All in Due Time: Or Hitting Your Flow in Games and Life

I’m not one to believe that gaming is a metaphor for life, but sometimes there are some truly uncanny moments and I had one of those this week. Recently my 6 year old started playing Pokemon Y on her own 3DS (she “played” X with me on mine when it first released) as a part of Mama’s nefarious plan to get her to read more than the daily allotted amount of required reading.

Her foray into Pokemon has also had the unforeseen side effect of giving us lots of time to snuggle up next to each other so that I can help her with the harder words that she can’t figure out on her own. But we all know what was destined to happen…yes, I started playing Pokemon again too. A lot. And then I realized that while I had about 60 hours of gameplay in, I had somehow not managed to get my legendary Pokemon yet. So I wandered on over to Geosenge Town with my level 75 Pokemon and blew through all of the henchmen and the boss and got my Xerneas. And it was a totally different experience this time around. (It always is when you are adequately leveled up in an RPG). I took my time and enjoyed the narrative. I laughed at the incredibly bad puns from Team Flare and I just played. I was seeing the game through new eyes this time around, my daughter’s.

With a sense of wonder I chased Pokemon around towns, fought them, and then used brightly colored balls (with a little more thought than my 6 year old) to catch them. I even got in the spirit of giving them crazy puns for names. (Might as well take it all the way, right?). While I enjoyed playing this game when it first came out, it was definitely a different kind of enjoyment. I caught Pokemon, traded Pokemon (via World Trade and a great group of women on FB who had a group just for this kind of thing), and I even bred Pokemon. My goal was to fill my Pokedex and I have to admit that I was kind of obsessive about it. This time is different. I’m having fun and I’m sharing it with my kid who wants to catch all of the Pokemon, but who really just wants to have fun doing it.

And that’s where we get the games as a metaphor for life moment. For me games and life becomes more enjoyable  when I just kick back and have some fun with it. Once I give up trying to collect every Pokemon, find every clue, or any kind of collectible and just play like a kid (my kid) I find that I just hit that flow. And I’m not talking about pop psychology flow that comes with concentration, cost and reward, and all of that, but I am talking more of a kind of flow that just happens. When you’re just having fun. Not thinking about what you’re doing and weighing options (necessarily) but just doing what you do because you enjoy it. The kind of flow that you can find just mindlessly playing puzzles games with hypnotic music (or sniping aliens in the Cosmodrome) or the flow that you can hit when you are writing about something that means something to you, something that you are passionate about and the words just start to flow. Flow is something that it took me a long time to understand. It’s something that you can’t force. It’s not always conducive to deadlines (oops), but it tends to give me a result that I am ridiculously happy with and most of all it brings me joy. The joy of a point well made (so here I’m talking about my academic life and not my personal one because that is a book length project) or an enemy well slain. It’s just that thing. It’s almost indescribable. It’s a feeling a place where your mind takes you and things just click into place in the ways that they should.

One of the most important things that I have learned about this flow (academically and in games) is that you can’t let anyone block it for you. And I’m not talking physically block it, but just get you into a headspace where you think too much about what it is that you are supposed to be doing and less about feeling what it is that you are supposed to be doing and just doing it. Learning from the mistakes that you make and integrating the knowledge gained from those mistakes into what you do next. Wow, the more I write the more I start to feel like there is a major hippy wreaking of pachouli waiting to get out, but really there’s not. It’s about the organic nature of learning and being. It’s dying a million times in Dark Souls or Bloodborne and then instead of getting pissed off and breaking a controller (yes, we do that sometimes) learning from the flow of the systems that control the game and integrating it into our own flow. Wave goes left, you go right, pick them off. Keep going. Allow yourself to be pulled wholly into the experience and just go with it. Keep people around you who contribute positively to your flow. Play with people who will sing 90s hip hop songs and won’t judge you (or will in a joking way) for screwing up yet again.

Games are life and life is a game.