response to getting stuck on a puzzle or frustrated in games like Celeste is to quit and come back later, so they’re rewarding without being sticky for me.
That seems like a healthy way to engage with games. Unfortunately my response to such disengagement moments is usually less sane^^.
Anyways, I claim it’s fine for my leisure activities to provide artificially concrete goals as long as I recognize that that’s what’s happening. Used properly I think this helps me handle more fuzziness in the rest of my life. But I usually stick to very concrete games that require little metacognition, because that resource is scarce and I don’t want to spend it on leisure.
Yeah, sure. Apologies if I gave a different impression, like that gaming is categorically bad or net harmful or whatever. It’s just that your advice re: success definitions resonated with me, and I wanted to expand on it.
Anyway, a thing I meant to mention in my previous comment, but apparently forgot to, is this: I personally began seeing my gaming hobby in a somewhat less positive light once I realized I’d spent my youth between school and games, so that I’d been following others’ definitions of success in both school and play. Which was not ideal: defining one’s own success criteria, and decomposing one’s own goals into projects and tasks, are all skills one has to develop or learn. And because I hadn’t learned them back then, it took me years to learn them afterwards.
Another issue was that e.g. solving puzzles in puzzle games to me felt similar to, but better than, solving physics exercises, which made it harder to find the motivation to do the latter.
Recently I used @Raemon’s deliberate practice thing on snakebird. It felt really good, if tiring, and I beat the bonus levels that had previously escaped me.
Congrats! Those bonus levels were insane; according to my notes I looked almost all of them up.
Anecdote time: When I played Super Hexagon in 2013 (fast-paced dexterity game w/ sensory overload), I’d heard about the concept of deliberate practice from somewhere (probably from LW), and I somehow got pretty convinced that a) one could progress far more quickly in the game by using the principles of deliberate practice, and b) that the game was somehow unusually well-suited for studying and demonstrating the efficacy of deliberate practice.
Anyway, I ended up emailing both the game’s dev, and even Prof. Ericsson himself, and had a back-and-forth email exchange for a bit (apparently one can email professors, and they sometimes actually reply), though I was quickly asked to discuss the idea with someone else (like a PhD student or something). I eventually lost interest in the idea, while they didn’t consider the game to be a good fit for study (e.g. because the obstacle patterns were random rather than deterministic), and so ultimately nothing came of the idea. Apart from this anecdote itself.
PS: I have played all five games you mentioned, and of the games I still remember well (i.e. all but The Sims), I found them all excellent, though I share your criticism of ME. (FYI, there’s a weirdly-named hints setting in the game which points one towards the optional islands.)
PPS: Since you liked those puzzle games, you might also enjoy the two puzzle games by Patrick Traynor: Linelith (<1h of playtime; has one really neat idea; relaxing), and Patrick’s Parabox (recursive Sokoban where you can push boxes into boxes).
Yeah, sure. Apologies if I gave a different impression, like that gaming is categorically bad or net harmful or whatever. It’s just that your advice re: success definitions resonated with me, and I wanted to expand on it.
Oh of course. The whole reason I write these as “Dear self” is that people are so variable I don’t really feel competent to make general proclamations.
You might like this thread on puzzle games. I have some narcissism of small differences with the author (Monster’s Expedition ahead of Snakebird? ⚔️ ), but the post + comments have been providing me puzzle games for the last three years.
I really like this style of post. So thanks for writing & sharing this!
Yeah, I developed a pretty negative view of school & university because it felt like, in retrospect, I had been taught a bunch of wrong lessons like this.
Something I want to add here, though, is that some hobbies have the same problem where they strongly advertise their own definitions of success, similar to school.
I have spent a significant portion of my life on video games, for example. And to expand on my comment from here, one disadvantage of games is that they make it very very easy to adopt their definitions of success. They’re neatly separated into matches and levels; they have campaigns; there are meta-game progressions like achievements and daily quests, and so on and so forth. Everything is so conveniently pre-packaged into tasks and projects at various scales, and so it is (or at least I find it to be) very easy to unintentionally adopt that set of tasks and goals as one’s own, at the expense of whatever else one would have come to care about.
Another style of hobby with a related problem is anything built around collecting stuff, like trading card games. Related Gwern essay: What is the Collecting Mindset?
This is more a collection of tangential thoughts than a reply, hopefully it’s fun anyway:
Recently I used @Raemon’s deliberate practice thing on snakebird. It felt really good, if tiring, and I beat the bonus levels that had previously escaped me. Then I went back to monster’s expedition (which I’d previously gotten maybe halfway through the main levels, and no bonus levels). It didn’t feel like I could apply the same procedure, and in general I found ME less fun than Snakebird because, among other things, the problem weren’t as well defined.
I beat the main path on ME, decided finishing the bonus levels wasn’t fun, and went on to baba is you. So far I’m very bad at it, but it feels more like snakebird than ME in important ways.
I do try to stick to video games that have natural disengagement points, rather than one-more-turn syndrome. My natural response to getting stuck on a puzzle or frustrated in games like Celeste is to quit and come back later, so they’re rewarding without being sticky for me.
But also, I have a friend who banned herself from playing The Sims, because the times she wanted to were the times it was the worst idea.
Anyways, I claim it’s fine for my leisure activities to provide artificially concrete goals as long as I recognize that that’s what’s happening. Used properly I think this helps me handle more fuzziness in the rest of my life. But I usually stick to very concrete games that require little metacognition, because that resource is scarce and I don’t want to spend it on leisure.
That seems like a healthy way to engage with games. Unfortunately my response to such disengagement moments is usually less sane^^.
Yeah, sure. Apologies if I gave a different impression, like that gaming is categorically bad or net harmful or whatever. It’s just that your advice re: success definitions resonated with me, and I wanted to expand on it.
Anyway, a thing I meant to mention in my previous comment, but apparently forgot to, is this: I personally began seeing my gaming hobby in a somewhat less positive light once I realized I’d spent my youth between school and games, so that I’d been following others’ definitions of success in both school and play. Which was not ideal: defining one’s own success criteria, and decomposing one’s own goals into projects and tasks, are all skills one has to develop or learn. And because I hadn’t learned them back then, it took me years to learn them afterwards.
Another issue was that e.g. solving puzzles in puzzle games to me felt similar to, but better than, solving physics exercises, which made it harder to find the motivation to do the latter.
Congrats! Those bonus levels were insane; according to my notes I looked almost all of them up.
Anecdote time: When I played Super Hexagon in 2013 (fast-paced dexterity game w/ sensory overload), I’d heard about the concept of deliberate practice from somewhere (probably from LW), and I somehow got pretty convinced that a) one could progress far more quickly in the game by using the principles of deliberate practice, and b) that the game was somehow unusually well-suited for studying and demonstrating the efficacy of deliberate practice.
Anyway, I ended up emailing both the game’s dev, and even Prof. Ericsson himself, and had a back-and-forth email exchange for a bit (apparently one can email professors, and they sometimes actually reply), though I was quickly asked to discuss the idea with someone else (like a PhD student or something). I eventually lost interest in the idea, while they didn’t consider the game to be a good fit for study (e.g. because the obstacle patterns were random rather than deterministic), and so ultimately nothing came of the idea. Apart from this anecdote itself.
PS: I have played all five games you mentioned, and of the games I still remember well (i.e. all but The Sims), I found them all excellent, though I share your criticism of ME. (FYI, there’s a weirdly-named hints setting in the game which points one towards the optional islands.)
PPS: Since you liked those puzzle games, you might also enjoy the two puzzle games by Patrick Traynor: Linelith (<1h of playtime; has one really neat idea; relaxing), and Patrick’s Parabox (recursive Sokoban where you can push boxes into boxes).
Oh of course. The whole reason I write these as “Dear self” is that people are so variable I don’t really feel competent to make general proclamations.
You might like this thread on puzzle games. I have some narcissism of small differences with the author (Monster’s Expedition ahead of Snakebird? ⚔️ ), but the post + comments have been providing me puzzle games for the last three years.