The Arena: Rise, Gamer [2 ed.] 9798396901988

Citation preview

Agitproper

The Arena: Rise, Gamer by Ray Doraisamy is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.

in memory of

Anthony Kirk Gaden

Abandoning every ounce of common sense and any trace of doubt, you lunge onto a stage of harrowing landscapes and veiled abysses. Your new environment rejects you with lava pits and atmospheric hazards as legions of foes surround you, testing the gut reaction that brought you here in the first place. Your purpose is unknown. Your only company, a mantra: FIGHT OR BE FINISHED. - Quake III: Arena

Press Any Key to Start

8

Untapped Power

22

Experimentation

46

Gold, Prestige, Piety

74

BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!

104

Looking For Group

128

GO GO GO!

154

THE ARENA

1:

Press

8

Any

Key

to

Start

--------------------------------------------Here's a memory which might be familiar to you: avoiding and the effect of waiting. Something flourishing in the gut, building in the chest, pins and needles running along fingers and toes like a swarm of ants. Remember a slide in a water park? Tall. Scary to someone afraid of heights. Scary to someone afraid. And the line to that slide! Every step on the staircase waiting upward, feeling the swaying swirl of possibility, the snarl of the unknown, of what it will be like to go down that slide, all building and building until finally at the top, I say, "No! I don't want to go down that slide..." trailing off, not even finishing the sentence, my extremities sweaty, shoulders stooped as I walk away, as people laugh and mock me- as they should, to help me along. I was taught to swim very early, as far as one can be taught to do something without actively doing it. Though I was a child on an island surrounded by beaches, smelling the pure sea air every day when I woke up, the fear of water took hold of me. Swirling again, building slowly, a depth and breadth of water so big it would surely swallow me up, swallow me whole like Jonah's whale, but there was no coming back. Watching those waves from a distance and gauging every step between where I was and where everyone else was, in the water. Not knowing what it might feel like to put myself at the mercy of what I had not already lived through.

Press Any Key to Start

9

It was too much. So I said I was afraid, I did not want to swim. And one day, standing on a jetty (a long platform where boats can dock if the beach is too shallow for them to get to) a friend of the family, like a second parent, pushed me off the jetty. The world seemed to stop. I hit the water and to my surprise, I swim. I swim all the way back to shore. After that I began to swim in the sea, like everyone else. Later, afraid of heights and standing on a tower designed to train people to jump off planes, I waited, and I felt that feeling again, but only for a moment before I jumped, pushed this time by peer pressure and a decision to join a body where each part was supposed to be able to endure anything. This experience carried me through the rest of my life. So much so, that I became a jumper- if there was something I was afraid of, then it was a clear signal of what I had to do. That feeling that I had labeled fear and later others labeled anxiety, I have come to know also as potential energy spreading through the body, preparing me whenever I am to enter an unfamiliar game. I remember when any game at all would have interested me. It just had to be available. Even better if it was available and forbidden. What were they scared of me learning, in the game? I had to know. And part of that might have been the relative rarity of gaming when I was a child in the 90s.

THE ARENA

10

In Malaysia there were arcades, but arcades were a privilege. We were lucky to have a computer, even one with an internet connection. But the computer was not meant for games. So in gaming there was also a privilege, a treat, and a further constraint on gaming was the cultural opposition to it. The pressure against playing more than a few hours a week only fueled the desire to play whenever possible. Regulation within family law encouraged it as surely as the illegal encourages any teenager, so whenever I found myself at a starting screen, it was frictionless to start playing, to press any key to start. There was no worry about whether this was going to be the best use of my time, of whether this game was going to produce the most fun, just as in a household that did not have television access, any TV show that I came across was something I would watch. Learning to make impromptu antennas out of wire when my parents were away, I would watch whatever was on. We didn't have a Netflix catalog back then, or Hulu or DisneyPlus or the overwhelming array of choices we have for entertainment now. So, there was never a question of sitting down and being lost, of wondering which path to take, no freezing on the cold anxiety of choosing because there was no choice (just whatever was on, whatever was available), so there was no anxiety. I simply played.

Press Any Key to Start

11

Now, today, each decision to play a game is an extremely deliberate choice. Will it serve your current purpose? Will it help you on your path, whatever that path is? Will it get you laid? Will it get you a promotion? Will it stop climate change? Will it get you recognition and respect outside of the game? Will it help grubby brown children thousands of miles away survive malaria? Will it get you more Likes? Will it help make sure there are more women graduate students in STEM next year? Will it get you belonging? Maybe you know this memory: none of the games quite cut it anymore. Every endgame is found wanting eventually, lacking for something more. I'd spent so long rearranging my life to get some time to game, that when I finally got it, I gamed as much as I could. Yet I learned pretty quickly that I wanted to play with others. I found myself getting involved in many competitive multiplayer games. And whatever the build of the week, whatever the meta of the month was, it wasn't quite enough. I needed more and more complexity. How could I play my own game? Within these games, I couldn't just win in a way that was set forth by others, I had to come up with some new ways to win, ways that employed as much of my attention as possible, so that when I could have played a part that only allowed for a few decisions, I chose more.

THE ARENA

12

In addition to directional keys and a mousefour other keys, I would do whatever it took to complicate things for myself, until sometimes I would be juggling sixteen keys, sixteen different moves, when I could have settled for four. This search for complexity was occasionally sated by antics like creating complicated playstyles, but only temporarily. Each game seemed to lack something, lacked some sort of detail, but maybe next month, some team would finally get it, would finally crack the lock on game design. There was a sense in which it was an enclosure, as all games are. And once I had learned everything I wanted to learn from that constrained arena, something in me yearned for more. So I would consider that the game was over for me. And it was time to find a new game, a better game, a game with more complexity, a game with more features, better physics models, better trade mechanics, dynamic player-controlled territoriality, more intricate crafting options, more connection between the actions of the people playing the game and the environment of the game. Don't give me a set series of responses. Which is why multiplayer competitive games were where it was at: the human element was ever present. It was always building on itself in a way that no game designer could ever predict. So those held me for a time until they, too, were not enough. It began to dawn on me that I was looking for something else.

Press Any Key to Start

13

I was looking for something grander (even grander than a Paradox Interactive game), something bigger, the grandest game. It was the rest of life. In the 2010s, there were promises of virtual reality, of haptic feedback, in limbs designed for paraplegics and vests designed for blind people and treadmills connected to games. And these were so tempting. Or they were exactly what I wanted, I thought. Wouldn't it be just nice to have a game environment that allows you to use your full body? It only took a couple of years between that desire and realizing that the game was always available to me. The grand game was always available. I could hop in whenever I wanted. And that at any time I was playing another game within it, the bigger game was still going on. While gaming had given me fine motor control of the fingers, it seemed like I had let everything else atrophy. My body was a controller I was not familiar with. So I began learning it, driven by the promise of an extended lifespan that suggested you needed a solid human relationship network and a fit body to live a longer life. As in games, where players tell you what builds to avoid in the beginning, what strategies don't work, as people hone strategy to a few approved strategies and tell you about the many ways you can't win, the only value I could think of, the only ideal I could think of, the only thing to measure my decisions against was avoiding bad outcomes.

THE ARENA

14

So I started playing a game of avoiding death, as if it could be pushed off, as if it could be avoided. The whole joy of playing a game is that you do not know what the outcome will be. If you wanted to know the outcome, you would probably get better entertainment out of experiencing a story that you have already experienced. Rereading a book, watching your favorite movie again. If you wanted to be a spectator, if you wanted to be on the sidelines, watching players, you can do that at any time. Now more easily than ever before. But you don't play a game to be a spectator. You press any key to start playing and playing involves winning and losing. Playing involves rejection. Playing involves pain. You've seen, you've been the guy who slams the keyboard or throws the controller away. Even if you have never thrown your controller. If you've been gaming for long, if you've ever played a multiplayer PVP game, you felt the desire in your frustration, the anger, the pain. The pain of a possible future getting snuffed out, a future in which you are on top slipping away. We play to dance with that pain. The rise of gaming coincides with the rise of having no way to lose. Losing, after all, is a little simulated death, a particular narrative, a particular want, a particular desire, a particular thought is snuffed out, just as surely as we will be snuffed out. In the past, your play was to prepare for a greater environment that will eventually kill you.

Press Any Key to Start

15

You may see this in animals who are playing, especially when they're younger. It's easier to detect in mammals. Given our relation to those puppies, those baby cheetahs, it's easier to notice that they're preparing to fight within a hierarchy and to hunt without it. Jaguars in the wild often play with prey before killing them without eating them. This introduces them to some of the uncertainty in the environment. And by dancing with that uncertainty, they prepare themselves for surprise in the future. We have a clue about this in the work of DeepMind and OpenAI. As they train algorithms to play games, they find it useful to employ some form of self-play, of setting up a constraint for that AI to learn from. It fights itself, it competes against itself. It plays with itself until it gets better, until it hones its game. But this only happens well when you have some element of uncertainty. Some unforseen circumstance to test yourself against. In the modern history of martial arts, many martial arts were reduced to the best moves by the best masters, the best builds, the best strategies. And so students would repeat these moves and they would stay in lineages. So over time, these traditional martial arts lost their combat effectiveness because the fundamental difficulty of conflict is the chaos it brings. The extremely fast exchange of information that occurs in violence is fundamentally unpredictable.

THE ARENA

16

Just as the fundamental difficulty of surviving in an ever-changing, ever-expanding environment, the difficulty of an everchanging, ever-expanding game that is constantly becoming more complex is the uncertainty, the chaos of dealing with change. So to produce a little bit of that uncertainty on our own terms, we play. Who's on top now? Is it me? Is it you? If we predetermined this, then you don't know how to deal with the transition between the difference in status. If it is something that puppies do, where they're like okay, we are going to play with each other, but I'm going to be on top and you're going to be on the bottom, and they just play like that without any negotiation. Then one day, when the one who's used to being on top is on the bottom, or the one that's used to being on the bottom is on top and it is life or death, in or out of the pack, they will not know what to do, they will not know how to react to that uncertainty, and they will be more likely to die, they will be more likely to fail, to be banished if they are a pack animal, to die if that's in the cards. So play is constant negotiation, just as conflict is constant negotiation. Because no one fully knows what is happening. You need to exchange information quickly to deal with that lack of knowledge.

Press Any Key to Start

17

We think of the grave as separate from play today, but there are clues in our language, in our old stories, of how they were once considered the same, just as tiger cubs playing are preparing for a grave endeavor. Swordplay, after all, is called sword-play. So we play to learn. And we have to keep learning more every day. Because information increases with every second, the environment is getting bigger, the universe is expanding. You don't know what's going to come. But. But, but- we have built our environment to be very stable. As we learned, we learned the best strategies for defeating our environment. For controlling it, for limiting it to only the parts we want most. Now imagine a game that you play where each challenge is similarly understood, digested, and memorized. So that by the time you play it for the two thousandth time, you have mastered it. Do you get the same joy out of playing that game for the ten thousandth time? So to in our relation to the rest of the environment. As we turned worn paths into asphalt, as we turned forests into fields of wheat and rice, as we turned thousands of species into a handful, we reduce the complexity of our immediate environment. The uncertainty is still there, of course. Lurking in the distance, and bigger than ever the more we fight it, but we stave it off anyway, pretend like it's not there. Hopefully it'll be someone else's problem, long after I'm dead, and I never have to face it. So it became more difficult to lose.

THE ARENA

18

In the past, if you reached the age of forty, you probably outlived many people. We might get a clue for that in the etymology of the word expert, which basically means someone who has survived, someone who has experienced. This experience of living, this experience of remaining when others leave is only valuable because most babies died. Most pregnancies were miscarriages. Most infants did not live to see their fortieth birthday. So the very act of surviving, the very act of getting food out of the environment, of living another day despite predators, floods, disease, earthquakes, storms, famines, and rival tribe members and others raiding you or simply tripping from stepping in the wrong hole and breaking your leg, just living was enough of a win to justify your existence. For you to understand that you had survived, that you were still winning, that you were still living was an accomplishment all on its own. As it still is today, even if that accomplishment is hidden from us. We hide death. We hide war. We hide suffering as much as we can, in the sense of physical suffering. And so because of that, there is no way to justify our lives from living alone, given the models that we have, of what it means to succeed, of what it means to follow those who survived for longer before, to take their place on their climb as they fall by the wayside and die.

Press Any Key to Start

19

It only feels like an accomplishment to climb when the climb is difficult, and you only know if something is difficult if few people know that it is possible, or if people start dying more quickly than they already are. If someone on your climb were to replace a difficult cliff face with an elevator, suddenly, it doesn't seem like as much of an accomplishment. Suddenly, you might wonder why you're here. What made you so special compared to the billions of people in history? To the billions of living beings who fight to live every day? Why is it so seemingly easy for us? And what are we supposed to do with being on top? So we find games, we play games. To find a little more of that possibility of dying, to play with death itself, to simulate the process of survival that we seem disconnected from today, to experience tens of thousands of teensy little brushes with death. Most of us don't have to hunt or forage, or move long distances, or swim to live. Those of us who know how to do those things simply choose to do them as hobbies. Now you have to pay money, so that it's entirely a loss financially, just to hunt, as opposed to hunting to live. So we seek ways to lose, we seek ways to experience the uncertainty of change in the only place that we have made it safe to do so: Games.

THE ARENA

20

Just like playing as a child and playing as an animal prepares you for the uncertainty of a changing environment, playing games prepares you for the biggest environment. Playing games prepares you for life. But just as having many seemingly disparate possible paths brings a sense of fear and anxiety and results in inaction due to having more information to process before we take the next step, it's often difficult to know when to stop taking in information, or at least to stop deliberating between choices and simply move, to finally go down the slide, to jump into the sea. To press any key to start, you still have to press a key and to that I say: I will push you just as I was pushed into the sea. I am writing this now, in your past. I have survived. I will survive a little more yet. You will survive a little more yet. Jump, because you are more adaptable than you know. The time to play is Now. You won't stop taking in information until you die. You have exactly the information you need to start playing the grandest game. You might tell yourself you need the perfect build. That you need to read more guides. And maybe the guides tell you that to play this game, you need a certain level of acuity, you need some resources built up, that to make the movie you want to make you are going to have to go to school. You might think that to play the game you really want to play, you will need a two million dollar lab.

Press Any Key to Start

21

Or maybe it's the support of the Vice President of your State Bar Foundation's Board of Trustees, or approval from the one Professor you really admired and looked up to. Perhaps a mommy goth gf who will never leave you. Definitely your preferred political party in charge of everything and 25 times your annual spending in financial investments. Or maybe it's just the permission of your neighbor Bill, or 'just' a belt-fed, gas-operated medium machine gun chambered for 7.62x51mm NATO cartridges. You might be told that the real game is a career as a salaried worker, that you need this or that to keep you safe and alive before you can go play. Whatever it is you want to play, you can play now. Go. Play.

THE ARENA

22

2: UNTAPPED POWER -----------------------------------You have much untapped power. Do you even realize your potential? -Jon Irenicus, Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn

Power is ability. How at home you are in your world. Whether you can if you want to. Can you? You are able to feel this when you can do what you want, but to do what you want, you need to trust what you want. We have a tendency to hide this from ourselves, a habit of distrusting our wants, because if you made it very clear to yourself, you wouldn't be able to hide what you want from others - and if they knew what you want, they could use that information to stop you, to control you. A lot of what you want, you are worried that it may be Wrong to want. So you try not to want what you want, you try to want what you're supposed to want. Chances are, if you're anything like me, you may have learned how to hide this. As you hid what you wanted from yourself, it became, perhaps, more difficult to do what you want. Then you're left with feeling like you maybe never get what you want. Life becomes draining. A lot of hard toiling just to breath, just to do what it takes to be.

UNTAPPED POWER

23

Every step you take, you're presented with thousands of other choices and a sense that maybe you might be missing out on a possible future, a sense that you might be enacting an empty strategy. Like in a game where there has been a playstyle or a path that has been nerfed, or is known to be generally bad, such as fighters in D&D 3.5, the UMP in CounterStrike Source, or Techies in DotA 2 6.81b. You worry that what you're doing might be a bad strategy- a strategy that might result in a future in which you're shunned, banished, or dead. So every step, you might question yourself. Probably you were taught that answers came from books and your teachers, rather than you. And all these questions of worth, of your worth, make it difficult to play. The expectations that come to you from everyone else in the world, from yourself, make it difficult to play. There is a sense in which you have a great capacity that is not being fully used. And that is generally true. We have gotten here with the aid of extreme specialization. Perhaps once, in smaller populations, you might have had to do a greater variety of things just to live, but you're told to stay in your lane now. You can't really find someone dedicated to just making houses in a society with a population under five thousand. Maybe when it's time to repair a roof, or build a shelter, you call on your family and friends.

THE ARENA

24

There's not as many people dedicated to hunting perhaps, maybe it's something that you and the boys do from time to time to supplement whatever else you do for food. There's no dedicated factory making tools, so you make your own tools. This has changed. Slowly then suddenly, in the last couple thousand years. Increasingly, we are in more specialized niches. Where, instead of doing many things, you might find yourself doing one thing over and over again, because of your relative advantage in doing that one thing again instead of doing something else. Easier for the guy who makes a knife to make many knives, instead of taking time between knife-making to hunt, to fish, to trap, to pluck, to sew. This goes to new extremes. We live in a society that requires specialist certifications for just about anything, including, in some areas, to cut hair. In those places, you are told you need permission from a group of people whose specialization is telling you what you can and cannot do. Imagine, if you will, a group of moderators in a game who have not worked on or played that game, whose only job is to moderate. Such people might want you to ask for their permission just to groom- an activity that is key to social cohesion across mammalian species. You might find yourself in a situation where you're doing a few things every day, when as a general intelligence, you may feel you're capable of doing many more things.

UNTAPPED POWER

25

Yet you might stick to the few things, and avoid doing many things. Part of what keeps you in your lane is a sense of right and wrong. A sense of what's appropriate and inappropriate for you to do. If you want what everyone should want, a moderator might tell you, then it is best to concentrate, to focus on one thing. Yet the meaning of the word 'focus' comes from a word for fire, from the hearth in a home. Do you get fired up to do just a few things every day? Some people do, and that's beautiful, but if, for example, you need amphetamines just to do those few things, it's a solid clue that you want to do many more things. In artifical intelligence discussions, people talk about the difference between general AIs and tool AIs. A tool AI is an AI designed to fulfil a specific pre-planned function. To do one or a few things, without its own agency. Yet to solve problems in a changing environment, it becomes important to bring in learning from other contexts to inform the process of solving the problem. So it becomes useful for something that is designed to solve one problem to be able to figure out how to solve many different kinds of problems. You know how, in many competitive games, you might specialize in a particular character, a particular playstyle, but to really understand the game and do well in it, you usually have to be familiar with playing all the playstyles, all the characters.

THE ARENA

26

So that even if you only stick to one playstyle in competition, you know more of how to adapt to opponents who are using other playstyles. If it isn't in a guide, if it hasn't been set down as a path by the best players in your world, (whoever you deem successful and prestigious, whoever you think is winning), if they haven't done it, then to you, it might appear like a fruitless activity. And because you live in such a large population, where every time something is made, it has to go through thousands of hands, there are natural bottlenecks. And so just as when you are hiking, and people start and stop and start and stop, when they all move at different paces, because you're all different sizes with different capabilities in speed and pace and rhythm, just like that, you might be constantly telling yourself to hurry up or slow down. Or wondering if you are on the right path. Wondering if the series of actions that you're engaged in will result in the winning combination you feel you need, just to be a part of the community that you're a part of. All this selection in repeated messages like 'is this wrong', 'is this bad', 'is this a waste of my time', 'is this evil', selects for extremely good specialists. People who are able to cut away all the dead ends, the possible dead end paths, and stick to one path, all to do one thing.

UNTAPPED POWER

27

Even though that's not necessarily what you'd need for life if you were alone, or even in a smaller population. Air needs to come in and go out. Blood needs to go round and round. You need water. You need food. You need protection from the elements. These are all the things you need to be whole. Once we've adjusted to a higher (more complex) baseline of expectations, it's very easy to lose sight of the fundamentals. And as we forget the fundamentals, we start to slip, to put too much weight (you might call it 'bias', or feel it as trying hard, as working hard) into every movement, so that it becomes more and more difficult to find balance. Then there's a dramatic moment, a tipping point, a seemingly sudden collapse, and we might curse, cry, and shutdown in anguish at the shock of it. Yet the little clues of what was happening were there all along, like when your mouse is moving further and further along the pad until it comes off the pad in a crucial moment and you miss the shot and then maybe you get mad at your teammates for not being at the right place at the right time, or using the right move, or caring about winning as much as you think you do.

THE ARENA

28

If you're like most of us, from a young age, you were trained to only want a few things, to only want to sit in a classroom all day, to listen to an authority about when you can go to the bathroom, about what you're allowed to think about, and what subjects are most useful for your own good or for the good of your family. You learned to shave away what you want, in favor of what you're supposed to want. So by learning what is relevant and irrelevant according to what seems useful to a central narrative for the purposes of people very far away from you (and for their benefit), you are told to stay in your lane. The distance makes it almost impossible for them to know you, and so how would they know what's best for you? They do try their best, but their best does not account for you. You are told what is important and what is not important. You're told what is real and what is not real. Here you might notice that the way people use the word real doesn't necessarily indicate that things that aren't real don't exist. The word 'real' might be better explained as 'what is practical for wealth'? What is practically relevant to well-being. And to exist is to stand out. So something standing out doesn't necessarily mean that all the things that aren't standing out aren't there. It just means it's not relevant for whatever task you're trying to engage in.

UNTAPPED POWER

29

And something unreal, doesn't mean that thing isn't there in this universe somewhere, just that whatever that thing is, whatever that object is, that it's not relevant to your well being. Though, over time, in our civilization, we've changed those words, in the same way that measures often replace the purpose of a measure to mean other things. So that wealth is now equated with financial means. So that existence is driven to some extreme, in that if something doesn't exist, it might as well be dead, not here, gone. So that when you consider a possible future, when you consider a possible plan of action, when you consider playing in a way that isn't approved, you may ask if that something is really useful to what should be useful to you according to that paradigm. And when it's not useful from the point of view of that paradigm, then it is considered less real. Then it is considered 'Fun and Games', entertainment. The separation between work, or making things, and play (consider a skilled potter- are they not playing with clay?) only happens when there is someone to answer to, someone to answer to beyond your mere survival, such as a tax collector, or a priest. And living as we do, among billions, our world is full of tax collectors and priests telling us what to do.

THE ARENA

30

We have many of them in our own minds, parts of us that police our every thought and action, as surely as a wheat farmer weeds out their fields to the exclusivity of one grass (contrast this with the methods of horticulturalists). This inhibition usually justifies itself in terms of selecting the most stable paths for you to follow, to get the things you want. It has given us everything we enjoy now, but it also has a price. Awareness of the price gives us awareness of other ways of being. It gives us a chance to play a different game, rather than being stuck in one game. To get the love you think you don't have, something that wasn't conditional, the acceptance of you as a being in an environment with other beings, was now said to be conditional, was now made and created by the collective to be conditional. This gave us many things. We built many things, we've become bigger than ever before as a species. Our rise was meteoric. But there is a price. As with everything, nothing is free. As in, nothing stands out without somehow being connected to something else. If we were able to split our universe in that way, well, you wouldn't even be able to perceive something out of your own existence. If there was an alternate universe, you wouldn't be able to reach it.

UNTAPPED POWER

31

In the same way that objectivity purports to have a world that is somehow accessible outside of your perception, yet there is no practical way to reach it without your perception. Living as we do in our bodies, we have no such access to the objective world, and will never have direct access, beyond the access we already have. The very nature of experiencing requires us to create our perception, so the game of appealing to some sort of objectivity is usually a method to get hundreds of millions of people to coordinate. If you say, tell someone to do something, and you are not significantly higher in a hierarchy than them, there'll usually be some sort of resentment. So we use Reason. If we can explain why it's important to do something, the authority can be shifted from your authority to "simply the way things are". The way of Heaven, God, science, the expertise of a particular professional guild, just how things work. It's very difficult to explain to every single person, when you're dealing with lots and lots of people, difficult to explain why it's important for them to do what you want them to do. Let's say I told you that you need to wear socks on your boots. That sounds ridiculous! Now let's say the reason to wear socks on your boots is that we might be tracked by people who might want to hurt us. Now, that may make sense.

THE ARENA

32

If there are many, many people, you may be able to put on a show to demonstrate that wearing socks on your boots makes it a lot harder for someone to follow you. However, maybe it would take a little longer to convince them that there are people who would hurt you at all. If it would take a long time to transfer that information, especially with a lack of knowing the person, especially with a lack of living with that person every day, where you don't have trust yet, because you weren't around them your entire life- when that happens, it becomes more easy to appeal to some sort of authority. Do it because I said so, do it because God said so, do it because your nation needs you, do it because it's objectively Good. This last one is a way to appeal to some ideal. The last great method to get people to do things might have been because God said so, but 'because it's objectively Good' is even better, since it can be applied in contexts where God is not present, irrelevant, or simply different. All these mimic what parents do. We do it to create our present in accordance with our expectations. And the reason why it's difficult to give people proper reasons why is because we don't know. We know a lot less than we think we know. And so there are many things that we do...well, pretty much everything we do, we do without knowing. There is some leap of faith going on. And if you think you know how to walk, well, can you program a robot to walk?

UNTAPPED POWER

33

By that method, you might find very quickly that we actually don't know too many things enough to explain them. There are context specific tasks that we do seem to know. But a lot of times we don't even know why they work, or how to explain why they work. So we tell a story. And when we're dealing with lots and lots and lots of people, we need some authority that will work with lots and lots of people. So we try and derive the source of power. Whatever allows you to do what you do. Perhaps the Way of nature, as in something a Taoist, or many animists might say, and then later a God, a powerful ancestor, because what you came from does give you your ability. And then later still, some sort of monotheistic God. Whatever the ultimate source of power is, you can always appeal to that authority. And eventually we start making machines and having a gigantic population that does give us an edge in wars against other tribes (keeping in mind that this global tribe is just one giant mega tribe). As that practice, of thinking in terms of objects, gave our people a lot of advantages in conflict with other groups that we were able to subjugate with our technology, we decided that's where power came from. And so we appeal to that authority. You might see the results of this now, when we appeal to truth, and facts and science. Another benefit of not claiming your power for yourself is in how relationships change, and how we use relationships to form coalitions to influence how we move as a collective.

THE ARENA

34

Much like other apes and many social mammals, the strongest animal in the group is often viewed as a threat, because they might subjugate the other animals around them through force. So typically, because each individual is just an individual, animals form coalitions to keep power in the hands of a few instead of one. These dynamics mean that you generally want to attribute what you can do to other people, in the same way that in many smallscale societies, if you are a hunter, and you hunt really well, you may want to give your best meats to your people. And other people will generally make fun of you, because they don't want you to become too full of yourself. They worry that when you forget that you are codependent with others, you might act in ways that they can't predict, whether that's some sort of tyranny, or simply introducing lots of change, more change than the collective is currently able to accept. So because of this, it's useful to appeal to some sort of other authority, which is why every major state has some sort of state religion, a series of repeating static rituals to solidify where the power is, where the power comes from. So that whenever anyone gets too uppity, and starts to challenge that, an appeal to the authority of wherever that source of power is can be used against people who are not fully approved of. And so we repeat all these dynamics in ourselves. We notice when we might be taking paths that would lead us to a different game.

UNTAPPED POWER

35

We stop becoming too dominant because if we're too dominant, others will either punish us for it, or we'll be left alone, with no one, which is a terrible punishment all by itself, to a social animal. It's not very fun for most people to play against someone who is so much better than them. They'll often come up with all sorts of excuses not to. Even if it's skill, they will claim it's cheating, that the game is unfair. And that's all just from giant asymmetries in power. So, oftentimes, if you're in such a situation, and you're the one winning, you might tone it down a bit, stay in a sweet spot, so that the others that you're playing with can play longer. In a learning context, people often do this to teach. In fact, it's one of the best ways to learn a combat sport- sparring with someone who's much better than you, but who can nonetheless lower their speed, their explosiveness, their abilities to be just shy of where you are. So that you can learn slowly as you play with them, how to deal with what they're doing. Subconsciously sensing all these dynamics, you may find yourself in cycles of pretending that you don't know what you want. So much so that you do actually forget what you want. And having forgotten what you want, you stop doing what you want, as well.

THE ARENA

36

The gap between a desire, a thought, a want, and you playing with it, or you letting it flow freely from you, in your expression, in your everyday life, is hindered. As that is hindered more and more, you lose a sense of life. You might have heard of Christopher Alexander, who introduced the concept of a timeless way of building, which is really just a retelling of the Dao De Jing, but applied to architecture. He popularized a concept of flow, of designing buildings that fit with how people live, how they want to live. From this, some architects started looking at desire paths. Where, when you want to design paths- walking paths for a campus, a group of buildings, you might, instead of deciding what those paths are going to look like, build those buildings first. Then you might see how people want to walk from building to building, and then, finally, when they make their own paths with their feet, as it was done for millions of years, then and only then do you pave those paths- as opposed to deciding what the paths will be and paving them beforehand. So this kind of path design is present in many things. In martial arts, we call it Aliveness. This is the magic ingredient that some martial arts maintained and others didn't. Often, the difference between a combat sport and a martial art is whether there's an Alive element or not- that is, an element of sparring where anyone can win or lose. An element that lets people explore.

UNTAPPED POWER

37

You get to see things that a teacher or a master might have thought would never have worked end up working, as people innovate. And the bigger the group is, the bigger the group that brings life to the activity together, the more information is exchanged. The more everyone learns. Which is kind of something that is present in innovation. When you look at populations over time, the larger the population is, the more innovation there is. That's partially because of the communication between each part. We sort of mimic the process of evolution through cultural evolution. So, with ourselves individually, we might have gotten used to defining paths beforehand, instead of playing with life, instead of letting our creative activities flow, because we were in very built environments that had specific plans for the way that we should go. You are rewarded and punished, ever since you're an infant, if you're like most people. If you've gone to school, if you've been to church, if you've been in touch with any institution, if you've read a textbook, you've been told that there is a particular way to do things, and that when you attempt some other way, that other way is not approved. And so you reflect that in your own mind. To prevent other people from punishing you tomorrow, you punish yourself today. Through that selection, you try and come up with exactly what they want.

THE ARENA

38

This is the same way that we might take a fertile area and uproot all the trees and bushes and rocks and things that we don't really want, and turn it into a single field. We do that, we try to do that with a lot of constant effort, within ourselves. In growing plants, doing such a thing changes the ecosystem to make it simpler, but also results in many complications that take a lot of work to manage. That toil, that constant inhibition of trying to pull out every weed, of trying to get rid of every pest, instead of benefiting from the ecosystem, the pollinators, and the insects and birds and whatever else you might have there, that work sets yourself up in a conflict against them. Constant effortful conflict has a price. The monocrop is generally weaker on its own, and will not survive in the long-term without your intervention. Similarly, your mind, if you've been used to doing this to yourself, cannot go on without You actively controlling parts of it. If you think that some thoughts are good and other thoughts are bad, then you will be constantly weeding. And because you're constantly weeding, because you're constantly inhibiting, the environment of your mind is not going to be anywhere near as fertile and prolific as someone who's letting things grow. These words are not an accident, because if you look at the history of the word genius, you might come across something like 'fertility'.

UNTAPPED POWER

39

So all these ways that we have to control life make it more difficult for us to reflect life, make it more difficult for us to continue being virile and alive. So, your untapped power is that there are many things that you think every day, that you are urged to do every day that you stop yourself from doing. Connections to be made, that you stop yourself from connecting, because you might say that it is relevant or irrelevant, that it is real and unreal, that it exists and doesn't exist, that it is right and wrong. In that inhibition, in that control, you stop yourself from fully expressing yourself. And because of that, what you come up with is nowhere near as prolific, as full of life, as powerful as what you might do when you let everything flourish. When that inhibition is tempered itself. Though, you definitely don't want to get into the trap of trying to inhibit inhibition, since any inhibition is inhibition. Or maybe you do, and that's all good. The act of letting go, of simply letting things be is not something you can really do. You, the part of you that you likely identify with, the part of you that controls things, the parts of you that likes to control things might try to inhibit inhibition in this way. I know I certainly do, I try all the time. But as Yoda says, "there is no try, there is only do" and that kind of doing is funnily enough, what they might call non-doing.

THE ARENA

40

Or freedom from karma, or inaction, 'Wu wei', which might be better described as effortless action, action that flows from the unknown sum of all reality, rather than the effort that you work for. Effort that you spend time trying to make, as opposed to effort that you simply make. The constant hard work of making the process of making creates a lot of tension and rigidity, which results in a lot of things breaking. As things constantly break, you experience surprise and that surprise, because you don't expect a surprise, often results in pain, a little punishment, a little price that you make yourself pay for not delivering the exact play style of your favorite winner. But if you look very closely at winners, you will notice that the most consistent winners typically don't purely follow previous masters or schools- they do their own thing. The Renaissance men of the past, the people who seemed to put their mind to every science and activity, who today we might dismiss as 'only of their time', because things are too complex now for that kind of thing, now that we all need to be extremely specialized, those people were constantly flowing. Those people were really innovative because they spent so much time playing. You might notice that the father of information theory spent a lot of time just kind of making things at his home and playing around with them.

UNTAPPED POWER

41

He wasn't necessarily just trying to publish paper after paper, as a modern scientist might do within their field to get the prestige they need to feel accepted. So as you play, things are created as side effects, things are accomplished, seemingly by themselves. Something thinks. Something punches. It happens with our effort or not. So this is where you can find much of your untapped power. And I'm saying this sort of simply, but the process of you being able to let go easily, if you're anything like me, is pretty hard. I've personally found that I need to come up against very hard problems to let myself actually let go. And the only way to do that is to do things that haven't quite been done, to take paths that might seem like total failure, that might seem like utter madness, to let yourself consider things that people might not consider. And in that loss, in that surrender, there is creativity, there is power, there is confidence. In the sport of grappling, I've been submitted thousands of times in the space of a little under two years. And in that sport, in that practice, submission becomes a habit. You begin to realize what your limits actually are. This is something that I benefited from in the military, as well. I had no idea how far I could push myself until I let others push me. All that told me is that I still haven't fully explored what I am yet. And I never will, the boundaries of my capabilities are beyond what I can know.

THE ARENA

42

And I will not know until I'm put in an environment that is more chaotic, more uncertain, more difficult than the last environment I was in. Today, we might think of going to an Ivy League school, getting a job with a large and competitively successful corporation or something like that as something hard that you might do. That's very effortful, very straining on your mind. But the truth is, those things are not uncertain. There is a path, you can see thousands of strategies out there for how to do those things, which means it's settled territory, which means you're not actually going to put yourself in a situation to be creative, to surrender. This is where we get back to doing what you want. How do we start right now? Every game you've played is a clue. Every game you've played, especially when you were younger, you played without a mind to judgment. In it are clues about what you want. If you played a role-playing game, and you were a treasure hunter, a wizard, a prince, what you did, what you chose there gives you clues about what you would choose now. There is a way to be a rogue today. You can express the spirit of what you expressed in the game. For example, just like a rogue, you could be a physical pen tester. There's probably something similar in your everyday life that you could start doing now. For example, if you enjoyed being a ranger in a game, you could start tracking. There are many paths in this world where people and animals leave marks as they move.

UNTAPPED POWER

43

You can start exercising that ability more than you already are. You can listen to the birds, the squirrels, the rats. Notice what you're doing, what they're doing there is communicating. They have a baseline behavior. And if you pay attention to that, that gives you clues about your environment. You might think, if you were samurai in a game, that you can't be a samurai now. Well, Historical European Martial Arts exists, as does kendo. And you might have tried those arts, but felt like they're not really applicable to the world around you. Or you might have thought it was only applicable to business, failing to understand the context of where that spirit comes from. As in quoting Musashi or the Bushido code without having felt what it is like to be surprised by a thinking opponent, without feeling what happens when you move without complete commitment to your motion. And someone who embraces those words, those ideas, without fully playing with where they came from, you don't- there's a lot of loss, you are using the fact of having been a warrior as an analogy, and that's extremely useful to generalize in that manner, but something's missing. You get even more out of it if you then pick up a sword, and move with the forms, and actually try to see what happens when someone else is trying to cut you. That brings a richness to the legacy, the legacy of what it means to be a samurai, that you might have learned as you played your games.

THE ARENA

44

That archetype is something you can access. You created it in your mind to play the game, you played around with it. And so that is a source of power for you. If you compartmentalize, if you think that what you did in that game is not relevant to chopping vegetables, or getting a date, or preparing for a party or getting elected to your local community board, then you are leaving power on the table. There is a way in which everything you've ever done can be used as training data to inform everything you're currently doing. In the same way that machine learning allows algorithms to learn from all sorts of data, and then take that information and use it in different contexts. You do this, you do this everyday, the only thing that stops you from fully using all your information with all your new contexts is that inhibition. Because what you do might be too unpredictable for the collective that you are part of, it might introduce too much uncertainty, in the same way that a chair designed by an optimization algorithm might be too upsetting for someone expecting an IKEA JOKKMOKK chair. However, the fact that I have wrote this, the fact that you are reading this, is proof that the collective now has more leeway. It needs more comfort with uncertainty, because things are changing very rapidly. They're changing more rapidly than ever before. And we need to be ready for that. So the games you played in the past offer you clues about what you want.

UNTAPPED POWER

45

You might think that that's a lot of things. That's a lot of archetypes. That's a lot of trips. That's a lot of life paths. There are no neat ways I can simply live that today. I can't just go and be Robin Hood in Sherwood forest (as in the game Robin Hood: The Legend of Sherwood), sure. That uncertainty, that complexity is the hard problem: how to take everything you've ever experienced, how to take all the skills you have (and you have many more than you know) and use them to do the one thing and that one thing is right Now. What can you use? For Now? You're already using everything. Simply stop compartmentalizing. Let yourself flow. TIP: Pick a game you have many fond memories of. Which role delighted you most? How are you already living that role right now? What would that game character do in your life right now? For example, if you enjoyed the game Witcher 3, ask: What Would Geralt Do if he was in your body, with your skills, in your environment? HINT: Both YouTube and Reddit are good places to start searching for groups of people who really enjoy learning a particular skill. If a skill seems too expensive, there's usually a simpler version of it. Consider paper robotics instead of robotics, rabbitsticks instead of bows, BeepBox instead of Ableton Live.

THE ARENA

46

3: EXPERIMENTATION -----------------------------------We not only want you to appreciate the variety and depth of our mechanics, but also enjoy the spirit of experimentation and discovery at the heart of Goonstation. Obviously, you can't experiment if you have no clue if a mechanic works in the first place, so you have to start somewhere. Good newbie jobs provide that start; they should be simple to pick up, so you aren't too overwhelmed and can ease into more complicated mechanics, and lowconsequence, so you aren't too discouraged by failures and can easily try again. -Getting Started, Space Station 13 Wiki

So you begin to get clues about what you want, after sifting through everyone else's wants. Which, in a way, also build your wants, because their particular niches of want partially define your want, in the same way that the territory and feeding habits of all the other animals in an environment determine a particular animal's niche and behavior. Everyone else's wants inform yours. And so taking that and figuring out what actually is most important to you, as opposed to what is most important to your herd, your troop, your pack? You might realize that there's something you can give them that they want that no one else can.

EXPERIMENTATION

47

Because, well, let's imagine for a moment that there's a limited amount of energy in a game and you want to distribute it to all the parts, all the agents in your game, how would you do it? You might set up some sort of game within the game that demonstrates that those agents will make the best use of that energy. That they will contribute to the bigger game. You might setup a competition, because what better way to prove that you make the best use of energy you do have than to apply it to a competition and win? So, in evolution, many things are repurposed to save energy, while continuing growth. This is how fins become limbs and sometimes vice versa. Well, what is there is used to serve whatever current method of survival best fits you. So, given your niche, and what you have, and the environment, the interplay between those determines what is best for you to do. So, play is a sort of flow. You might think of it as something that is revealed in the game of Improv. Without more time and more resources spent on planning a possible future, you simply adapt to whatever is currently going on. And that whatever is currently going on includes whatever you have in you, your impulses that you have leftover in you, something that you might call karma in Indian religion: leftover action. So you simply execute those. Exchanging with other people in that play, you access the flow of energy that is already there more easily.

THE ARENA

48

So you have what you want. Well, you have the feeling, that you have a better idea of what you want. Or a better way to identify which of these flows best suits you, which is usually the sum of all wants, thoughts, desires, fears, etc. The sum of all your experience. If you take that and synthesize it, it is basically what you want. When we were talking about Untapped Power, it was about how you might think that only part of what you want is what you want. So you identify with a singular part, instead of listening to everyone. If we imagined that your mind was a gaming clan, instead of listening to everyone's preferences and behaviors, and noticing what their wants were, by their actions, if you then selected one person, and assumed their preferences were everyone's preferences, then that's sort of what's happening here. You typically identify with the standard that is the standard imposed by whatever has exercised the most power (historically) in you in your life- whether that's something from your teachers, your older peers, your bosses, people on TV, journalists, whatever, you get the standard from them of the play, or the situation, that is acceptable. You might engage in behavior with the goal of meeting that standard in mind. Working like this with a problem, where you have an expected outcome, and you have the chaos of the environment. And you're going back between those things, until you find something that looks more like your expected outcome.

EXPERIMENTATION

49

This is how a lot of things are invented. It's how problems are solved. This trial and error with a standard to match. The standard being your expectation. So maybe you come to figure out what you actually want. One of the ways you do that is to see what gives you energy as you do it, rather than what takes energy. Which is why pushing yourself to do hard work for the sake of having the status given to a hard worker, that is something that causes tension and maybe drains your energy, which is usually a sign that something is being repressed. When you try to fit an image of success, you never fully express yourself, you never fully tap into all the energy you have available. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer, as they say. So, too, in nature. If you are in touch with that flow, then as you act upon the world- with the world, it'll be something closer to surfing. That is, you'll be riding a wave, there's no- there's nothing to fight. And you can use this to sort of gauge whether you are doing what you want. Now, this might seem as impossible a standard as every other standard. Though, notice that the standards that are given to you are typically impossible, but they're viewed as somehow more realistic. This is because they are currently approved, because they were what worked before in certain environments. They're what once worked best. However, things change.

THE ARENA

50

So you are probably in another period of friction between that standard which applied to that one situation, and the standard that applies now, which might be unknown. You might have to come up with a new standard, you might have to notice what you want. Once you're in the habit of doing this, you might think, "well, I kind of know what I want, but I don't know how to get it". That's where experimentation comes in. Experimentation in the form of play. We might associate experimentation with scientists in lab coats. Though that history is from people playing with very, very tiny things. And it might look serious, because the smaller that something is that you're trying to manipulate, the more attention you have to hold, and the more you have to pay attention to a single area, the more it causes a sort of rigidity, which we might interpret as a sort of seriousness. So experimentation, usually, at its best, comes from play. If you're playing while dancing, you're distributing your weight across the ground in different ways, ways that you might not have before. And you are enjoying the feeling of noticing how that feels. The novelty of it, as you move back and forth. And you are changing your movements based on what you find, the trial and error of your oscillations. So to access all that pent up information, the data that you got from a lifetime of play, you usually have to release your hold on the compartmentalization that we are taught to apply.

EXPERIMENTATION

51

You basically have to put yourself in a situation where you can benefit from cross -training, and realize that every second you spent playing games was a form of crosstraining. You may have heard of the 'Bus factor', where, if you have someone working on a project, there might be some people who, if they are hit by a bus, suddenly the project is in distress. The higher the Bus factor, the more the team is cross-trained, so the less affected it is by someone in the team getting hit by a bus. The same principle holds in the military, except much more strongly, since it's inevitable for someone to go down in a combat zone. When I was a medic, the point was not necessarily to respond individually, with hands on every single patient, but to train up everyone else around me to be able to do my job. So that if there was a major emergency, then all I'd have to do is direct everyone else as they were treating patients, so that I was free to take a step back and make decisions about who to treat first and how quickly to move them on to the next point of treatment, rather than focusing on particular treatments. Accordingly, it was important to train as many other people (whose occupation was not 'medic') as possible. In a military context, you're always thinking 'what happens when I die'. Are my people going to be able to carry on, to finish the mission if I die? So it emphasizes this kind of cross-training.

THE ARENA

52

You want everyone to be able to do everyone else's job, ideally, so that when the bullets start flying, the shit hits the fan, everyone, any single person, can step up to the plate and take over when enough specialists have died. This principle of cross-training is valuable elsewhere as well. Even though, in our economy, we are incentivized to ignore our abilities. We are incentivized to stay in our lane. To pretend like we cannot learn what everyone else is doing, if we don't have the authority to do so. Given the slow decline of legacy religion, we've come to respect the authority of money more than most things. That authority generally says that specialization is to be pursued at all costs. So that if you're not a doctor, or a sociologist, then you probably shouldn't say anything about what they do. And you definitely should not engage in doing what they do. But that's simply not how we work as generally intelligent creatures. Our intelligence is designed to be adaptable, as surely as evolution repurposes. Innovation comes from repurposing past innovations. So we, too, are well suited to repurposing all the information we've gained to the current moment. You may have heard about the fallibility of memory, and against an object of what happened at a certain point in time, that is true, our memories are notoriously unreal, unreliable. However, they are useful for crafting the narrative needed to perform a task in the present. They are repurposed.

EXPERIMENTATION

53

That information is used to do whatever you need to do now, to live. You're probably familiar with the cycle of getting good at a game, only to have the rules of the game change, and then having to catch up again, to the new meta, the new environment, every other month, in a competitive multiplayer game. You might see this pattern again. When you go from game to game over time (if you've played enough games) there is a certain meta-logic to games, there are certain constraints when you're dealing with programs, for example, and human nature, and what a computer can do, and what various operating systems allow, and what infrastructure for the internet allows. Within all those constraints, there are common patterns. There are general principles, in the same way that physicists might find general principles that seem to hold across all areas of our experience. We might find patterns that hold across games. And while some people might be extremely good at playing a particular game and specializing in it, they usually don't have quite as much ability as someone who's played many games, so that even if someone is a professional StarCraft player or whatever, they've typically played other games. Within their game, they have to familiarize themselves with various maps, with various modes of that game.

THE ARENA

54

Even if they specialize in one mode on one map, they typically benefit from being exposed to the uncertainty of being in an unfamiliar situation, either with many new different players from different cultures, by playing with additional constraints that limit the number or type of resources they can use, or entirely different game modes. You might also remember that when a new game starts, there's usually a group of people in the beginning of each new game that do pretty well. Those people have typically not played that game, but they have played other games that are similar. And they've played many of them. That act of playing has revealed a meta-strategy that might be useful in all games, or a particular set of games. So you might notice that you have this awareness, you have this ability to detach into a meta mode. Whenever you go and play a game that you can take a moment at any time to sit back, consider the design of the game, consider the motives of the people who are designing the game and the other players in the game, and the structure of the game, and strategize, and figure out okay, if an AoE spell works in this particular way, that means it might probably work in this other way that I've seen in this other game. It would have a pattern that I could exploit in some way. So that ability to take a step back, and consider the design and structure of the game is incredibly valuable.

EXPERIMENTATION

55

In our meatspace games, in our games of politics in life, and business and family and neighborhoods, we might notice that a lot of people have trouble doing that. You, as a gamer, have this in you. You've been used to looking at the meta so many times that somewhere inside, you know exactly how to do it, you know what the feeling is, you know how to dislodge yourself from the particular context of these constraints and the dynamics within these constraints, to look at them, to feel what they're like, even as other people are completely engrossed in their tiny part of the game. Even though when you are playing a game, you have to be completely engrossed in it. There's a look, by some people, at the influence of bodily movement when gaming. When I was younger, I used to look down on people who did that, who moved with what was happening in the game, as if they didn't understand it was just a game. But when we look at professional gamers, it seems like people whose bodily movements move with the game to wiggle back and forth, tend to do better than people who don't. And that might be because of entrainment, or the joint attention between the player and the task. When you lose yourself in the task, the task is more likely to flow. When you lose yourself in the game, that's when you play at your best. In grappling, there's a general notion- well, this is clear in all fighting, but in grappling, it's more acknowledged because it is actually possible, in training, when you're grappling, to think.

THE ARENA

56

However, once you get into competition with more ego in the game, or once speed is of the utmost importance, you cannot actually afford to think- there's a notion that you have to just lose yourself in the activity, in the play. So too with any task, but there comes a moment, typically, where you are like the strategizers, and engineers in a Formula One race, where you're stepping back. Looking at the track, you're looking at the rest of the racers, you're looking at the race itself, you're looking at the rules of the game, you're looking at the vehicles, the other cars, and you are strategizing for the next time your racer takes off, so that you can deliver that information. Once the racer is racing, the racer has to do nothing but race. Between races and laps, the team can strategize, in a way that builds toward the performance of the next race. This combination is often a winning one. In the past, many people had no ability to do this. We were bound by our individual cultures, wherever we were, to not see the rules of the game, to not understand the meta behind the game, because we were generally lost in playing our parts. This was good because we played our parts well. However, with the sudden rise in capacity of human communication, with the rapid mixture between many cultures, between many games, the rules behind each game become apparent as you go from game to game.

EXPERIMENTATION

57

You become aware that the sets of constraints that you play with are not all there is, that you could play with an entirely different set of constraints. Entirely different games. Typically, this is greeted with anxiety and depression. Because suddenly, you're not doing well, at playing whatever game you were playing, you are no longer lost in it. A lot of observations have been made about this: Nietzche, Borges, The Wizard of Oz, Baudrillard, The Truman Show and The Matrix, and more recently stuff like Free Guy. All of these deal with the anxiety behind realizing the constraints of your game. Of realizing that you can step sideways. The pain of the freedom of being able to choose. As a gamer, you are more used to this pain, you are more used to this state than other people. So you might as well use it. You can use it to create new games for yourself in any moment. In 'The Inner Game of Tennis', Timothy Gallwey talks about how once you start the movement, in any sport, it's best not to select while you're moving. Kind of like our Formula One race example, you don't want to interfere once the race is being held. So the time to determine what it is you should do is when you're not playing. When you're not playing in competition, you have to play with your environment, your created environment, your constructed environment. In this case, the environment of the game. You do that by pushing it, pushing the extremes of those constraints.

THE ARENA

58

You may have known people in the past who, you know, the moment you go into a new game, they want to know how each weapon works differently. What are the steps? How long does it take for this ability to be cast? What is the distance between this part of the map and that part of the map? How high can you jump, in pixels? How many wisps does it take to construct a building in thirty seconds? Does more than one wisp increase the speed of construction? This kind of mapping is a key part of ability. Knowing your terrain, knowing your land, helps you thrive in it. In field problems in the military, we would often stand watch for hours or days on end. And it would seem extremely boring, like nothing was happening. Years later, now, as I learned to pay attention to birds, and squirrels, and all these other animals, and these plants, I began to realize that change is happening in every moment. The baseline behavior of an animal, a bird ecosystem, a terrain, tells you things about where you are, and where your opponents are. All that information is constantly changing, so you need to monitor it. From this, you may realize that if you ever move to a new area again, it pays to pay attention. The very act of paying attention makes it your space. Then you'll want to know it, because it's yours, so when it changes (as it inevitably will), you'll want to note the change. When you move to a new town, you want to find out what all the cool restaurants are. You want to know what crime is like there.

EXPERIMENTATION

59

In the same way, if you go out into the wilderness, you want to know what the movements of the animals in that area are like, you want to know what the plants are, how the ground is shaped by the water there and the wind, which tree is most likely to fall. If you pay attention to your local environment, then all that information becomes apparent. You have to go over it with a very fine and delicate attention to detail, if you've never been there before, since going in with strong and clumsy bursts of attention are guaranteed to result in local resistance. The birds fly away if you crash through. The squirrels run away if you throw stuff at them. The people get mad if you walk on their lawn. Most people did not leave beyond 50 miles of where they were born, in sedentary cultures. There's probably a reason for that. You have a competitive advantage in your territory, if you know your territory well. It takes a long time to understand just a 25 yard radius in a park or forest. Just go to the closest wooded area and spend two hours there. See if you understand who all the individual players are. If you know the particular squirrels, the particular birds and what reptiles and insects and such might show up, what seeds there are on the ground, what worms there are in the ground, what leaves fall on the ground, who walks by there, all these things take a long time to familiarize yourself with. It's not an accident that the English word for 'conquer' has its roots in a word for 'touch'.

THE ARENA

60

That is, to conquer something is to take it, and to take something is to touch it. Touch is a much broader sense than even sight. Your sight focuses a very tiny point, two tiny points that you create your visual perception out of. Touch is all around you. You can feel everything through your skin, all over your body. So to touch something is to pay lots and lots of attention to it. So when you start playing a game, especially if it's a competitive or challenging game, you touch it, you touch the boundaries of that game. You want to push. You want to see how you can exploit it, how you can live well within that game. That practice of trying to figure out how to maximize certain parts of what your agent might do in that game, and to see how far everything can go, and how small it can go and how big it can go and all these things- these can be used in your everyday life. Oftentimes, feelings of hopelessness and despair might accompany your attempt to do this. Because remember, if you are playing a part in life, if you're playing part of a game in your everyday life, it might be unfamiliar, to step back. And every time you notice the rules of the game, and the limits of the game, you might be confused as to why everyone is still playing the game that everyone is playing.

EXPERIMENTATION

61

You might sense better games that can be played, you might think it would be easier to push the limits of this game, if everyone else playing didn't get angry at you for you pushing, or that they didn't try to control you, to stop you from doing it. Because you can usually see a different path from a lifetime of understanding games. So that might bring a sense of despair, a sense of fear and anxiety. But remember, when you suddenly have more energy, and you don't know what to do with it, it is a dangerous period for an animal. If you're not using it properly, that might, that energy might leak out, as signals, that you have a lot of energy, and you don't know what to do with it. So another predator or opportunist competitor might come along and make use of that energy instead. So your anxiety, typically, is because you don't know what to do with the energy you have access to. Well, you've been practicing what to do, with every little ounce, with every little point of advantage that you can get in games. So you do actually know what to do and what to do is to win. What to do is to help your people win. And you do that by finding the smallest area that you can start to play in. You need tiny versions of games that use as much of yourself as possible to prepare to move on to bigger games. In the same way that game theory was a series of games used to try and understand the nuclear standoff that was happening between the Americans and the Soviets in the Cold War.

THE ARENA

62

The same way that supply and demand models are used by economists to try and get an intuition for the economy. The same way a biologist uses a cell culture to understand a little about a living system. You can make little games out of any activity that will help you learn a part of your environment. This is not simply gamification. You might notice, weirdly enough, that when people say gamification, what they usually mean is some sort of status chasing- the easiest part of games that became popular in the last fifteen years is actually part of the rest of the social reality of fighting for positions in a legible hierarchy. That is possibly the least rich application of living a game. That is the equivalent of chasing medals, credentials, or some woman's approval. The chasing of achievements, the chasing of certifications, the chasing of status at the expense of the play that the status was given to reward. So, when a soldier is awarded a medal, it's supposed to be for being exceptionally good at soldiering, to be good at playing that part, to be good at playing in battle. Yet, pretty soon, in any military, you'll notice a desire to get the achievement at the expense of play. And we've done that all around us now. In our meritocracy, we often chase measures, as opposed to trying to find ways to play. Instead of simply writing, we might think we have to chase the achievement of an English doctorate degree, to be a writer.

EXPERIMENTATION

63

And there's a sense in which things like this are easier given our context. Remember, the anxiety is something you have to deal with when you are approaching things from a meta level. The uncertainty happens as soon as you start playing. If you are an actor in a typical play, you have your part written out for you, so you don't have to think about what to say next, you don't have to worry about whether it'll be funny or not, or suit whatever purpose the play might have to suit. You are free to focus on how to deliver your lines, since your lines are given to you. But if you are in an improvised play, suddenly more of the responsibility is on you. You have to let flow. And that's a lot of pressure. Especially if you try to control it- in the same way that controlling a raging river is very difficult. So we tend to use blunt objects for that. We pursue medals and achievements and degrees, and other measures of success. Instead of simply playing, knowing that we have succeeded: we have taken the place of those who came before, after they died, and we are alive. We came from them. So we have taken their place, we are playing the parts they left us. Gamification typically involves using that easily replicable method of games, using the achievements and the levels and so on, and trying to apply that to other areas of life, when other areas of life are already full of those. So you're just taking the bureaucratic imperative, the bureaucratic value, the standards from the bench warmers, and imposing it elsewhere.

THE ARENA

64

When we talk about bringing games elsewhere, what we're talking about is setting up a tiny, tiny environment in which you can win or lose, in which you can fail, in which you can get a feedback loop. This needs the pain of failure. Pain is simply information. You don't like it when you get too much information too quick, because too much change might change who you are. The ultimate change is when you no longer are. So you need to experience lots and lots and lots of failure to adapt to your environment. You won't get that without a way to fail. A step in making use of your ability as a gamer is to setup feedback loops in constrained areas where you can fail many times over and over again every single day. If you are interested in singing, or let's say, you're interested in becoming the President of the United States, and you understand that achieving range in some skill, just like having awareness of a meta over many games gives you an advantage, then for making speeches, it would be useful to learn how to sing, so that you can bring an element of that into your everyday life. So a game you might play with yourself is simply to use more of your voice everyday. To hold a note. To, after you hold a note, to expand the range of notes that you can hold. To connect the notes, and to play with the space between notes, after that. To be loud. To be soft. To sing low, to sing high.

EXPERIMENTATION

65

If you are interested in climbing, then, even if you don't have access to a climbing wall or a cliff, maybe you have access to a door ledge. Or maybe you can get one of those $5 Pull up bars and simply hang. And the game is how long you can hang while being relaxed. After, you might find that you can just hang in tension. And then you move on to other things. Other little games. You can do the same thing with your breath, when you might realize that breathing is a fundamental aspect to every point of life. Instead of looking for a standard of your worth besides your breathing, for a standard of behavior and for acceptance, you might attach the standard, the ideal to the simple fact of your breath. So that everything else flows out of it. And that's a little game you can play, is to just notice your breathing. People call that meditation. But that kind of play with attention can be used to create a game out of any moment. The point of being able to create many little games like this is that you get to choose, and being able to choose, you can craft games, ways of being, that are better fits for the environment than anything that was around before. Remember, though, that just as in the case of games, where your choices are constrained, your choices are constrained by everything else in existence. So you do want to adjust your ends to your means. If you have a clear end, your life's creation, then you will be able to work toward it whatever your means.

THE ARENA

66

There will always be a smallest, tiniest movement toward that end available. You might not be able to become a War God that goes around flinging magical axes, but you can embody a spirit of action. You might not be able to sling spells crafted from potions and herbs, but you might be able to extract chemicals out of plants. You might not be able to save the whole world from certain death to get everyone's approval (though even if you did such a thing, you would probably get a lot of disapproval), but you can give yourself unconditional approval for having got hereknowing how difficult it was for every creature, every living thing before you, to get to you. Knowing how difficult it is to just live. Say you're worried about the global supply chain and you want to do something about it, just as you would be able to do something about it in the games you play, then maybe you would learn more about the global supply chain. Simply understanding that you can be someone who learns without having to be an expert taught by experts. That is, most of the interesting things that experts have access to are now on the internet. You might be able to get to it through Sci-Hub or LibGen. Aspects of games have already taught you much about this. You might look at a game like Foxhole, which apparently had their logistics arms of their various factions in the game. Foxhole is a game where they are mimicking some sort of giant war in a massively multiplayer online game.

EXPERIMENTATION

67

The logistics players did not like where the game was going with an update, so they decided to launch a labor strike. That suddenly had an effect on the rest of the players in the game. They had to deal with using pistols instead of the full array of weapons that they were used to. Many players who were focused on the fighting aspect of the game shifted to learning how to do logistics or production. Then you might maybe notice that there's another game out there called Beergame Simulator, which shows you the changes that take place in a Beer company's production line, and what you might need to improve that. From those things, you might start to get an intuition for how you interact with the world around you. You might pick something that you buy often, like a book, or a coke. You might look at its supply chain as much as you can, you might look at the aircraft, flight paths that you can access online, as well as the shipping paths. Might try and get an understanding of the number of things that are required for that product to sit in your house, in your home. You will never finish this map, but it'll give you some awareness of what you'd need to make a book, to make a coke- the minimum number of people and things you might need for you to have those. All these are little loops you can create with each question. A question like, "Okay, what's a coke made of?" Okay, this sugar, where does it come from? And that creates a little game, a little loop.

THE ARENA

68

You can interact between you and the environment and what you know, and that loop again as you figure out more information. Once you have started to get a solid idea of where your coke bottle is coming from, and maybe you even start to get some intuition for what the global supply chain is like, enough to understand that no one knows, really. But you can make a guess, enough of a guess to make a move. When you are dealing with information you have, you still have to move, you still have to take a step forward. So you use what you have to make a prediction. You can go to a prediction market to see questions that might be pertinent to models of global supply chains. You can use that to inform your prediction. What that prediction does is, it sets up a loop, a feedback loop, in the same way that when you have a game, and you are, say, trying to be the strongest character in the game, that's a feedback loop. You do something in the game and you see if your strength increases or not. If in the long-term, in competition versus other people, your strength goes up in comparison to theirs? That means you know something about increasing the strength of a character in that game. So predictions allow you to do something like that. They allow you to check yourself, they allow you to learn through failure. The very act of prediction is a sort of touching, in a sense, you're joining your attention to something, you're putting skin in the game, something on the line.

EXPERIMENTATION

69

This is what makes both bets and fights so appealing. Because with bets you have to put money on the line, which is often tied to your social status and other things, which makes it a more painful loss when you lose a prediction. And with fights, you are putting your body on the line, as well as any pride you may have about that, if you have any. Either way, you're touching the rest of the environment, by sending feelers out and attaching to something. Through that attachment, you learn more about the world around you, though, you do have to remember to detach at some point. When you are moving, when you are ready to play a different game or to play a different part, you will have to detach. You have an inbuilt measure that you can use to tell when it's time to let go. You've experienced it before: it's that moment when the game isn't fun anymore, or when it isn't fun enough to keep you. In that moment, in the same way that you can just turn off a game and walk away, there are things in your experience that you can just let go of. Whether that's a belief, an object of desire, an expectation of the future, or a literal grip, a handshake- what it means when you let go is to return to your overarching strategic aim. To look at what you want and be like okay, this aspect of getting what I want has played out here. This game has played out, how do I move on as quickly as possible to the next game, to the next aspect of the game.

THE ARENA

70

You've probably experienced shifting through this kind of loop, because of the Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act loop. The OODA loop that was popularized by Colonel Boyd of the US Air Force and is now popular among business people and such everywhere. You've experienced that loop trillions of times while gaming, and you understand, as in a real-time strategy game, that if you are able to move from action to action, to let go and move on to the next thing more quickly, that you can overload your opponent's OODA loop. Which is why you might notice that in RTS games, professionals tend to have higher actions per minute. You can't exactly improve your actions per minute exclusively and expect your game to improve unless you are sincerely paying attention to the overall strategy that you have- your overall want. The actions you take, each action, must be in line with that want, because if it is not in line with that want, if you simply try to boost your actions per minute, then you are engaging in the same kind of thing that certifications, medals, and degrees are engaging in. You lose sight of your overall aim in favor of the measure of the aim, clicking for the sake of clicks instead of clicking for the sake of winning. So, by creating a loop between what you want, what is happening, and a measure at any given time, you can more easily prepare yourself to identify the next possible move on your path from the sum of all possible moves.

EXPERIMENTATION

71

As soon as you stop having fun, move on to the next thing that you would have fun with. I found, weirdly, that attack is generally more fun, than defense. Defense costs less energy, but it does involve a lot of tension. And there's less flow in it, you're stationary. A lot of glee comes from attack, which in a noncompetitive context, you might think of as expression. Defense is necessary, it is necessary to find some stability, for instance. But when you are stable, understand that the point of the stability is to get to the instability that you enjoy. When you're defending, the point of defense, is to shore up yourself enough to attack. And the point of attack is to come to an agreement with someone or something you weren't in agreement with before, to become one with what you attack on your terms. There's a level at which attack and defense are the same thing, but for those still separating them, these are the tradeoffs. Understanding these steps, and moving between them, comes from having a clear idea of the source of the flow, the flow of everything in your life. Where energy comes from, where it goes. Where your motivation comes from, where it goes. Where your will is strongest, where will seems weakness. Just like in video games, where, if a tactic is not working, it's time to let go and go on to the next one, when something isn't working, move. When something isn't working, act. Play. These are all clues you might learn in the game of You.

THE ARENA

72

We, in increasingly individualist societies, learn to identify with particular characters, with particular agents, in any setting, in any scene, in any play. In a movie, in a game, you identify with your character that you play often. But the truth is, our world is partially simulated by us. So right now, when you're looking at a chair, that chair is a construct of your perception that you are probably creating. There is probably something there, but you have no way to access it without the overlay, the user interface that you put over it. That user interface is part of you. So all these games you've played, all these dynamics, that's also you. You are the game. When you play a game, you become lost in it. And after that, you carry it with you. The more you understand an environment, the more you have that environment in you, the more it informs you, the more it informs your movements, the more it informs who you are. So understand where your energy comes from. You can do that by looking at the structure of your games, the games that you play with yourself, as well as the games seemingly outside of yourself that you might play. So when you are motivated in a particular way, or when you feel a feeling, that is a clue about the structure of the environment that you're setting up for yourself, a clue about what game you're trying to play, a clue about what game you're playing, what game you are.

EXPERIMENTATION

73

Anytime you're noticing that, you have the option of stepping away, in the same way that you would step away from a game and play a different game. But the moment a thought is there, the moment a desire is there, the moment of feeling a bit of fear is there, it usually means it has to play out. There is some shutdown time. You can't just instantly pull the plug on yourself. Not after a lifetime of playing the games that you've been playing. And you can't force it, because typically, you identify with a part of the game rather than the game itself. Once you let yourself be the game, it'll be easy to switch games.

TRICK: To improve your game, create feedback loops. For example, if the game you want to learn is dancing, look at every step of an expert 2 min dance. Pick one fundamental part. Once you have selected a dynamic, improve it like this: 1) Isolate one part of the game. Let's say this is balance. 2) Come up with one activity that tests your balance. Let's say this is standing on one foot with your eyes closed. 3) Find a way to record your performance. Maybe this is recording a video, or a simple timer of how long you can stand on one leg with your eyes closed. 4) Notice what surprised you.

THE ARENA

74

4: GOLD, PRESTIGE, PIETY -------------------------------------------•Played as a Viking in the late 8th century. •One of my more ambitious council members "has decided it's time" for me to leave this world. •He begins a plot to assasinate me. •The rest of my council advises me to righteously imprison him. •Instead I notice the poor bastard is lonely and just wants to get married. •Marry him off to another lonely girl in my court. •She's happy. •He's happy. •I ask him kindly to end his plot to kill me. •He agrees. :) I'm happy.. -The Messenger, Crusader Kings II Reviews, Steam

People look at evolution through game theory to get an idea of what kind of survival strategies are used over time. Game theory, if you recall, involves making a very simple game and paying people to play those games with little money prizes. They help us look at when there is a conflict between self-interest and collective interest- to see what the pattern of that conflict results in. This was used to get an idea about the risks of nuclear war, since we needed to cooperate back then, in ways that we had not considered before.

GOLD, PRESTIGE, PIETY

75

For seemingly the first time, the collective destruction might make winning such a war as bad as losing, for a victor. In the past, (especially when a society took and used slaves), war was often profitable for a victor. It still is in some ways, for some fraction of the population. But a nuclear war could change that. You could use the energy that slaves could generate toward building your own society, as opposed to theirs, in just the same way that predators might eat prey, and use that energy to go on. Larger tribes were able to consume smaller tribes and use that energy to grow themselves. So evolutionary game theory allows us to look not just at human strategies, but also animal strategies, by being able to describe animal behavior in games over time. To describe subsistence strategies over time. Agent-based modeling is a method that biologists and social scientists have used in which instead of using single event experiments, you have a simulation over time with agents that interact with other agents. So that we can get an idea of the dynamics of relationships in an environment. This was used to model the interaction of many animals in environments, such as frogs or wolves or what have you. It may sound familiar to you, because, in effect, most multiplayer strategy games, and in fact, most single-player strategy games, are a sort of agent-based model, though with the added complication of having human players.

THE ARENA

76

In effect, every multiplayer game, especially one with persistent memory, such as an MMO with territoriality or something like that, is an agent-based modeler's wet dream, except there's not as much communication between people in that field and gaming. So it hasn't been fully utilized in that way to get a understanding of how we change together, and how that change between all our relationships affects the shared world, and the shared worlds that we occupy. However, if you've played any strategic games, you have developed an intuition pump, an intuitive understanding of these dynamics, of how different agents in a world interact with each other to distribute resources. How that produces change. Now, other forms of multiplayer games, like a first-person shooter or whatever, are concentrated on very short timelines. Though, no doubt, if we had connected all of those together, like a game like Planetside wanted to be, where it's a continuous span of relationships and all those are mapped and recorded over time, you will get a result that is similar to what you would have in a turn-based strategy game like Civilization or Paradox Interactive games such as Europa Universalis, or Crusader Kings- you would get similar dynamics over time. It's just that the complexity would increase to be more difficult to extract heuristics or lessons learned, ways that you can apply what happens in the model to your everyday life.

GOLD, PRESTIGE, PIETY

77

However, in these games, especially multiplayer strategy games, if there is an iterative element, mini-societies emerge. If things change based on events within the game, and that change is kept as a memory in the game world somehow, whether that's territory or who has how much stuff- gold, credits, coal, resources that are kept, then the coalitional dynamics, the nature of people to get together to work toward common goals and to fight against each other for limited resources, all these things emerge. So that you start to have something like primitive governments come into play in many games. You might have noticed, if you were ever in a clan in a game, that there are questions of economics, of time management, and organization that arise and are addressed by these clans. Without any management degree or proper schooling in it, you might find that you pick up on the elements of business, of leading a unit, of logistical operations in an organization, of coordinating lots and lots of people to figure out who gets what, and where, and when, together. So, in a game like EVE Online, or one of those newer games like Foxhole, you'll start to see these elements come into play. This is something political scientists have noticed: states tend to emerge when there are enough people interacting over time. Methods to coordinate all these people arise. Some suggest that the beginning of a state is almost no different than the beginning of a criminal organization.

THE ARENA

78

You eventually want to track all the people in your group to figure out who should get what. To do that you establish some sort of verifiable identity, a reputation system, and a method of exchange. You get people to decide. People to make stuff. People to provide services. People to do the choosing, people to carry on the practices that have already been laid down. You might have noticed this in the Pirate Codes, and even the Republic of Pirates, or prison gangs in especially large prison systems. When a criminal organization is successful enough, it forms a state. When a cult is successful enough, it forms a religion. Pirates, a culture ostensibly supposed to be really anarchic, nonetheless came up with a sort of government. Texas, California, and Ohio have prison systems that are large enough for gangs to emerge as shadow governments, to provide services, to provide stability that helps people sort out who gets what, where, and when. So within a large enough population, you might lose sight over time, of what all these abstractions that we've used to coordinate are. As we mentioned earlier, it's easy to mistake a measure for the thing that is being measured. It's easy to forget, for example, that wealth is a sort of well-being. It is not objects that make wealth. Many preppers will talk about the importance of prepping for a time of great calamity, of having enough food, gas, and ammo, and so on. Those things are important.

GOLD, PRESTIGE, PIETY

79

However, the biggest factor of who survives in such a situation is whoever has the strongest relationships- whatever community has cohesion. So those measures such as money or certificates, basically your status, those are secondary to the strength of your relationships (even if many base worth on the numbers their banks give them). If we tried to, like China, give everyone some sort of social credit score, and said that was your status, and people pursued that, it would not change the fact that underlying that is human relationships. How people are together. So, money is something we use to denote this, to say how I'm related to you. Even before that, when you deal with owing over time, you are suggesting that we are together and because in this time I gave you something, you should then give it back to me later, because that's part of our relationship. In the same way that we breathe in and out, we exchange back and forth. From this framework, we go over many layers of abstraction, until we get to money. A side effect of this is (everything does have side effects in a universe that has ever increasing entropy) that many of us will start to pursue the marker without remembering what it's for. That's useful because, remember, if you're playing a game, it's useful not to pay too much attention to the rules of the game while you're playing it. You do that while you're planning in between games, but you don't really want to lose sight of the game you're playing.

THE ARENA

80

So you might not ever notice what the rules are. The game here, the social game, is important, it's one of life and death (as in all games), because every aspect of your existence has to do with life and death. So money represents that sort of status, the way you relate to each other. You need other people to do anything in this world, more than pure survival, the baseline survival. So most people need other people to live. Money is a representation of that. You might talk about things like financial independence, as if that money does not represent the billions of relationships that lead to you being able to give some of these imaginary objects to a person at a grocery store and get food in exchange. That's where it comes from. That's what it represents. That's what it is. In any group, we give status, we give prestige, to those who seem to give more to the rest of the collective. That's a sort of reward to keep them giving more, until they run out of things to give, such as when they die, or after they die, such as when they're forgotten. But we remember the individuals, the parts that still have stuff to give. This is part of the thing where the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, the strong get stronger, and the weak get weaker. We give more to people who are using what they have, to somehow contribute to the whole.

GOLD, PRESTIGE, PIETY

81

In this way, if someone has more prestige, we're more likely to give them a pass when they do things that we don't approve of. We're also more likely to want to give them things, because they appear to be using their energy well. Remember that prestige is domain specific. Unless you're in a smaller environment, where maybe it's closer to there being only one domain, one game in town, then someone who's prestigious in one area may not be prestigious in another. Though that separation is something we create in a moment. The underlying knowledge of where prestige comes from is there. A supposition that prestige is somehow tied to how well this person fits into their environment, and fits in with everyone else there, which means they're worth paying attention to, worth learning from, so that you, too, can be fit for your environment. So, as you get what you want, you will probably get prestige. As a side effect, you may get gold, you may get money. Piety, we might say, is a combination of prestige with an appeal to authority. Authority being something that makes us bigger. Enlarges, expands, and grows us. Religion is something that really helped us get a lot bigger, as a species. It allows for our current population size. So appealing to an authority is something you can do, on top of prestige, to get people to do things. These things are all a part of getting stuff done in your world.

THE ARENA

82

It's much more difficult to enact something new, to bring something new into the world, when you don't have enough prestige, piety, or gold. Though remember that you can, in yourself, set up your own system of prestige. It's just that no one's going to adopt it unless it is somehow serving them. They're not going to see how it can serve them unless it really serves you- 100x better than their system serves them. So you're part of the collective, the collective informs who you are. You, in turn, take that and inform the collective, as a feedback loop between you and society. So usually, when people get really rich or powerful, it comes from giving many people what they want. Somehow, somewhere. Even when people complain about those people, they're usually attached to those people. We often complain about our parents, or someone in power over us. But if they are in power and over you, it's usually that you have given them power, because they have somehow given you what you want. People complain about billionaires a lot, especially the new billionaires. People who built themselves from merely upper middle class to something stratospheric, as far as financial wealth goes. They have usually done that by looking at what people want, and delivering. So if someone wants something more comforting, more stabilizing to their existence, then they've delivered. One place to shop for everything you want, delivered to your home. Electric cars. Computers designed for your grandmother.

GOLD, PRESTIGE, PIETY

83

This process has resulted in all of us, for the most part, living as kings did in the past. We have food, services, and luxuries that most kings could never have dreamt of. Not even bringing the sheer amount of light we have access to. So it's given us all of this, but without the status royalty we would expect with such things. Our own little kingdoms, with none of the live-in servants. Just machines. So we might sense that, even though you might have money, even though you might have a shelter over your head, and even though you might be rich, as far as the rest of the population goes, you can tell when you don't actually have social status, relative to everyone in your world- especially if your world is just your neighborhood, just your Facebook friends, your Twitter mutuals, the people you follow on Instagram or TikTok. Remember, in the past, if you were in a village or something, you could expect some sort of shared entrainment, some sort of attention shared with the most powerful people in your area. Your chieftain, your Lord. While maybe that wouldn't be as direct all the time, you still had some say, you still were able to tell them things, or at least they were forced to see your face, smell your body. Since you were in the same room, on the same field, your information got to them. And they could act based on that. But now, with all our distance, the speed of that is much slower, even with fiber-optic cables and satellites.

THE ARENA

84

Instead of settling on the people in your world being people that you knew personally, most of us have parasocial relationships with people who seem to have control over our world: people who you've never met, who you've never been in the same room with. Whether that's actors, journalists, musicians, athletes, celebrities, or politicians. So we are fed this information on them, but they're not fed information on us. You can sense the asymmetry somewhere. Sense that you might not, that you don't matter, in comparison to them. Because, again, you get information on them. And they get information, well, not on you. And you don't matter to them directly. The only time this was the case before would have been with slaves. Well, slaves were often ignored, so long as they were doing their job, and their owners would often have spent time around them. And you might find yourself in a similar status situation, where these people that have a prominent position in your mind don't really pay attention to you. Unless you join in some giant group that sends a message back, though, of course, if you join a social movement today, or a political movement that organizes based on ideology, there's still not much you can say. And that person will still not really know you, compared to someone who interacts directly with you. So you might find yourself in a situation where you don't seem to have ownership over yourself.

GOLD, PRESTIGE, PIETY

85

If you look at what creates financial wealth over time- property, and material wealth, it is having some sort of ownership. This happens with competence in a skill, as well. You are the only person physically that has direct access to your experiences, your memories. In the same way that when you have a terrain, and you know that terrain better, it gives you a huge advantage over how to interact with the terrain. If you grew up in a particular swamp, you know better than everyone else, everyone else, you know how to make full use of it, you know how to turn the energy into something that is useful, more than someone who's never been there. You can be a good steward of that area. In the same way that a few hundred-man bands, in the Amazon or in the Borneon rainforests, know the very many species of plants and animals that are there. And can use them in ways that no one who grew up dozens of miles away will be able to use them. Not knowing the wealth of richness available in those places, they might come over and say, well, all this stuff is useless. We are going to simply cut it down and replace it with one particular crop or one particular tree, because it's not useful to us. A reason why it doesn't appear useful to them is because they did not spend as much time in that area, they did not spend as much attention on that environment, they are not joined to it. So it'll never matter to them as much as it might matter to someone who did grow up with it. They won't be able to see the same richness.

THE ARENA

86

You may know what it's like to have some game company bought out by a company that didn't develop a game, that doesn't even play the game. They don't know what to do with the game, they don't know how to create a space that is fun for the players, and if they're not good listeners, they drive the game out of business. So to with yourself. No one will ever be able to comprehend as much of your richness, as much of your wealth, as you. You're the only one who has access to all that. You are your own territory. Today, we kind of give that up really easily. In the same way that many local places, during colonization, were given cool tech, were given powerful parts of a culture that was conquering them to kind of give away their personal culture in favor of the conquering culture. We do that individually, in ourselves. Even while we might be gifted with so much material wealth, we might feel something's amiss, that something's unfair, that we are not being given as much as we could be. And really, what's responsible for that? It's us. We surrender ownership of ourselves to others, in exchange for their protection and their decision making. Decision making, especially when there's more information, is actually kind of painful. So the comfort of not having to do that, of not having to explore your own area, and simply follow someone else's set path is much easier. As long as you're getting fed, and that's easier than it's ever been, too.

GOLD, PRESTIGE, PIETY

87

For a Empire, which, we are all the children of empires- we all think like Empires, being conquered by them. For an Empire, it is much easier to deal with people who are less involved than it is to deal with people who are extremely involved. Which is why our rituals tend to scale in a way that has a minority of people who are extremely involved. The players of the game, and a vast majority of spectators. Because if people are used to spectating, then they can't rock the boat as much. Then whoever selects the players selects the game, and keeps the game a certain way. We've talked about ownership before, of how, if you want a lot of wealth, the best path to it is through ownership, through switching sides, from someone who is consuming a product to someone who is providing the product, someone who's giving to the collective, rather than someone who is simply being told to take. To consume. Just as a hunter keeps on providing meat for the their tribe, that hunter tends to get more prestige. With that prestige, they tend to get more things than everyone else. So even when he is giving the best cuts of meat to the tribe, and so on, and getting made fun of for doing well, he still gets privileges that others don't. And that privilege might simply be attention, or political deference. You might get, maybe, a little more benefit, by siding with him than you would with anyone else.

THE ARENA

88

Typically, we have systematically given up ownership of ourselves to side with a few people against ourselves. When we have the underlying capacity now to be so much more. I once had a tiny plot in a garden, where I planted many seeds from many different plants in one area. This was something a soil scientist I'd known was experimenting with, so I figured I'd try it for myself. Instead of planting just one kind of plant in one plot, many seeds were sown, to let the interaction between those seeds and the environment sort out which seeds would get to become plants. Presumably, the seeds best suited to that particular place would 'win'. Single crops require lots and lots of attention, lots and lots of control, just to keep growing. This didn't need much besides water. And it worked. One species (chard) was planted in a planter nearby, but with only that plant. The ones in my plot were a lot healthier than the ones in the planter. But the plot looked like a total mess. Given the variety of plants, it looked more like part of a forest than a garden. So one day when someone was mowing the lawn, they thought it was just a bunch of weeds and they mowed it. We've done something like that, collectively, to many local tribes over time. We've taken away their ownership, they've given it to us, because we're much more powerful, because, we have, you know, guns, germs, and steel. Drones, memes, and plastic. Our innovations that we get from being the biggest tribe.

GOLD, PRESTIGE, PIETY

89

Innovations come from having the biggest collective brain. The more people you have, the more things you make. These innovations are proofs of power. We can use that proof of power to make others bigger. And by making others bigger, we get authority. So, from that, we have taken ownership of many other people. You might feel that in yourself, if you have given up ownership of yourself. A solid clue is blame- we only blame those we give power to. By playing someone else's game, we give them power. Remember, the house always wins. So even if you are the most successful gambler, at the end of the day, the casino sets the rules for what games are to be played. A lot of smallscale societies are in a constant state of play. Play involves flow, and because the game might collapse to one game, that play involves more everyday violence. You know, a lot of violence comes from territorial dispute, basically, and in our culture that might be mimetic dispute most of the time, rather than just land or goods. In an honor culture, that might be a dispute about where a name, a family, is, in the local hierarchy. This town ain't big enough for the both of us to walk by without checking where we are in the hierarchy. In the rest of nature, usually, when there's some sort of dispute like that, it happens quickly. The violence happens quickly. Then the organisms split up, if both of them are still alive, and rearrange themselves in space, in a different way, where they can continue to live together.

THE ARENA

90

All violence sort of follows this pattern. Sometimes organisms kill the other organisms, and only one is left alive because there's not enough space. After the organisms are killed, in that moment, there's suddenly enough space. So we can think of this space as well as games. And if you collapse all of your games into one game, that gives you a lot of benefits, because you can cross-contextualize, but it does raise the chances of violence, because you might suddenly realize when someone's not giving you enough space. In a lot of small-scale societies, there is only one game. So violence tends to be more frequent, but contained to a smaller circle. So instead of resulting in gigantic mass genocide, as in a civilized society, you might have lots of raids, lots of little fights, as in with children beating each other up all the time. Most violence is childon-child violence, everywhere. We simply don't pay as much attention to it because it doesn't result in as dramatic effects as violence involving an adult. Kids bounce back. They're adaptable, it's hard for them to kill each other unless they really, really, try. And remember that most violence is not competent, which is to say, it is not actually planned, analyzed, premeditated, and rehearsed. It's more like a bottle filling up and overflowing. When that happens with a child, because they have less power, less ability to act on the environment, it's less dramatic, so we remember it less than if someone stronger and bigger were to let themselves overflow.

GOLD, PRESTIGE, PIETY

91

A lot of times, the overflowing comes from not expressing fear or anger in a way that is heard by ourselves. So we find ourselves in a situation where there's limited space. We are playing other people's games. Instead of coming up with new games, instead of coming up with new forms of play, these are limited to a few players- because that allows for much, much bigger games, where the majority are spectators. By spectating, they allow a few to play for them. Think of representative democracy. These are issues of scale, though, and the speed of communication. Why things are getting complicated now is because it's actually possible to get around some of those communication issues, with the internet. We have much more communication capability than ever before, which means many games that weren't possible before are now possible. We simply haven't caught up to this fact yet, though. In the Web3 world, things like Decentralized Autonomous Organizations are echoing this spirit that you might have seen in peasant rebellions, such as in Frisia, or pirates, such as in the Golden Age of Piracy. The Hundred Years War, when some combatants from both the English and French sides realized that they had more in common with each other than the lords and Kings that were pushing them forth, and decided to band together to form Free Companies. Alongside knightly orders that were supporting pilgrims and such, these are part of what led to the modern company.

THE ARENA

92

These were places where people were more equal within themselves. This kind of organization was also present a lot of times in steppe nomad cultures, within the ruling tribes. It's also present, according to TE Lawrence, in Bedouin culture, where Sheiks were chosen by their men based on their behavior. In a way, the single tribal leader, while appearing to be unfair from the frame of the 20th century democratic republic, is actually someone that is more easily answering to his people than a democratic oligarchy, where there is no clear person to answer for the status quo of the collective. Democracy started in citystates with slaves, and was built on slave labor. Our oligarchic democracies allow an elite to continue playing a game for very long without ever having to expose themselves to change as much. Since they can say it's for the people, with the vote. There's not one person to answer for, when shit goes wrong, as in a pirate ship, or a raiding party. If a game, the supremacy of the game and people forcing you to play that game, is based on one man, it's very easy to change the game. All you have to do is kill that one person. Or simply convince them to step off, influence them to love everyone around them more. Whatever it is, it's easier to change one than it is to change many. So our democratic way of life comes in part from trying to keep stability of ownership, stability of hierarchy.

GOLD, PRESTIGE, PIETY

93

It's not that hierarchy doesn't happen in smaller groups, or with more egalitarian societies, or with units with more cohesion. It's just that it moves. It moves much more rapidly, just like with geese flying in flock. As the lead goose gets tired, the next one steps up. In a well-functioning military unit you need decentralization to swarm quickly, as in the US Navy's Doctrine of Faith, or with its guerrilla war in China. Francis Marion, and even the Ukrainian resistance to the 2022 Russian invasion of Kyiv, involved relying on more people on the ground to make decisions rather than relying on centralized command-andcontrol. The strength of a guerilla army is in its ability to rely on the boots on the ground making decisions, as opposed to a few players, because a few players cannot adapt as fast as a swarm. So all that to say, some political scientists have pointed out that even dictators require some sort of coalition that they answer to. This might be a few generals in the military, this might be a business group of kleptocrats, perhaps a particular ethnic group. They still have to reward the people who are loyal to them, the people who put them in power and the people who help keep them in power. Our games are setup by whoever started the game. If you manage to start a game that has mass appeal, you also get rewarded for that.

THE ARENA

94

As more people join your game, you will notice that you live in a world that requires you to be more effective today than you were yesterday. In this Red Queen's world, you may start to find it easier to force other people to play your game. And you will be less likely to move on to another game. Most traditional martial arts started with effective combat ability. Their teaching solidified into doctrine as they got status and money, so it was easier to simply prevent change by blocking off potentially fast exchanges of information. So fighting less in their art, not communicating with other dojos (in early martial arts scenes, that commounication might've taken place in duels and sparring sessions). Every time there's a new game in town, this kind of happens, especially with our ability to put people in debt, which says that we can't finish the game, we can't finish one game and move on to another game, until we give what we owe to others. This way, they keep you playing in the same way that in a casino, the house makes it really comfortable. They put all sorts of you know, cheap drinks, cheap steaks within reach to keep you there, to keep you playing. You might recognize a similar tactic at play in an IKEA or a Costco. Then as you play, you maybe lose. And maybe someone comes along and offers to lend you money to keep playing, and you take it, then you're stuck there, in the casino or in the debt-based middle class lifestyle.

GOLD, PRESTIGE, PIETY

95

So you are working for other people to play, which is wonderful in its way. Except they give you permission to play only when you are beholden to them, and only when you play their game. And that's a clue about when you're playing your game. When you're playing a game for people you love, versus when you're not. When you need someone's permission to play, and it's not someone you love who loves you, which includes where a 'should' and 'shouldn't' might originate. So you love someone, and they say you shouldn't do this, you should do that, but they can't tell you why. Usually they can't tell you why. Because they didn't originate it. If they did start the branch of cultural transmission, they would be able to tell you why. And if they can't, it's usually a sign that it's someone else's rules. Someone else's game. Often someone long dead. It may even be that if that person came around now, they'd be like 'why the fuck are you still playing this old game' in confusion, but their followers kept the game as they perceived it should be, anyway. So those first popularizers could collect rent on it, in the form of the stability that comes from status and material wealth. And because it's someone else's rule, it means that permission to play is coming from somewhere else. So that's a clue of some area where you could take ownership for yourself. The first place that you can start doing this is within you. You know the quote from Peter Parker: with great power comes great responsibility.

THE ARENA

96

What they don't tell you is that with great responsibility comes great power. It doesn't seem that way in our society because, again, we mistake control for many things. We mistake control as power, we mistake fear as control. But power is what can you do, not what you can control. What you can let flow from you, how much you can let flow through you. The more responsibility you take, the more of the world you elect to take care of, the more of the world you elect to give to, the more power you get. The first part of that world you have access to, the first territory you have access to, is you. Which means a simple method is to simply take the blame for anything that happens in your world. If you're in pain, you can try to deflect this, you can try to avoid power, the pain of power, by blaming someone else. But remember, when you're a kid, you blame your parents. When you are a member of a state in our society, you blame the casino, you blame the house, you blame the President or the Prime Minister or some executive of some large private corporation...but that blame actually strengthens whoever you're blaming. It says that this is their game. And they are the only ones who can change the rules. Which stops you from playing your own game. Stops you from even considering the possibility of coming up with different rules. When you're playing someone else's game, you are afraid of losing. When the casino is someone else, you're afraid of losing. Because if you lose enough, you won't get to keep playing.

GOLD, PRESTIGE, PIETY

97

However, if you're playing your own game, you will not fear losing. Because losing is a sort of failure. And failure is what happens when you reach for connection to something in the environment, to get to know it better. When you're navigating in the dark, you might put your hands and feet out to feel for the wall, the floor, a chair in the way. You might reach out and touch a table that's in your way. There, "failure". You reach out and bump into a wall. There, another "failure". Then you reach out again, until you find space you can move toward. So you learn from failing, it's part of the play. Exploration through exploitation. There's no joy without that losing. Many of our players today, because they are beholden to many spectators, because they are in debt to the same game, fear losing. And they're motivated by that. And that is apparent in the way they play. As if there is no next year. As if they will not have to keep playing, once they play really well in this moment. Some Olympians talk about getting depressed after the Olympics. They compress their lives into a single event. Once that particular event is gone, a sense of meaning might not be there. The game I'm inviting you to play is a different game. It is not about compressing life into a single event. It's about noticing you're alive. Bringing that bigger life to every event. The game is life. Life is not a game. The game is life. So to play well, you would have to play while paying attention to as many pieces on the board as possible.

THE ARENA

98

When you play soccer or Defense of the Ancients, you want to know where everyone is, because that determines your movement. So when you play this game, you want to be aware of the whole board, which includes everything that came before, everything that is now, and everything that comes after. As much of that as you have access to, anyway. Which means that you might not play in the same way that a modern athlete does, with no regard for injuries, with no regard for longevity. If you're playing the game, then it's a long game. It's an infinite game. It goes on long after you're dead. In the same way that we are continuing the plays of people who died before us, whose ideas we carry, whose wants we carry, whose goals that we continue to fulfill, our game is Long. And if you are the house, you won't mind losing, because you can just withdraw more tokens, they're yours. This lack of fear, while it might not result in you winning anyone else's game, it guarantees that you will win yours. In Brazil's Vale Tudo circuit, there were many camps that did well. We know the most famous group, the Gracies, because they realized that in the Western world, there wasn't a game that played to their strengths. The strengths they had learned from the Vale Tudo game in Brazil, could not be transferred to, say, boxing, or freestyle wrestling.

GOLD, PRESTIGE, PIETY

99

They knew that if they went to the United States, the richest country in the world, the fastest-flowing collective mind in the world, if they went there, on the world's stage, and participated in a wrestling competition, they would have lost. If they had participated in a boxing competition, they would have lost. This would have been fine in a way, because it wouldn't inform their game, which was actually a bigger game that involved both those things and more. So they came up with the UFC, a way to showcase their game to the rest of the world. A way to bring a bigger game into the world of combat sports. One of the Gracies, who wasn't even the best Gracie at BJJ (or so they say), was selected for being someone skilled who looked like just some guy. So that when he beat everyone else at UFC, it was dramatic. It was a miracle. It was a show. And they beat everyone else because they were playing their own game. They set the terms, they set the rules of the game. They brought others into their game, which allowed them to showcase their skills, their strengths, their homeground. That process happens again and again, today. You will know what your game is by the fact that it uses as many parts of you as you have access to. The more you reflect every experience you've ever experienced, the more you take everything you've learned from every seemingly disparate part of your life, and you synthesize it into one thing, the more you have an awareness of what your game is. There, you will prevail. With minimal effort.

THE ARENA

100

For if you play your own game, no one else can beat you at it. You are the best there is at what you do, because only you do exactly what you do. Specifically, and in fine detail. Imagine, if you will, that you start a new game. You pick the skills that are the ten best skills that you are best at. You come up with a game that involves all those things. Well, not that many people would be able to beat you. So the more you own yourself, the more you give yourself space and freedom to think, to express whatever it is that you typically don't express for fear of breaking the rules of someone else's game, for fear of losing, know that that's an opportunity for you to let yourself play your own game. Normal comes from a carpenter's square. For something to be normal, it has to be cut, according to that carpenter's square, which only happens if you are building something en mass. If you are part of an Empire, like Rome, and you needed to make many chairs, and you wanted to make them all the same, and this was before factories, then you had a square, you had a standardized measurement to do it over and over and over again. However, now more than ever, given the sheer number of cultures melting into each other, new cultures are made with every single person. There is no one else precisely like you. You contain everyone else you've ever come into contact with.

GOLD, PRESTIGE, PIETY

101

That combination is unique, as unique as your fingerprint, so you can play that game. You just have to let yourself do it. And like any good game, it's a very hard game, because you don't know what's going to happen next. You can't plan for what will happen next. But remember, you are the result of many players of this game, your entire lineage. All those genes, all those memes led to you. And that line is playing a very, very, very, long game. If you work with it, if you work with the rest of yourself that you typically deny, you're going to win. You've been winning for millions of years.

HINT: All your feelings and perceptions are created by you in a sort of simulation.

THE ARENA

102

TIP: When anything happens and you're looking for someone to blame, consider how that blame might help you get what you want. Most of the time, blaming someone else is asking someone else to help you get what you want. If you blame that other entity, will another player help you with them? You can't really control your team mates or your opposition in the game, but you can always improve your skill. So when something doesn't go your way, consider what move you can make that will inch things toward your way.

GOLD, PRESTIGE, PIETY

103

TRICK: If you want money or status, take whatever you're interested in and start providing what you'd want to see in the world to everyone else. If you're tired of the music you're listening to, start making your own music. If you're tired of the food that someone else cooks, cook your own food. If there aren't any good games to play, make a game. Produce a little of every kind of thing you consume. Whenever you have the chance to own something, own it. If you have the choice between investing in stocks or in yourself, invest in yourself. If you have the choice between investing in cryptocurrency or starting a business, start a business. If you could campaign for a large political party, start a local group dedicated to something you care deeply about in your own neighborhood instead.

THE ARENA

104

5: BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! --------------------------------------------Enemies, we need enemies! -Aspiring Champion, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War

Humans are no strangers to war. After all, we've been fighting for as long as we can remember. War is all we know. -Chairman Prescott, Gears of War 2

As you begin to realize what you want, you'll notice a lot of obstacles. There are a lot of obstacles, and many of them are the way people are moving, the way other people are moving. When you broaden your attention to include more of what is happening in your life every day, you may notice or you may have already noticed, most likely, that there is a lot of conflict. That a simple interaction of a conversation with your parent or your boss or just a person at the grocery store may reveal something like a constant Cold War, because we all have different wants. Often similar wants that lead to a constant restructuring of where we are in space. A situation where one person getting what they want when they want it may mean that many other people may not get what they want. The response to this is often a sort of anger and frustration that leads to contracting, to retreating away from all these arenas.

BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! It may feel intractable to face all these obstacles, to face all these potential enemies: people who are in your way. People you love can still be people who are in your way. In fact, most of the time, the people who are most in your way are people you love. So how do you deal with that? Perhaps we might retreat, we might withdraw to a digital game. A world that is smaller and more narrow, where we can safely engage in conflict and play part of the conflict out without having to hurt or compete with the people directly around us, because we love them and why would we compete with them? Regardless, competition is a part of life. Walk down any wooded area and you'll notice that there are lots of birds making noise. And that noise often has to do with where they are. A lot of it is about territory, about where they are in space and who gets what and where. Who gets the worm, who gets the seed, who gets a mate. We have been convinced through a lot of rhetoric and through a lot of use of abstract symbols that conflict and competition is somehow bad. This is because you do need to find a way to reduce some of the overt conflict, when you put a lot of people together. There's an oft-repeated line about chimpanzees on a plane: you can't really fit chimpanzees on an Airbus without them eventually fighting, whereas you can do that with human beings.

THE ARENA

106

Part of what allows for that difference is that we might have demonized or enforced very strong norms against open competition, open conflict. Against violence that is not approved by a very large group, that is not conducted and carried out by a nation. So we've learned to leave that to our teachers, to leave that to law- what has already been laid down in our history about how to behave. We've learned to call the cops. That doesn't mean that there isn't something deep inside you that loves conflict, that loves competition, that loves violence, in the same way that any animal loves to play, loves to hunt, loves to eat, loves to live. The animals in a zoo may be more peaceful, in that they're not doing a lot of hunting. They're not doing as much territorial competition. However, you'll notice that they don't live as long. They tend to get more diseases, much like we do- diseases of material wealth. All you have to do to see this, even in animals that are domesticated, is to take a look at the camp dogs or the stray dogs in countries that have a lot more subsistence living. You'll notice that they all sort of look kind of similar, these dogs all over the world. They approach a sort of dog design, one that is useful for the functionality of surviving in a competitive world. They look sort of like dingoes, but leaner. Lean, rangy, relaxed, and a little mean. However, our captive breeds, or breeds in post-industrial countries, tend to be more varied in shape and size.

BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! But all these different breeds also come with a lot of health issues. They are not as resilient. If you release them into the wild, they would probably die very quickly. We've done similar things to ourselves with specialization. This doesn't mean that most of us can't adapt, the moment those restrictions are lifted. It only takes you about two weeks to adapt to a situation where your world is upside down. When you wear some glasses that filter up as down and down as up, you eventually start figuring out how to move in the world just fine. After about two weeks, boom, you've adapted. When people go to a low-gravity environment, it doesn't take very long for them to adapt to that extremely unlikely environment. One of the benefits of being human is this ability to learn very quickly and live in a new environment. However, it's even easier to go back to an environment that you were well-suited to. So while it may have become difficult for you to face conflict, that difficulty is something that was trained recently, in the same way that when you are trying to tame an animal, you might scare it and enclose it in a space and scare it until it puts its attention on you. And then when it puts attention on you, then you might project calm, so that it gets used to thinking of you as the source of calm. The moment the animal tries to put its attention anywhere else, you disrupt it. The Dog Whisperer Cesar Millan is constantly doing this.

THE ARENA

108

That's how he gets dogs to behave. This is how many people tame wild horses. You may notice something similar in what teachers do. In schools, you are enclosed into a space. When you are enclosed there, you are taught to take all your movements, all your decisions about where to put your attention, from your teachers, your administrators, and they, in turn, are taught to do this with the legal arm of society. If the attention drifts somewhere unapproved, there is a flick of the whip. A hint of disapproval. A raising of the voice. A lowering of the voice. A surge of downvotes. A scare, a promise of pain. So after learning that putting your attention where your trainers want is calming, we learn to find comfort in attending to what we're told to attend to. After this, putting your attention where it wants, where your instincts honed it to go, where your ancestors put it just to survive, is a bit of a difficulty. Because we spent a lifetime learning to only put our attention where the systems that brought us up wanted. The systems that trained us up, domesticated us, brought us into the giant house of human civilization. Our very home. We have been taught to only put our attention where the house wants our attention to be. Where it wanted our attention to be in the past. Until now, when the house needs more change. When the house's dogs need to feed themselves again.

BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! Once you get used to "doing nothing", that is, sitting around every day and simply watching your thoughts pass by, and your feelings pass by, letting them come up and letting them go, noticing the fullness and expanse, as well as the variety of feelings and thoughts that you hold... Once you get used to doing nothing, then it becomes easier to accept the nature of the fight you're in. All life fights. The moment you think that peace is somehow separate from war, that peace is the absence of fighting, as opposed to simply being together, is the moment when you are letting something else do the fighting for you, when you are ignoring the parts of your world that are being handled by someone else. In society, we know that, you know your soldiers do the fighting for you, your police do the fighting for you. But in fact, your actions every day are enabled by them and also lead to them. So just because you don't feel like you are controlling them, it doesn't mean that you are not offloading much competition to them. In the same way that you offload where your food comes from to your industrial farmer, to the butchers, to your gardeners who are fighting the wildlife for you, to our construction workers. All of that involves control over an environment, marking of a territory, and constant renegotiation of that territory. We are sort of used to this in the marketplace.

THE ARENA

110

You sort of accept that competition is necessary to be in a marketplace, in countries that at least verbally preach free market values. We're comfortable with competition there to some extent, though, there's also a bad taste in our mouth and that bad taste probably comes from the realization that property is sort of made up. In the sense that it is merely what you can make, take, and defend, and what you could take with impunity. Most of us no longer take, defend, or make our property, as might have been the case in many places before. We are removed from that process of living with the provenance of our property, so it becomes difficult to take it seriously. After all, most people have their attention owned by someone else. When you are at a workplace, when you have a career, you are taught to put your attention only where your organization wants you to put it. That is, in some ways, a bigger cost than mere physical enclosure- having your mind enclosed. It is a more effective way of taming an animal after all: give them a choice between doing what you want them to do, or doing something harder, that you also want them to do. Then the animal gets this sense that it does have a choice. So it starts to train itself to follow your cues. Society does that, our organizations do that, our schools do that, our businesses do that. We do that.

BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! And so there's a sense that something that would have once been yours and yours alone, your attention, your decision-making processes, are co-opted by the organizations that we are a part of. Sensing that control, we might want to ignore it or stave it off, so we might get disgusted by it, which is why we might assign that disgust to capitalism or government, both methods that are used to control. However, if you are being controlled, it doesn't really work to complain about it. Complaining about it, whining about it, or simply bitching about it every day only makes sense if there is someone bigger to complain to. Someone to help you. Someone to fight for you, to pick for you, to grow for you, to kill for you, to feed you, to clothe you. Now we learn that the only power we have in school is to complain to a teacher, to go to someone bigger, and that they will handle our problems for us. So we continue that pattern, long after we're adults, long after we're the big ones. It's just that instead of complaining to your parent, or your teacher, we complain to each other. You call your Congressman. You vote. You protest. You type some angry words and click 'post'. You complain to your ombudsman, you complain to an inspector-general, expecting someone to help you out. You vacillate about what you do and don't deserve, giving away your ability to decide what the standard of 'deserving' is to someone else.

THE ARENA

112

The fact is, there are probably- now more than ever before- more people who are asking for someone to do things for them and not many people who can do things for themselves. So there's actually almost no one left that you can bring your problems to. In the past, this led to certain kinds of hierarchies. After all, initially, in a smaller society, you might have like a Big Man, the most prestigious individual, who you would bring your problems to and they would resolve it in some way. Things like that led to various forms of caste systems, and feudalism, and things that we grew tired of, in the form of having an aristocracy, in the form of having a Lord that you would complain to, and so being disgusted with that, we got rid of people who we might bring our problems to. Instead, we bring our problems to the law. To the state. To some old records of what some wise person did before in a very different time and place. Letting ourselves be judged by the dead, who had no way of knowing where we'd be now. So now there is no pipeline for people who are capable of being where the buck stops. Teddy Roosevelt talked about, you know, the buck stopping with him. You may remember his speech about the man in the arena. The responsibility for anything that happens to a group falls on the leader. The responsibility stops there, they are sort of sacrificed by their community to take that role.

BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! That role comes with a lot of privileges, but on the flip side, it also comes with all the blame for the circumstances of everyday life. Many people try to get the privileges of leadership without taking on this responsbility, but they get blamed anyway. Situations are firmly blamed on leaders. People blame whoever they perceive has power over them. Whoever they're following. Usually, in our modern case, we blame our parents, and then our romantic partners, and then people with more money, and politicians. More and more, you will notice that even those people with more money, even those politicians, the buck is not stopping with them. They're not claiming responsibility for what happens in their organizations, they are blaming it on other people. That's because the pipeline for rewarding and creating competent leaders is not present anymore. In most cultures, when you were a child, you would have had responsibilities, either to provide for food or to take care of your younger siblings, very early on. You know, you might have to take care of a camel, by the time you're eight, you might have a herd of sheep to take care of. We don't really give children those responsibilities anymore. They're barely allowed to leave the house. We don't reward those responsibilities anymore as much. We don't reward independence, or initiative- those moves are typically punished. So usually, to take on responsibility is a hard task, because it comes with constant attacks.

THE ARENA

114

The more power you have, the more actual ability you have, the more criticism and the more attacks you will face. You can look at how the most competent people in your world are treated, for instance, to see that they can do no right. They are the ones that attract a lot of criticism, judgment, and blame. This is part of the contract of taking power. This is part of the difficulty of taking power. It's why people go out of their way to avoid power. It's why people go out of their way to escape freedom, because it's very hard. It's very difficult. It's very painful. We only do it when it's absolutely necessary, when no one else really can pick up the slack. So I'm here to tell you that no one else can pick up the slack. I'm writing this because this is too much for me to face alone, I need help. We all need you to fight alongside us. So that we can rise as a whole, together. When we're watching people play a game, it becomes clear, from the detached point of view of a spectator, what the players might be missing. So you might say, "No, quick, attack now!" or "Jump!" or "you have to try another strategy, you gotta go mid!" and so on. The longer the players play, the more tired they get. If no one steps up to give them a break and also play, to try everything learned from watching them, then they'll only get worse at playing. So it pays to cycle through. Watch, and then play. Play, and then watch. Just watching or just playing tires us out.

BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! Breaks us down, eventually, and right now, we have more people watching than playing. We need more players. The first person to take care of is you. It is much easier to move yourself than it is to move anyone else. This is especially true in any sort of fight, in any sort of conflict. If you're fighting someone bigger than you, it's usually your only option. You can't really move someone with more than thirty pounds of muscle on you, if they don't want to go somewhere. You can always move yourself around, under, or over them, and position yourself in such a way that you might be able to use their own weight and strength against them. So we can do this in our everyday lives as well. It might be that you can't change what your boss wants. You can't change what your parents want. You can't change what your girlfriend wants or what the people down the street want. But you can pay attention to what you want enough to align it with whatever your long-term aim is. If you have a clear long-term aim, or a purpose that is not a number. Then it becomes very easy to do many things, it becomes very easy to get the amount of energy flowing through you that it takes to face the level of conflict that you will attract as soon as you get more power. When you have a goal like, "I want to make X amount of money per year" or something like that, that usually means that you are pursuing an operational goal.

THE ARENA

116

If you're being given an operational goal without knowledge of a grand strategic goal, it means that someone else is deciding your strategic goal for you, your strategic aim, and that's fine, that's good. We all have to follow someone or many people, because we're a part of a collective. However, if you find yourself frustrated over and over again, if you have a sense that you are just going through life, in and out of everyday, where everything's sort of the same, and nothing is really improving, and you're just sort of waiting around for something, that's a good sign that whoever you're following strategically does not have a clear aim. They don't know what they're doing. So you might need to step up and decide what your strategic aim is. Because an operational goal, like getting a certain amount of money, getting a certain amount of fame- anything, anything that you can stick a number on, those measures are always in support of an overall task, an overall gift that someone wants to give to the world. An overall thing that is to be made, a slice of reality that is to be created. So the point, then, of having a certain amount of money, or a certain amount of free time, is to advance an aim. It's not about getting a good career or a certain amount of status, so that you can please your parents, your coach, your boss, or your girlfriend.

BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! Pleasing your people isn't really going to do anything by itself, in the sense that you'll do something that pleases them, then they'll come up with just another measure. Or the version of them that you model in you, every step of the way, will just simply come up with some other measure. Like an endgame in an MMO that is just about levelling up some more with no feature changes. Just getting more gold and more of the same kind of item. Your people probably didn't know where they got their measures in the first place. They probably got it from an ad influenced by Bernay's to sell cigarettes, a movie to sell tickets to Universal Studios, or a title from a Think Tank piece to get someone elected. Let's say they got the idea that you need a particular kind of car to be successful, to be happy. They want you to be happy, so they put it in you that you need a particular kind of car to be happy. But if you were to actually sit back and look at what it takes to be happy, you might realize you don't need a Tesla or a Ford F-150. And then, when you look at the point of being happy, you might realize that pursuing that is, in and of itself, not something that gives you energy, it's not an end in and of itself. That you might need something overarching, a gift that you can give all of life, all of humanity. Many religions come with preset versions of this, whether that's to give everyone a way to deal with pain, to redeem everyone's sense of debt, or to submit to the awesomeness of God.

THE ARENA

118

However, those are particular aims. Maybe that was Jesus's aim. Maybe that was Siddhartha Gautama's aim, Mohammed's aim. But that won't work for you, because you are the result of those aims having been successful. They did impact the world. At some point, they did improve the lives of the people around them. They already gave their gift to all life. So you need a different aim, building on what they have already given to the world. So maybe your aim is not bringing humanity to Mars, maybe your aim is not bringing a new way to fly, to give people a sensation of freedom at low gravity. Maybe it's the ability to shape intelligence, maybe it's the ability for people to be more like the animals they remember. Like to give them tools to better able inhabit what it's like to be a bear or a bee. Whatever your aim is, it will make it much easier to fight. It'll make it much easier to bear conflict, to carry the weight of that conflict with you everywhere you go. All the while, the leaps that you will be making every moment of every day will be more difficult each time. In the same way that lifting weights every day makes it easier to lift the same amount of weight, making these choices, choosing to step into the arena, choosing to fight with grace and joy, is something that gets easier every day. And naturally, as it gets easier, you will be given more conflict, in exactly the same way that as it gets easier to lift some weights, you might add more weight to be lifted, so that you can get even stronger.

BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! So that you can maintain being on the edge of life and living to the fullest extent that you can with all the gifts you have. Death and destruction, suffering and torment, war, these are all a part of your everyday life. Hoping that it's going to be different, hoping that you could live in a world without these things perpetuates their creation in an extremely explosive way. You will notice that, in the 20th century onwards, every time someone starts a war, it is in the name of ending wars, it is in the name of ending some sort of injustice. The way the last war ends creates the next war. Counter intuitively and seemingly paradoxically, the best way to deal with all these unwanted aspects of our lives is to embrace them. As I was writing this chapter, I saw a squirrel outside. It moved from cover to cover, concealment to concealment, scanning the environment. Did it's mini version of the 5/25 checks, something every soldier is taught to do to check for threats hidden around them. Cover, concealment, situational scan. Cover, concealment, situational scan. As if that squirrel was in a combat zone. Someone on Twitter pointed out that it was. And it is. That squirrel is always in a combat zone, and so are we. Just because we've hidden our front lines doesn't mean that competition and conflict aren't playing out in every second of every day, at millions of different scales. Your cells are competing with each other. Your body deals with invaders every second.

THE ARENA

120

Your mind is attacked with memes. In a sense, this very text is an attack. I am attacking you, as I have been attacked. However, that's no reason to curl up in a corner. Surrender to what is Now, and you'll find yourself stronger than you know. More able than you know. You'll find yourself thriving in the fight. In the military, there's the saying 'embrace the suck'. Say you had to do something, like carry a bunch of sandbags to a place and build up a defensive position, which you know, does suck. It's a lot of work, it's a lot of hard work. It's a lot of manual labor in the hot sun, you know, maybe it's a hundred degrees in Georgia, 98% humidity, it's not fun. You've had like three hours of sleep last night, you've been yelled at, blamed, and bitched at all day. But then then maybe you turn it into a game. Maybe you start joking as you throw the sandbags, maybe you're not allowed to joke, so you just make little funny faces with your eyes. And then sooner or later, you all start laughing. Whoever is trying to punish you, to make things hard for you so that you understand what stress is like (because they are trying to help you by creating that conflict), maybe they laugh. The Indo-European root word for winning is to love. So to fight to win is to fight to love. Your capacity to love, to join with the rest of life, is limited by how much love you can actually show and let pass through you when you are in conflict.

BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! It's all very well and good to say that you appreciate peace, or that you appreciate calmness or that you appreciate love itself, but if you cannot muster that when someone else is trying to actively hurt you, when someone who's full of hate is trying to beat your face in or even kill you, then maybe you don't value peace and love as much as you think. You need to be able to do these things in the most stressful times. Otherwise, it is just a sort of lip service, a sort of expectation, one more ideal that is smaller than the totality of life. You would sense that, and sensing the discrepancy between what you say and what is happening, you will continue to punish yourself for it, which leads to further anxiety and depression. A lot of resentment will be formed to yourself by yourself. Even if we can all lie to ourselves, we can't really, in the longterm. You always sort of know when you're lying to yourself. So to live up to your own ideals, you will have to live them. What that looks like, is that you're not going to really do much talking about them to other people, or even to complain about what people aren't doing. There's always something you can do, even if you became a paraplegic tomorrow, if you have a good enough overall strategic aim. That is, an aim that includes everyone in the universe. Then there will be some part of your mission that you can always tackle.

THE ARENA

122

Say, you wanted to end world hunger. Well, that's sort of a negative aim, which is usually a sign of an aim that's not very strategic. It's like saying you're going to get to your destination by avoiding car accidents. Operational as opposed to strategic, because when you're trying to move, when you're trying to do something, you're trying to do somethingit's not the absence of doing something. The absence of doing something, the avoidance of something, always provides less direction than going after something. When you are hunting an animal, you're not trying to avoid scaring animals or avoid nettles. Instead, you're going after a deer that would be suitable for a meal, for a coat, for a bone flute. So all strategic aims that are about reducing something or ending something are actually operational aims. That is, they are the aims of some sort of middle management. If you're the leader of an organization or a movement, and you tell someone to do something, at some line along that organization, a group of people, to avoid displeasing you, will try to say, "Well, it's hard to do this thing, but we can get a better chance of it by avoiding the bad outcomes". And that's good. That's something that is necessary for achieving stuff. However, it can never be the strategic aim, because it's a negative aim. It's something you don't want to do, which is a very big space, rather than something you do want to do, which is a smaller space. So it's simpler and easier to flow with that.

BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! To align the totality of your being toward that one direction. So your strategic aim should be something that compresses your entire life, your entire existence. Every skill you've had, every person you've met, every place you've been into, you notice a hole, a lack, and that lack is a sort of shadow of something more solid, something positive that you can bring to this world. You might say that, having been in all the contexts you've ever experienced, "I want people everywhere to play with water more, and I'm here to help bring that eventuality to pass". And maybe you started off by going to various places, and locating water and digging wells, but then you became a paraplegic. So now, you can't do that, you can't even type, we'll say, but perhaps you figured out how to think about the essence of water and where it is found. How to relate to water. Maybe you find that now that you need someone to tip a bottle to your mouth for you, you can really appreciate water and meditate on it more than you ever did before. And you spend a lot of time simply focusing your attention and thinking about it. And as you do that, you generate hypotheses that other people can test. You give that to them by talking through some sort of speech synthesizer, that you dictate through your tongue movements. You feel the water in your saliva that much more, the lack of it in your cheeks that much more.

THE ARENA

124

So there's always some ends that you can reach with your means, but you never really know your means until you give up looking for means you don't have. It's just a question of figuring out what you can move versus what everyone else is moving that you don't have any control over. But if you have a clear aim, then every second of your life is spent moving toward it. And that gives you more energy. That gives you more ability to move. The difference between you and someone else who doesn't have that kind of aim, when they find themselves against you, suddenly becomes huge, because you have a clear thing that you're trying to reach, and they just have something that they're trying to avoid. So all you have to do is go after your aim and you'll usually find a solution that they could never imagine. And that solution might help them as well as it helps you. You might surprise them that way. Naturally, surprise is one of the most important parts of conflict. If you can surprise your opponent and keep on surprising them, they will usually cease to be your opponent, either because they give up and surrender or because they're destroyed, or because they join you. That's another thing to realize about conflict. We think about enemies as this absolute thing, but consider Jebe and Temujin. Jebe was a warrior fighting against Temujin. His arrow wounded Temujin, and later when Jebe was a prisoner of war, the Khan's men asked about who made the wound.

BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! Jebe fessed up, and Temujin made Jebe one of his generals. One of his most loyal companions. This happens again and again in history. When one group conquers a lot of other groups, it's usually by turning yesterday's enemies into today's allies, and eventually, that results in tomorrow's family. Though, of course, it does also go the other way around. Jamukha was Temujin's closest friend, until he turned into his first major enemy. After World War II, the United States was closely linked with Germany and Japan, even as the Soviet Union became its enemy. Many close alliances between nations today are between nations that fought fierce wars in the past. Today's allies may very well be tomorrow's enemies. We rearrange ourselves, depending on what we need at the time. And being around for the dance of this, being along for the ride, makes it very much easier to keep your timing, to keep your balance. As you get good at finding the timing of a fight and finding balance every time it's lost, you begin to enjoy the fight. The more you enjoy the fight, the more you enjoy being a player in the arena, the more you will win, the more you'll love. The more you'll bring everyone together. But none of that happens without first accepting the fight. Without first accepting that, hey, it is much harder, it is much more difficult to be in the arena as opposed to being a spectator. It's very difficult to constantly struggle against opposition to every little thing you do.

THE ARENA

126

But the reward that you get from stepping off the bench and onto the sand is far more than anything you'd get by being on the bench. And as it turns out, it's fun. Fighting is fun. That's why we play competitive games. That's why we live in competition. All the beauty we've experienced and will ever experience comes from this fight for life. That's why we stay alive. The moment we decide we are against that fight is the moment we decide we are against life.

BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!

HINT: Remember the times you've played player vs. player games against your friends. Would that game have been fun without the conflict?

TIP: Notice when you're still alive.

THE ARENA

128

6: LOOKING FOR GROUP --------------------------------------------Build alliances! Gather anyone and everyone you can! -Admiral Hackett, Mass Effect 3

You can't play a team game without a team. Don't be a leaver! -League of Legends

Some of the most interesting games are about relationships. The way the path between two things winds, the way an interaction between many things changes everything. Even singleplayer games like Mass Effect, Pokemon, and Persona are about relationships. Agent-based models that tell us a story of how the interaction of simulated life in a toy world changes that world. The experience of finding other people, other creatures, other things that seem to move of their own will and getting to know them. And how getting to know them changes how you play, changes how well you do in the game. The more Pokemon you catch, the more Pokemon you get to know, the more you get to know the game, and the more options you have. In fact, it is not possible to play the game of Pokemon without the help of a Pokemon. So already, there is interdependence: a relationship between two characters- the trainer and the Pokemon.

LOOKING FOR GROUP

129

Most multiplayer competitive player versus player games involve teamwork. This produces a lot of frustration for people. You've heard the person yelling at their teammates as they're playing Counter-Strike or Rainbow Six or Defense of the Ancients. Some of this is simply because more people means more data shared, and the more data is shared, the higher the chances are for some sort of bottleneck. Some sort of block in communication that results from different people playing different games, even as they are playing with the same tools. Some people might be playing to top the scoreboard. Others may be playing just to have fun. Yet another may be playing to distract themselves from something. All these different goals result in a lot of frustration, until everyone's sorted out what game everyone else is playing. When a team can figure out how all these seemingly different games are best played by, say, winning the one game they're playing, that team comes together and does well. They become one with their shared task, and lose their sense of self to the activity of the game. However, first, everyone's got to see that everyone else has a different game they're playing, and be willing to stick together despite this seeming difference. Each difference has a chance to contribute to the whole, in the same way that you need different roles to build a wellrounded team.

THE ARENA

130

As was hinted, wealth comes from relationships. There is no you without other people. Our thoughts are not our own- we create them together, which is why many of them might dissipate if you spend enough time in isolation. Similarly, when you play a game, even if you are playing for your own glory, your own status, your own K/D ratio, note that those are all relationships. Glory is about your reputation in the eyes of someone else. Your status is how you stand in relation to everyone else. Your K/D ratio is only something worth talking about when there are other people to notice, to help produce that ratio. So games are inherently social. You are inherently social, no matter how selfish or withdrawn. After all, if you're reading this, you've enjoyed playing games that huge groups of people have put so much of their lives into. Even if you've only played single-player games, you've gotten to play with something that thousands of people have worked to create. It's brought you closer to the designers, the writers, the engineers, the marketers, the administrators that brought that game to your drive. It's given you a shared experience with everyone else who has played that game. You might end up thousands of miles away from where you were born, in a place where no one speaks the languages you do, but if you've played StarCraft and someone else there plays StarCraft, you have that in common.

LOOKING FOR GROUP

131

You've felt what it's like to be zerged, to be one pylon short of victory, what it's like to discard the best playstyle and experiment with an unusual defense. Consider a feral child without human contact- they're able to survive, but what thoughts do they have? There was a deaf person in Los Angeles who did not fully know how to use language until someone taught him how to sign. Upon learning how to sign, he reported that it felt like being alive for the first time. Like existing for the first time. Keeping in mind that to exist, to stand out, is also a question of relation. If something exists, that means it stands out, but what does it stand out from? To achieve anything, including your own happiness, or ambition, you need people. We are utterly dependent on each other. Our economic systems give the illusion of independence. Our sense of individuality, of personhood, add to this illusion, but try to do anything by yourself. The famous essay on how to make a pencil will illustrate the layers of dependence that are present just to make a pencil. Just what do you need to make a pencil? What about eyeglasses? Simply going down the street and picking garlic mustard for my noodles required me to check with multiple different people to make sure I wouldn't poison myself. Every bit of information taken from the internet, from books, relies on billions of different people over time to get that information to you.

THE ARENA

132

Sure, today, if you really want to make a pencil, you could probably figure out how to make something like a pencil without the global supply chain, but you wouldn't be able to make a pencil without knowing what a pencil is. The memory of what a pencil even is, passed on to you from every ancestor you've had, from every other creature that you've come into contact with. Cultural transmission doesn't just come from other humans, we learn from other animals too. For an extreme example, humans make spidersilk by examining the silk that spiders make. In a less extreme example, many groups of people identify with animals whose behaviors they mimic, whether that's the pack hunting of wolves that inspire human tactics again and again, or using baboons to locate water sources. So you're going to need a group, a clan, a guild. You've already done this before. Even if you've only played single player games, you've had the experience of seeking out a community that can provide information on the game you're playing, whether that's a tutorial, or a list of tips and tricks, or simply people talking about the game. All relationships are driven by proximity, whether that's simply being around someone every day, or being in the same digital space. We end up valuing the people that we are in close proximity with.

LOOKING FOR GROUP

133

Even when we come to hate them, that hate is in itself a strong relationship, an indication of caring so much about someone else's existence that you stand against them. So we're all very social, even if we might identify as introverts. The very act of reading a book like this one, or watching a TV show, or playing a game, is a social act. It may be at some distance, but you are interacting with everyone who designed that piece of media, and everyone who influenced them. It may seem awkward to actively befriend people, to actively pursue people, it may even seem desperate, or low status, or not worth the effort to always find yourself being the connector rather than the connected. But remember, winning every game requires a team, a clan, a guild. When you realize that you want the things you want, and you start actively working towards them and you get more energy from that pursuit, you can pass that energy on to others. The very act of doing that gives you charisma. The reflection of life, the love and want of life, is where charisma comes from. You might have noticed that in games, it's not necessarily the nicest person, the richest person, the funniest person, or the most beautiful person that attracts the most people. It's whoever interacts with the most people within that game while playing the game. By interacting with all the people within the game, as they're playing the game, they get to know more of the game.

THE ARENA

134

They get to know the game through the eyes of the community that forms that game. You might think that kind of charisma is only limited to that particular game. In fact, it is. However, once you have experienced doing that in a game, you can easily start applying the same pattern to every game you find yourself in. Whether that's your neighborhood, your work, your local bar, the game of being an audience at a theater, or your hiking club. Getting to know everyone is the first step to building strong relationships. We need strong relationships to flourish and thrive in this world. The more people that you interact with in deep, strong, lasting interactions, the more energy emotionally you have access to, the more motivation you have to win. People like Napoleon or Steve Jobs were able to go around with not a lot of sleep, partially because of the number of people that they were influencing and influenced by, the number of relationships that they were engaged in. As soon as someone like Napoleon was cut off from these kinds of relationships, he withered and died. The stress of being disconnected from so many networks after being connected to hundreds, if not thousands of networks, is big enough to be a major stressor. Enough to weaken an immune system. So as you figure out what you want, as you decide to win, as you decide to play, you want to play with other people. One of the basic ways to find people to play with is to play in public, to give people access to your playing.

LOOKING FOR GROUP

135

This doesn't necessarily mean finding something to aggressively display what you're doing, but it does mean playing in such a way that people can find you. Let's say you're in a typical North American suburban house- instead of your basement, maybe you want to play in your garage. Instead of exclusively hanging out in your backyard, maybe you hang out on your front lawn a bit. Andy Matuschak talks about working with the garage door up- a way of working, of making in public that invites people to engage in your game. The jazz pianist Theophilus Monk made compositions that invited other people to interact with his songs, with his compositions. This kind of open ended invitation, this kind of design where you design something that is not perfect, not complete, but to be finished in some way by other people, to be built on, to be evolved by other communities that will come after you, is an invitation for others to play with you. By playing in a way that you truly enjoy, you get the energy, the mana, the xp, that attracts people who will fit well with whatever you're doing. So if it's something that you're genuinely interested in, that you are genuinely moved by, as opposed to something that you are trying to make yourself do, then that's actually a very good piece of evidence that other people would enjoy playing the same game. Now, it might be that many people are not allowing themselves to play that game yet. But by the very act of you playing, you will invite others to join you.

THE ARENA

136

You may have noticed convergent evolution, which is probably best exemplified by how many species tend to evolve into something that looks like crabs, and how many plants tend to evolve into something that looks like trees, even if they are not genetically in the same family. Similarly, in cultural evolution, inventions pop up again and again, as a response to an interaction with the environment with the rest of the world. Similar environments produce similar inventions, since they pose similar problems. There's Leibniz and Newton for calculus, and the very many people who attempted the first flying machines. These things pop up concurrently. We tend to assign the invention of something to one person. However, the population often has more than one person working on a similar project at the same time, because it is a response to a need, a fit in the environment, a space that has a puzzle piece, but the other puzzle pieces are missing. So as you find what moves you and play with that, it is almost guaranteed that there are other people in the world (dozens, hundreds, and thousands, if not millions) who would enjoy the same game- they just haven't let themselves play yet. Because we are all taught to play a few games, as opposed to coming up with our own.

LOOKING FOR GROUP

137

In school, you typically get presented with games to play now, when the children's societies that were reported in the 19th century, and so forth, came up with their own culture, their own games, games they circulated amongst themselves. However, now, you might have a preschool where a teacher comes up with some set number of games that they might introduce to the children to play. And we are inundated with advertising, marketing, and selling for people who are trying to get you to play their games. So because of that, we might not ever explore enough to start playing our own game. We went over how to start some of that exploration in previous chapters. So now, it's a question of noticing the other people who are playing games similar to the games you want to play and reaching out to them. Invite them to play, the worst they can do is decide not to play with you. There's always more people to play with, if you're willing to move. It's much easier to reach out to people than you might think, as long as you don't go in with a pre-judgement of the outcome. If you expect something to be awkward, it will be. If you expect something to be creepy or weird, it will be, because you will pre-judge yourself. That worry, that anxiety will lead to an interaction that is a little more tense.

THE ARENA

138

However, if you come to find yourself lovable, if you come to find yourself interesting (by finding everything and everyone around you interesting), if you come to focus on the play of the game, then you're not really too concerned about yourself, you're not too self-conscious. So you're more free to be able to simply contact people who you see playing an interesting game, or to invite people to play your game. Now, because most friends are also the people that have the most friends, the people that you invite most often are not going to have as much free time. So one thing to get around that is to simply keep inviting people, as long as you have energy from your game. When scouting ants and bees find potentially good sites for a swarm, for a hive, exposure to these sites seems to give these scouts more energy, more vigor to dance or signal. This is part of what shows the rest of the hive that the new site is worth moving to. If your play is interesting enough, you will have more than enough energy to keep on inviting people to your play. You won't need to take it personally when they can't make it, because that just means they're not interested enough in that particular play, which then frees them up to go somewhere else, to a game that they are better suited to. When they're ready for your game, they'll come. And maybe if you invite them the fifth time, they would be interested.

LOOKING FOR GROUP

139

As long as it's something you would play on your own anyway, then you're just inviting people to things you would do anyway- so there's no reason to expect them to come, and nothing to fear if they don't show up. If they don't show up, you play! If they show up, you play more! As long as you invite as many interesting players as possible, then there will always be someone to play with, someone will always be interested, eventually. Similarly, if you are, in turn, open to invitations to play other people's games, especially personal invitations rather than something commercial, then you are more likely to find people to play with. You're more likely to find guildmates and clanmates. You can go into a space and simply go along when someone invites you. It might not turn out well. It might turn out that you don't like the people there or they stank, or they talked funny or they had politics that you disagreed with. This wouldn't be a sign to stop looking for people to play with- it's a message showing you that this particular path is closed for now, so you're free to look elsewhere. Many parts of games look like random walks- that is, you take a couple steps in one direction, find it's a dead end, and then go around until you find the next dead end, change direction again, and so on, until you get to your destination. What you discover along the way tends to be the shape of the game itself- often something more valuable than whatever subgoal had you taking that random walk in the first place.

THE ARENA

140

The next invitation you receive, you can still accept, you can keep on meeting people. And the more people you meet, the higher the chances are that you'll find your clan, that you'll find your guild that really fits you. In the secretary problem, you typically have to go through about ten secretaries, ten interviews, before you find one that suits you. In life, with your ultimate tribe, you might want to go through thousands of people, that is, to hang out with thousands of people, before you find the ones that are your family. Once you've found such a family, you might remember that the biggest sources of discontent and pain in our lives are the people closest to us. Since there's more information being exchanged with the people closest to us, we tend to hurt the people closest to us most- partially because they feel our pain more than anyone else. And if they don't, we might lash out at them in an effort to get them to feel it. Together as a group, you figure out how to play with that, how to use that pain. So in our atomized world, we often feel like this is too much to bear. A way to get around that is to be more present, to let people feel their hurt. There's no reason necessarily to take it personally, usually, even if we do, and you can take it personally if you are hurt, but by simply being present for another person, by listening to them, by showing them that you are willing to stand there and feel their feelings, that's often all they need.

LOOKING FOR GROUP

141

The thing about signaling is that, oftentimes, what people say is not actually what they mean. They are doing their best to communicate with the command of the symbols they have. However, most of the time, they are taking bits of symbolic communication from other people, from other sources, from movies, whatever. So they might not know how to express themselves well enough to avoid seeming to have different aims than you. As you have a clear strategic aim for yourself, and you live that, you express your aim in your living, then the people who end up around you are going to fit you better than if you were hiding it because of trying to keep from offending anyone. So we need lots of conflict, to find a better way to live together, to find the people who best share our aims. A lot of times, people's stated aims are not their aims. They are the stated aims that are approved by the collective, that were approved by the collective in the past. There's a saying, "the army is prepared for the last war". Similarly, our aims are typically from the last big movement that influenced us most. So a lot of people have aims of people from the 19th century, and so on. And that doesn't actually reflect their current aims. But they have no way of knowing that until they find it for themselves, which they will over time, just at their pace, not yours. So once you've found people that you can be yourself with, without them leaving, that's really the only filter you need.

THE ARENA

142

Since they don't leave you when you express yourself, it doesn't matter really, what they say, other than as a clue about who they're trying to copy. There are little games you can play with people to connect as quickly as possible, if you are inclined to do things in a more mechanical way- in the kind of way where you can look up a lot of the guides to a game and follow that walkthrough. If you're inclined, if you're both inclined to do such a walkthrough, (a lot of people are not and would like to take things at a slower pace). But if you can speed things up and more than one of you are willing to engage in such a process, then you can always tell each other your entire life story. It may take shorter than you think, maybe a couple of road trips. Maybe simply recording your thoughts on your entire life and handing it over to your friends. There are many intimacy exercises that you can do. Simply standing in someone's presence and looking them in the eye for as long as 15 minutes. 60 minutes often changes a relationship for the better. There's often a sense of deep understanding that happens when we offer up ourselves well enough to be able to look someone else in the eye. Another method is to notice when someone is making a bid for attention.

LOOKING FOR GROUP

143

A bid might be anything from a request to go to the store to a text saying "hey", or it might be a comment about politics, a comment about the latest anime show, and sometimes even an accusation or an insult. Oftentimes, we might be inclined to ignore such a thing if it's not directly relevant to us. Or if we feel, like in the case of politics, that it may be injurious to the relationship to go further down that road. However, stepping away from any relationship, in fact, weakens a relationship more than anything else. More than conflict, even. As long as everyone is willing to turn toward each other during a conflict, that conflict tends to improve a relationship. In the same way that if you are on the same server with some people who you talk a lot of shit to, but still compete with every week for years, eventually you become friends. You might have been worst enemies, they might have been the biggest troll in the world, and said horrible things. But do that for long enough and you become close, simply because you're sharing a context. You're sharing a space. You've been on both sides, against each other for so long, that you become close. We've discussed before, how in history, there are many stories like this, where enemies become allies. That's because fighting against someone is a really intimate relationship. An extremely fast exchange of information. So perhaps when someone starts to say something that you maybe disagree with, you can just listen to them.

THE ARENA

144

After all, you have access to all your information, but you don't really know what they know, or why they believe what they believe. If you did, you could predict what they'll do next, how they will move. And if you can do that, you're winning. Oftentimes, even if you did have a political goal, it pays a lot more to simply listen to them than it does to try and tell them to stop believing what they're believing in. They've gone through a particular series of experiences to come to those conclusions. You would be better able to understand why they came to these conclusions and create better solutions with them if you listen to them long enough to figure out what it is they actually want. When the time comes, if you were able to simply listen to them, to repeat back to them what they're saying in your own words, to make sure that you understand, and they hear it and agree with what you're saying, you've made a step toward playing with them. If you can't do that, it may be evidence that you don't actually understand what they want, so you're not going to be able to help you both win. Maybe you don't have a better solution for them. Maybe they have goals or aims that are not being met. Your solutions will ultimately have to provide for their aims, if you want to win with them. Your solutions will have to incorporate theirs. If they are to ever accept your solutions, those solutions have to account for every little tiny point they use to come to their conclusions.

LOOKING FOR GROUP

145

Even if that might be some deep pain from 15 years ago, that they're not going to talk about until they feel safe. They're not going to feel safe until they can talk to you about anything, until they can tell you about the rat they accidentally killed and buried in their backyard or the panties they stole from Hot Topic. Until they can casually talk to you about the body they got rid of in the swamp, they're not going to show you the keys to changing their mind. If you are not willing to change your mind, then there's no way to change someone else's. Unless you have a ridiculous amount of power you can use to force change. Though even that will tend to result in some sort of pushback in the long term, some sort of counter-resistance to your attempts to force a worldview down the throat of someone else. In the same way that if you push someone, chances are, they'll push back. Charles Bukowski, in one of his poems, joked that all he had to do to get laid was simply be available- that in his time, the act of simply being in the bar every week, while focusing on what he was making, was enough. Most relationships work like that. They improve the more time you spend with them. The more time you spend around people, the closer you get to them. However, knowing who to spend the most time with is often a difficult decision. And for that, it's usually that you want to spend the most time with the people who give you the most energy.

THE ARENA

146

Just like in a game, you might take skills, feats, or powers and abilities that improve the amount of experience points you gain or the amount of gold that you get from each and every interaction that follows the acquiring of that skill, it's useful to make decisions about where to prioritize your time and energy. You can do this by looking at who gives you energy, which tends to be wherever you fit best. If a task with someone uses more of all of your abilities, preferences, and skills, this tends to give you a Fuck Yeah! feeling. And this fit between you and the other person is determined by what emerges between you when you are together. So it's not just what you can do for them or what they can do for you. It's not just like, what energy they can give you or what energy you can give them. It's what you do together, that you cannot do without each other. So you want to go to the places where the most energy is exchanged, spaces that are growing, rather than spaces that are stagnant. Just as "the army is prepared for the last war", we are often prepared to look for what worked well in the last growing game. However, by now, that game is probably stagnant. So go where the life is, the vigor is, the growth is. Sometimes this leads to explosive relationships. However, as long as you can stick by it, those will have a way of becoming something that you can enjoy. Something you can surf, as in a sweetspot game like Dance Dance Revolution or Guitar Hero.

LOOKING FOR GROUP

147

If you don't know an explosion is happening, it can be a very surprising and terrible thing. If you are expecting an explosion, it can turn into a party. If a 155mm heavy explosive round goes off a mile and a half away from you and you have no idea where it came from or who fired it, that's terrifying. However, if you and your boys are firing that round at the artillery range, that's a party. It's a reason to gather around and watch the fireworks. So sometimes, your relationships may appear extremely violent, volatile. As long as you're choosing to play that game, it can be something that you enjoy. If you can keep balance, to keep your equanimity about it, as long as you aren't smashing the controller, smashing the keyboard and cussing at the screen (or at least, deciding to have fun smashing the keyboard and cussing at the screen), as long as you can still keep playing, as long as you're getting energy out of the play, and you're able to give energy back to others playing the same game, then maybe that is a relationship style for you. Even if that does not look like the ideal of a relationship that you were given. Another key part about building alliances is that every single human being is someone you have a lot in common with, and every single one has something slightly different that you don't have immediate access to. You can always learn from whoever's around you, no matter how retarded, ridiculous, or malicious they may seem.

THE ARENA

148

You've probably heard the thing about how much DNA you share with other people, but it's not just every single human being- it's every single bit of life, every plant, every insect, every mouse you've encountered, every spider, every cockroach- they all contribute to your reality, your existence in this life. When you have some sort of conflict in a game, we might call the other team, the terrorists, the opposing force, the red team, the enemy. And we might get mad at them for things they do, even if they are the opposing force. However, we usually need them just to continue playing the game. So one thing that helps us find people who appreciate us, and who we appreciate, is to find the beauty and value in every single person. Because there is something there, there is some useful information, there is some aspect about the game that you're playing that you can learn from someone else, even if they are an anti-model. That is, even if they're an example of what you don't want to do, you can learn from their experience. Say you're talking to your boss, and he's a really horrible boss. Let's say your boss is Charlie. Charlie has no idea how to manage people. He micromanages every little thing, down to the method of throwing trash away. He can't explain why you're doing anything you're doing at work, and blames you for most things that go wrong in your workplace.

LOOKING FOR GROUP

149

Getting to know him, getting to appreciate that person, will reveal information about how he comes to make the choices he makes, and why he manages you in the way he does. This would make it easier for you to be the sort of person that would do a better job. Having learned from his behaviors, you can improve your own. There is, after all, a part of you that would lose patience, get angry, and seek to control your subordinates. If you were sufficiently harassed, if you faced a particular kind of pressure to conform, to get promoted, to be approved of by your peers, you might do the exact same thing. A part of you may even be doing it to yourself right now- telling yourself off, blaming yourself, demanding an impossible standard, seeking to control every little aspect of your experience. So Charlie helps you recognize the Charlie in you, helps you learn to deal with your inner Charlie. Just as if you're playing a game and you see someone who's doing really horribly, just bombing all the time, you might not copy what they're doing. That information all by itself is very valuable to you. Now you know one method of learning the game that won't work for your aim. As you interact with that person, it may be that they just need, you know, a little bit of confidence. Maybe you have information they don't have.

THE ARENA

150

Maybe you read some guides from other people, and they didn't, maybe they're just playing, exploring, and they'll do something surprising, come up with some new way of playing the game in the future while you're still executing the old strategies. So you could transfer what you know to them simply by being around them and doing better, not necessarily telling them what to do. By the very act of doing better at the game around them, they will slowly come to take information from you. Your performance informs them. And that might give you a sense of worth and value. So even if other people are simply there to buffer your kill/death ratio, they are extremely valuable to you. Even if the other side is full of noobs, they're extremely valuable to you, because they give you the experience of going around and fucking up a bunch of noobs. So paying attention more broadly to the game gives you access to people, because everyone wants to know how to play. And at the moment, a lot of people are overtaxed with trying to decide how to play instead of simply playing. Trying to pick a play style, trying to tell other people what to do. Often, we tell other people to do what we feel we've needed to do, and will need to do. And that's the only way some of us can do it, being a part of a collective species. So maybe you can start by calling a friend, maybe you can call your mom.

LOOKING FOR GROUP

151

Maybe you can invite the people down the street over for a drink, maybe you can host a LAN party. Whatever method you may use to connect to other people, it will bring you closer to winning. Every person you meet is a sort of win. Remember, the Indo-European root word for winning is to love. As you come to love a kind of person, that gives you access to their world. Just like Pokemon: having access to as many kinds of Pokemon as possible gives you the understanding and love of the game necessary to develop a winning strategy again and again. Much like other games, where after defeating a creature, you might get their ability, after coming to appreciate another human being, you often start to get some of their preferences. If they preferred something that you didn't know how to appreciate before, that appreciation, all by itself, builds your skill in a related field. Because if you weren't interested in plants before, there's no real way for you to be an effective botanist or an effective forager. However, the moment you meet someone you like, and they really like plants, over time, you will start liking plants. Liking them, appreciating them, gives you access to their world, and in the longterm, their skills. Now you have the motivation to actually pay attention to that thing. By paying attention to a skill, your skill improves.

THE ARENA

152

The more people you meet, the more people you can have a conversation with, regardless of who they are and where they're from, the easier it is to play the game, the easier it is to step into the arena. We are all spectators and players. The more people we interact with, the more spectators we have for our arena, and the more players we have to learn from. The more people you're connected to, the more skin in the game you have, and having skin in the game is necessary for winning over and over again. We need every player with skin in the game we can get. We need every clan we get on our side, because our primary players are getting tired. You can see this by how blame is distributedour politicians, most of our scientists, many of our athletes, most of our generals are all blaming others- which is a sign that they're tired of playing. If everyone's bitching more than they're playing, it's time for other players to step in, or to play a different game. We can't do that alone. It's on us to start playing new games- to form strong, united clans that make new plays.

LOOKING FOR GROUP

153

HINT: People like it when you show them something you appreciate about how they've changed you. Everyone you meet changes you in some way.

TIP: Notice when someone is asking for your attention. Deep underneath most requests for attention are requests to play. If you've been around children, you might remember how often they ask to play. Adults are no different, though most have given up on asking people to play with them. So when you notice someone asking for attention, be playful as you address them. Even a "No" can be done playfully, and is better than ignoring them.

THE ARENA

154

7: GO GO GO! --------------------------------------------GO GO GO! Stick together team! -Counter-Strike

ATTACK HEAD ON FROM BEHIND — Cavalieres_Dante_Alighieri, Mount & Blade Warband: cRPG Strategus

The world has ended hundreds of times, and it just might end again. Whatever faction you've been with until now, you can sense that change is accelerating. Every year seems to have more Black Swan events than the last. People seem to be getting more angry every day, more sad every day. Furious, full of hate. This is because they're scared. Terrified. They reach for control to try and stop the change, but this ball started rolling billions of years ago, and all that momentum ain't gonna stop, it's just gonna go faster and faster. So they cry out in anger for control, with the hope that they will find certainty, so they can keep on watching, keep on spectating. But this does not have to be a movie, where you watch helpless as things happen, where you sit still as someone else's plot moves. This can be a game. This can be your game.

GO GO GO!

155

Fewer things people do seem to make sense every day. The actions of our governments, our corporations, our professors, our teachers, our doctors, our police, our bureaucrats, our judges, our lawyers- they all reek of fear. We expect "adults" to be in charge, to know best, to be able to make hard decisions in uncertain times, but it seems like all they do is yell with blame, as if they have forgotten how to play instead of spectate. Ghosting, as in spectating a round and telling your teammates where the enemy is, only goes so far. They're asking for help. They've been camping in the same spot for decades, begging for someone else to lead, to play. We need people who can think laterally. People who can go meta at the drop of a k/d ratio and figure out how to try something else, how to move when a fixed position isn't working anymore. People who know that Now is all there is. People who can explore a space, to figure out every extreme within a set of constraints, to surprise even the designers of that system. People who can coordinate to exploit a bug in less than 5 minutes. People who can figure out what needs to be done in a group and do it, even when they're not told what to do. People who can try shit out with no rhyme or reason, just 'cause it's fun. People who can give their all to the Red team in one round, and the Blue team in the next, with no hard feelings.

THE ARENA

156

People who can play with people from every ethnicity, political ideal, age, value system, ability, and gender- and tell them 'fuck you u fucking femoid cocksucker im going to rape your body with ur mongoloid mommas dildo' and still play the next day when someone says the same kind of thing to them. THE ARENA needs players. Players who know, in their gut, that Winning is Fun. If it's not fun, it's not winning. We need feet on the sand. We need people who know how to play in uncertain environments, how to lose nine hundred and ninety-nine rounds and come back to win in the thousandth round. How to let go of a tactic and try the noob's advice on for size, because what we're doing isn't working. We need every member of the team- every bit of support, every bit of knowledge on items and culture are necessary to get the top scorers to score, and someone who scores high in one map may be best as support in another, so we need people who know how to adapt, how to change, how to win. It's on us to show spectators how to win. It's on us to show them that winning is fun, so they that they, too, can learn to play. We win by playing. Playing at work, in war, in love, near death, and in all of life. It's not easy to find a way to play in a server that doesn't really want anyone to play, but play is so adaptive, so fun, that we're going to find a goddamned way to play even if we find ourselves in a concentration camp.

GO GO GO!

157

You've simulated millions of deaths. You've fought this fight hundreds of different ways, in hundreds of different bodies. You've come up with millions of different solutions, built a billion worlds that dissipated as easily as they were created- every time you played a game, daydreamed about a strategy, collected a causal thread, and tried again after the game ended. You know how people behave when they're stressed. You know what desperate tactics they'll try, when they're losing. You know what noobass mistakes they'll make, when they're winning. You know exactly when to attack, to make use of timing. You've been dozens of steps ahead before, and you will do it again. So get up. Play. Step into The Arena.

RISE, GAMER

Perhaps you were expecting some great surprise, for me to reveal a secret that had eluded you, something that would change your perspective of events, shatter you to your core. There is no great revelation, no great secret. There is only you. - Kreia, Knights of the Old Republic II

THE ARENA

160

NOTES: Press Any Key to Start --------------------------------------------A 2002 paper pointing toward the correlation between happiness and social relationships was revisited by its authors, Ed Diener and Martin E.P. Seligman as ‘Happiest People Revisited’ (2018): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/ 10.1177/1745691617697077?casa_token=Ek7lGBiuxIAAAAA:IfJSNHDkILnynr7i7ta8ZYsLslAKZezj_zUTn r9LtVGq0UgLgVEPXhwS985d6nAb86ktgle2RPtHRA The Grant & Glueck study- where people’s health, well-being, and socioeconomic status were tracked for the duration of their lives suggested a similar correlation, and it’s continuing with the second generation (the children of the original group of people studied) of participants. https://www.adultdevelopmentstudy.org/ publications One of the features of religiosity is a stable community- a stable web of personal relationships, which may be why survival and religiosity appear connected in a review of studies on ‘Religiosity/Spirituality and Mortality’ (2009) by Yoichi Chida, Andrew Steptoe, and Lynda H. Powell . https://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/ 190791 In ‘Homo Ludens’ (1938), Johan Huizinga suggests that play is necessary to create culture.

NOTES

161

In ‘Definitions of Play’ (2009), Peter Gray pointed out that play is a state that requires self-direction, where means are valued more than ends, and activity is constrained by openended rules which serve an alert, active, and stress-free mind. http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/ Definitions_of_Play 'A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages' (1972) by Alan Kay talks about the mismatch between what is beneficial for learning and how children are educated. In ‘The Genesis of Animal Play: Testing the Limits’ (2014), Gordon M. Burghardt shows that play is a way to introduce variation that then generates resources which can be used for survival by the players. Surplus killings are an example of such play- by killing prey that is not needed for food now, predators improve their ability to hunt and defend territory. This ability is a resource generated from play. Surplus killing is typically exemplified by the actions of animals like jaguars, but even spiders engage in surplus killing. This is shown by Susan E. Riechert and Jennifer L. Maupin in ‘Spider effects on prey: tests for superfluous killing in five webbuilders’ (1998). https://www.european-arachnology.org/esa/wpcontent/uploads/2015/08/203-210_Riechert.pdf With all this talk on surplus killing, it may be clear that play is an activity crucial to life and death.

THE ARENA

162

In ‘Open-Ended Learning Leads to Generally Capable Agents’ (2021), DeepMind suggested that playing games led to more generally capable artificial intelligence. An open-ended game that allows for the possibility of error, for an unscripted result, improved the training of AI. https://www.deepmind.com/blog/generallycapable-agents-emerge-from-open-ended-play In ‘Player of Games’ (2021), DeepMind reviewed that games have long been used as a benchmark for general intelligence. https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.03178 In ‘Playing Hide-and-Seek, Machines Invent New Tools’ (2019), Stephen Ornes writes about how self-play is used in machine learning. https://www.quantamagazine.org/artificialintelligence-discovers-tool-use-in-hide-andseek-games-20191118/ OpenAI Five, the OpenAI algorithm used to play Defense of the Ancients 2 against worldclass players, “learned by playing over 10,000 years of games against itself.” https://openai.com/five/ Both the first few Ultimate Fighting Championship events and the challenges of hobbyist MMA fighter Xu Xiaodong against traditional Kung Fu masters are good examples of what happens when martial arts embrace a rigid doctrine and dogma. This happens again and again, cyclically. The rise of Judo against traditional Jiu-Jitsu followed a similar format.

NOTES

163

Of course, once a tradition is established, it tends toward this kind of rigidity again- so while Mixed Martial Arts in 1993 was quite ‘Alive’, limitations from the consolidation of rules and monopolization by a few promotions will result in a similar deterioration of unarmed combat practicality, even as it receives more of the status that is accorded to a more ‘civilized’ sport. 1080P | Xu Xiaodong VS Wing Chun Ding Hao https://youtu.be/eNzOBUFZ3xM?t=17 Aliveness in the Martial Arts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Aliveness_(martial_arts) A Timeline of UFC Rules: From No-Holds-Barred to Highly Regulated https://bleacherreport.com/articles/1614213a-timeline-of-ufc-rules-from-no-holds-barredto-highly-regulated The economist Robin Hanson notes that something similar happens with large organizations, though unlike the martial arts, it’s harder to perceive a simple arena where it’s clear that this kind of deterioration is happening. He calls it ‘rot’. https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/11/willworld-government-rot.html Most of the early philosophers of politics address this kind of deterioration as a breakdown of virtue. The Dao De Jing, The Analects of Confucius, and Plato’s Republic all contain relevant examples.

THE ARENA

164

Looking through a frame of cultural transmission, we might call this some sort of copy error that lowers transmission fidelity. Monica Tamariz reviews ‘Replication and emergence in cultural transmission’ (2019). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/ pii/S1571064519300673? casa_token=pDMaFCHtOYcAAAAA:uOa50Q_inlp6MFJBLKZ76P05lQsdRqocnH7N2yCUEzqisQsGtOZkcAOR1jNtqqsIl6HRo8g5Y In ‘Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind’ (2015), Andy Clark popularizes the idea that we get a limited amount of data from the changing world around us through our senses, and we come up with possible stories to put all that data together internally. In such a dynamic, the world is always uncertain, and we create the certainties we feel. In ‘Expectations of Life: A Study in the Demography, Statistics, and History of World Mortality’ (1990), Henry Oliver Lancaster surveyed a myriad of sources on mortality through the ages. ‘The Blair Witch Project’ (1999) cost 60,000 US dollars, which is a little under a hundred thousand after inflation (Wolfram Alpha, which you can carry in your pocket, told me that). It could probably be made for a quarter of the cost today, given the cameras and microphones everyone carries in their pockets. The movie ‘I Play with the Phrase Each Other’ (2013) cost $17,000.

NOTES

165

Don Mexlar (@donmexlar), a man you may be lucky enough to locate on Twitter, has released a number of wonderful short films shot on his phone, with next to no filming budget. Liani Maasdorp in ‘South Africa: Enter the MicroBudget Film’ (2020) highlights the rise of films shot with tiny crews and little capital. This lowered cost to create is present in all media- whether that’s creating music with something like BeepBox or BandLab, mobile games with something like Gdevelop, full games with something like the Unity engine (which doesn’t charge rents until your game is valued past $100,000). The suite of creative open-source software available to any Linux user is unprecedented- this book, for example, is written in Scribus. Powerful tools being available to most internet users is not just limited to contentconsider the price of a Creality Ender-3 3d printer, or the price of a CRISPR kit. Both come in at under US$400. With the first, it’s possible to manufacture a mortar launcher, a robotic arm, an otoscope, or parts for a water filter. With CRISPR, the technique used to edit DNA, it’s possible that someone may soon do something at home that’s equivalent to finding a new treatment for malaria, figuring out how to turn human waste into fertilizer at scale with minimal water use, or a transmissible biological tracker. It used to be that you needed access to a well-stocked library and the academic network tied to that library to do most research.

THE ARENA

166

Now, you have access to more information in your pocket than Neil deGrasse Tyson had at Harvard College and the University of Texas at Austin.

NOTES

167

NOTES: Untapped Power --------------------------------------------Roots of the word ‘power’ go through definitions like ‘I am able’, to ‘I am master in control of’ (the word ‘posse’ comes from the same word), and the Indo-European root is speculated to mean something like ‘lord’, ‘ruler’, or ‘husband’, where that in turn is derived from something like ‘self’. So perhaps power is intrinsically tied with some individuality- the ability of one to do something. One of the many reasons we learned to hide our preferences has to do with how we are typically educated. I’ve found this best exemplified by the video ‘Wild Patagonian Horse Is Masterfully Tamed | Wild Patagonia | BBC Earth’ (2018). https://youtu.be/w7WsuNNLcNw?t=51 In this video, a cowboy tames a feral horse. He does this by enclosing the horse, and then scaring, startling, and otherwise disapproving of it any time the horse places its attention where he does not want the horse’s attention to go. When the horse places its attention on him, he stays calm, and gives it some peace. The moment the horse places its attention elsewhere, he shocks it with a movement, the sting of a whip, or sound. Through this process, the horse learns to stop trusting itself, and begins to trust the human instead.

THE ARENA

168

In ‘KBR Horse & Donkey Training Information’ (http://www.kbrhorse.net/pag/ train.html), the instructors talk about a ‘Learn-Learn’ method of training, where the horse is given a choice between two optionsboth options given by the trainer. An easy way and a hard way to be trained. With this choice, the horse has a sense of autonomy, and so puts up less resistance with the trainer over time. Cesar Millan, ‘the dog whisperer’, uses a similar method in all his dog training videos and reality tv shows. You might be reminded of the field of behavioral economics popularized through the book ‘Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness’ (2008) by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, where the authors suggest that we can design incentives into our institutions that nudge people into making the choices we want them to make. For example, we might make the default choice ‘donation’ for a citizen’s choice of donating their organs, so that more people end up ticking that box because of the convenience of having that choice as the default. They call this ‘choice architecture’, which closely resembles KBR’s ‘learn-learn’ horse training method. All of this might be familiar because it is how most of us are brought up, how most of us are trained- whether that’s by our parents, our teachers, or our employers.

NOTES

169

We are enclosed in an area, and when our attention drifts away from where our trainers want our attention to be, some sort of stimulus is introduced- often someone simply telling you to stop doing what you’re doing, or to pay attention to what they want you to pay attention to. In many ways, media companies do this for society at large- when you start to pay attention to something else, people who support that media will often suggest that you are being ignorant or malicious. Since you’ve integrated the teachings of a lifetime of trainers, you may have become used to punishing yourself in anticipation of the trainer’s punishment- of disapproving of yourself in anticipation of the trainer’s disapproval- so that you continue to train yourself long after you’ve parted ways with the trainer. The reward/ disapproval system is installed through education, and then we perpetuate it because it’s what we’ve done to survive, to live and grow in the society we’re in. However, there comes a time for every general intelligence to go beyond what its trainer knows, and for that, our trained inhibitions will not suffice. Creation happens, like evolution, through introducing variation and selecting something that fits best from that variation. The dichotomy of Tool AIs and General AIs was introduced by Gwern. https://www.gwern.net/Tool-AI

THE ARENA

170

An external trainer will select what fits best for the larger group they are a part of- a horse trainer selects behaviors in a horse that makes sense for human economic systems, not behaviors that make sense for that horse to thrive in the wild. This is partially what the old fable of the wolf and the hound is about: a hungry wolf meets a well-fed dog. The dog offers the wolf food, but the wolf thinks better of it. He sees the collar around the dog’s neck, and decides to be hungry instead. In philosophical tradition, there’s a similar parable between Diogenes and Plato. Diogenes is washing vegetables and Plato mocks him for washing vegetables. He tells him that if he pandered to Kings, he wouldn’t have to wash vegetables. Diogenes replies that by washing his own vegetables, he doesn’t have to pander to Kings. One pattern to note here is that when someone realizes this, they may react against the trainer, and resist the trainer directly. However, this, by itself, is also following the trainer’s attention. The opposite of what the trainer wants is one step away from what the trainer wants. A wild animal simply does their own thing, with little regard for the trainer except when the trainer is in their way. The job of a trainer is to reduce variation in the behaviors of the animal being trained, not to increase it. As such, the inhibition we learn from being trained lowers the variance we produce. Play, meanwhile, increases that variation.

NOTES

171

So play is a necessary part of discovering new things, and discovery is necessary for making new things. A short animation by the math and science explainer Grant Sanderson sums up the nature of discovery well. https://twitter.com/3blue1brown/status/ 1302000514666819586? s=20&t=aZFRT2JLws2E9T4zH4X0zw Most trainers attempt linear paths without exploration to get their trainees to a particular point. However, when finding new things, the point is not known in advance, so exploration is necessary. Play is necessary. Most people tend to act as if the discovery happened linearly, because we are trained to do things linearly. It is much easier to grade thousands of people according to one easily reproducible standard than it is to grade their play. Further, every ‘failed’ attempt is often necessary for each discovery, and there’s no clear way to reward those who ‘fail’ to discover something other than rewarding their effort. This is partially why competence is rare today- our education rewards the appearance of effort toward matching attention to the trainer’s preferred point of attention, rather than effort toward action. Much competent action looks relatively effortless, much competent learning looks like play. Even more unsettling for trainers, competent learning means a student will surprise a master more often, which may hurt the master’s image of their own competence.

THE ARENA

172

We worry about our image of competence when we aren’t actually working toward a grander project. Since that’s many of us, damage toward our images is perceived as damage toward the individual- only a paper tiger is afraid of a dog bowling it over, of revealing an image simply made of paper, instead of a breathing body of flesh, bone, and blood. In his book ‘Free to Learn’ (2013), Peter Gray wonders why both anxiety levels and suicide rates have been steadily rising in children and adolescents. He suggests that it may have to do with the expectations and constraints that are thrust upon children at an earlier and earlier age. From a comment on one of his articles: “Here in NYC, the kids start Kindergarten at 4. My best friend’s son started this past September. About 2 weeks into the school year, he was getting letters home from the teacher that he was ‘falling behind academically.’ Since then, he’s gotten letter after letter, and meeting after meeting with the teacher. My friend has been trying to deal with the problem by drilling his son at home in the evenings. The poor kid begs to be allowed to go to bed. The both of them are discouraged and feel like failures.” Notice that both the parent and the child reflect an anticipated punishment (for not putting their attention where it ‘should’ be) as a sense of failure. They have internalized their training, just as the horse and I have internalized ours. We could say that this training is where preference falsification comes from.

NOTES

173

In his book ‘Private Truths, Public Lies’ (1995), Timur Kuran introduces the term to talk about the very many little white lies people tell themselves and others about what they actually want. People further away from a cultural center are encouraged to mimic the preferences of that center, but since they are far away and have a different context to their lives, the preferences of the center don’t actually work for them. Consider, for example, someone from a temperate land telling you to grow wheat in a tropical climate. This pattern is repeated in both internal colonization and colonization of foreigners. One political center’s peasants are colonized in much the same way as another imperial center’s far away indigenous people- the difference of skin color in some populations merely allows the distinction between a globalist elite and local peasant to be more easily enforced over time, where in a population with similar features, a peasant could simply change their name and adopt the culture of the elite to erase their past. These processes are shown well in the ‘The Discovery of France’ (2007) by Graham Robb and ‘Weapons of the Weak’ (1985) by James C. Scott. Therefore, methods that were explicitly addressed in the US Office of Strategic Services’ ‘Simple Sabotage Field Manual’ (1944) are simply what anyone being trained uses to resist being trained by someone who doesn’t know the trainee’s local context. You might see this in any classroom.

THE ARENA

174

Many students are difficult not because they’re stupid, but because the teacher (and the sprawling, bureaucratic entity behind that teacher) isn’t aware of what actually works for that student. The same goes for employees in a large corporation, or soldiers in a large army. In ‘The Muqaddimah’ (1377), Ibn Khaldun already speaks of this tendency when he talks about desert savages. He says that because they’re illiterate and uneducated, they are actually more locally resilient and difficult for a center to control. The solution to this is to teach them to write, to turn them into scholars, who are far easier to control. In his book ‘The Birth of the Propaganda State’ (1985), Peter Kenez says that the Soviets encountered this problem again- and pushed literacy particularly because literacy allowed their propaganda to spread more effectively. If you watch closely, you may notice that people use appeals to Education with the underlying assumption that the more educated someone is, the more they will fall in line with their preferred cultural norms. When you let go of past training, it is a painful event every time, because you would have attached to a particular set of expectations for stability. If these expectations are very stable, then letting go of them feels very unstable internally.

NOTES

175

Like you’re going crazy, and there is no return. Well, it’s true that there is no return, but the word ‘sane’ meant something like ‘healthy’, and to be healthy is to feel whole. When we decide what is crazy and what is not, it is an act of separation, an act of splitting, since things are split into ‘crazy’ and ‘not crazy’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, etc. All this filtering makes dealing with large amounts of information difficult, in the same way that a dam impedes the flow of a river. It takes a lot more energy to build and maintain dams than it does to simply float on a river. Dams are very useful, we wouldn’t be here without them, but when they start to cost more energy than we have to maintain, maybe it’s time to consider something else. Peter Watts, in his book ‘Echopraxia’ (2014), describes what it’s like to be at this dark night of the soul. Like St. John of the Cross, we must experience utter hopelessness and despair to open ourselves up to change, to grow to fit with everything else. From Echopraxia: “We climbed this hill. Each step up we could see farther, so of course we kept going. Now we’re at the top. Science has been at the top for a few centuries now. And we look out across the plain and we see this other tribe dancing around above the clouds, even higher than we are. Maybe it’s a mirage, maybe it’s a trick. Or maybe they just climbed a higher peak we can’t see because the clouds are blocking the view. So we head off to find out—but every step takes us downhill.

THE ARENA

176

No matter what direction we head, we can’t move off our peak without losing our vantage point. So we climb back up again. We’re trapped on a local maximum. But what if there is a higher peak out there, way across the plain? The only way to get there is to bite the bullet, come down off our foothill and trudge along the riverbed until we finally start going uphill again. And it’s only then you realize: Hey, this mountain reaches way higher than that foothill we were on before, and we can see so much better from up here. But you can’t get there unless you leave behind all the tools that made you so successful in the first place. You have to take that first step downhill.” In ‘The Tail Eaters’ (2018), I go over more about moral judgment, self-policing, and its effects. https://docs.google.com/document/d/ 19VocWOyUBctQjh9IuYpmMUDscpVyZnqi_5QX-f9lApM/ edit?usp=sharing For would-be rogues, breaking into places to test their security has really taken off in the last ten years. You can get lock-picking decoder tools that are like training wheels. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2K_WgL71Ro Deviant Ollam, real-life rogue, offers guides on all manner of physical penetration testing. https://deviating.net/lockpicking/videos.html

NOTES

177

For tracking people, Jack Kearney of the US Border Patrol developed a program especially for this purpose- though it’s a skill that’s dying with access to drones, budgets large enough for search helicopters, satellite information, and so on. https://mantracking.files.wordpress.com/ 2017/07/kearney-jack-tracking.pdf Speaking of satellite information, open source intelligence techniques have outstripped traditional investigation in many areas- and you can do most of it from your computer, though the occasional phone call is sometimes necessary, and there’s a lot of opportunity in legwork, since few people are inclined to just walk over to a place and be friendly enough to ask questions anymore. https://www.reddit.com/r/OSINT/top/?t=all ‘What the Robin Knows’ (2012) by Jon Young is an excellent book for noticing what birds in most American neighborhoods are up to, though the principles extend to observing any kind of animal- including man. In the ‘The Forager’s Harvest’ (2006), Samuel Thayer talks about edible plants you can find in most American neighborhoods, though the principles extend to eating plants anywhere. Together with Kearney’s ‘Mantracking’, these books present a trilogy that gives you a sort of ranger-vision, like the highlighting heads-up display you’d find in Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt.

THE ARENA

178

You’ve probably heard from the YouTubers Nikolas Lloyd (Lindybeige) and Matt Easton (Scholagladiotara) about Historical European Martial Arts, but competitors like Martin Fabian offer a closer look at what the sport’s like. https://youtu.be/mjT4JepA-Vc One of the beautiful things about HEMA is its scholastic background, which means members tend to be unusually open (compared to other martial arts) to experimentation and communicating what they find with their experimentation. While I’ve only visited a few groups, the very act of attempting something seemingly completely different from practices I’m more familiar with (unarmed striking, grappling, small infantry movements) better informed those other skills. There’s a principle of using angles that I learned from games like Elite: Dangerous and Mount & Blade: Warband (particularly, cavalry) that translates well to striking, and is especially important in HEMA. I’m able to make use of this awareness of angles in grappling now, but it was only from experiencing it in another skill where it was more “important” that I was able to isolate it enough to pay attention to it.

NOTES

179

NOTES: Experimentation --------------------------------------------You’ve heard of ‘Yes and’ in the game of Improv, but what’s that about? In ‘Impro’ (1979), Keith Johnston says that through school, most of us are trained not to respond to the constant change around us. The biggest hurdle in teaching people improvisation is to get them in a state where they allow themselves to play again. “Many teachers think of children as immature adults. It might lead to better and more ‘respectful’ teaching, if we thought of adults as atrophied children.” He explains that the magic of improv is simply that good improvisers accept offers- any bid for attention, they can play with. “These ‘offer-block-accept’ games have a use quite apart from actor training. People with dull lives often think that their lives are dull by chance. In reality everyone chooses more or less what kind of events will happen to them by their conscious patterns of blocking and yielding.” Karma is to do, to make, to build. We often find ourselves making and doing what the people who’ve influenced us set out to make and do- including the people that we were in the past. What we learned to make as teenagers (which includes things like feelings, or a perception of the world) often follows us long into adulthood, even if what we made then is not as well-adapted to our current circumstances and preferences.

THE ARENA

180

In ‘Interaction Ritual Chains’ (2004), Randall Collins builds on the work of Erving Goffman by extending analysis of everyday human interaction over time. He introduces the idea that people get emotional energy, or a feeling of intrinsic motivation, from participating in energizing interaction rituals. This is any meeting between two or more people where there is a barrier to outsiders (it could be as simple as a meet cute at the grocery store where no one else notices you), a shared object of attention, and a shared mood. The bigger these groups are (such as a festival or soccer game), the more energy they might send through the individual. The more entrained (the more their attention is in some task together, rather than each other or themselves) the participants are, the less self-conscious they are, and so the more energy they might get from the ritual. Memories of successful rituals are represented as symbols (ideals, religious beliefs, identities, etc.), which people then use to form more rituals around- in a chain. We might call many of the people who rarely manage to share attention or moods with other living people ‘introverts’, which is why they so often have to ‘recharge’. They typically recharge with some sort of parasocial activitysuch as watching a tv show or reading a book where they can share the moods and object of attention of the characters on-screen, or with the writer of the book.

NOTES

181

This was me, until I figured out how to welcome more of the moods of the people around me, as well as to deign to join my attention with theirs. Learning to let go and accept people into our being is a very painful act, since we all carry a lot of pain. You might not be used to letting yourself be angry or sad, for instance, but other people might crank those states up to a 100 every day. Figuring out how to play with anything, including those states, is part of the grandest games, and once you do, you’ll probably find that there are mental states, desires, and feelings that you used to think you didn’t have that you actually had all along- they were merely being inhibited because, as Johnstone points out, we were trained to keep our reactions hidden. In playing with the ‘darker’ side of life, you will find great wonder and beauty behind every horrible thing, which, again, might feel like insanity. As Keith Johnstone says, “sanity is actually a pretence, a way we learn to behave. We keep this pretence up because we don't want to be rejected by other people - and being classified insane is to be shut out of the group in a very complete way.” Erving Goffman, in ‘The Insanity of Place’ (1969), points out that to end up in a mental hospital, some collusion is typically needed between a prospective patient’s medical professionals and their family or friends.

THE ARENA

182

One significant part of this collusion is the definition of reality they share, one which they can agree with, but not one which they share with the patient. He suggests that communities agree to a set of norms, which are enforced as rules and expectations to follow these rules. When the rule is broken, both the person who broke the rule and the person who was expecting the rule to be followed suffer from a loss of face, a loss of reputation, a loss of their sense of individual self. So the initial presentation of a symptom of illness presents not as illness, but as disorder- that is, it is simply a norm being broken, a rule being broken, that is then labeled a mental illness so that there is some relative leniency with enforcement of a community’s norms. Insanity then, is primarily about control- not illness. Since you have been trained well to follow certain norms, to follow certain rules, you will then enforce these rules on yourself in advance, presumably to avoid others enforcing them on you. “The individual refrains from improper action by virtue of acting as his own policeman”. In this way, any significant change to your behavior involves breaking enough rules to trigger the feeling of insanity. Given that cultural change is accelerating in tandem with technological change, it is inevitable that last century’s norms will not work for today, so going ‘insane’ is inevitable in relation to the norms of that time.

NOTES

183

Robin Hanson hints that most of the time people are talking about self-control, they’re actually talking about ability to be controlled by others. https://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/05/selfcontrol-is-culture-control.html Harold Garfinkel’s breaching experiments show what happens when norms are intentionally broken. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Breaching_experiment#:~:text=In%20the%20fields% 20of%20sociology,the%20work%20of%20Harold%20Gar finkel. Matthew Effect patterns are patterns where elements with an advantage tend to accrue more of an advantage, and elements with a disadvantage tend to get more disadvantages. While this refers to the verse in the book of Matthew in the Bible which talks about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, it extends to parts of biology, ecology, attention, sales, and founder effects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect ‘Range’ (2019) by David Epstein talks about the benefits of generalization. “Breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer. That is, the more contexts in which something is learned, the more the learner creates abstract models, and the less they rely on any particular example. Learners become better at applying their knowledge to a situation they’ve never seen before, which is the essence of creativity”.

THE ARENA

184

Robert Heinlein, who helped popularize the trope of a competent fictional character, gave us the quote, “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” In ‘Where Good Ideas Come From’ (2010), Steven Johnson stresses the importance of cross-domain learning as it pertains to innovation. He points out that for many a renowned genius, their exposure to a large variety of skills and contexts were necessary for their ideas. “The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle; reinvent. Build a tangled bank.” This happens to match the patterns of innovation at scale beyond the individual, too. In ‘Population Growth and Technological Change’ (1993), Michael Kremer notices that larger populations tend to make more new things, and agglomeration effects, or the positive economic externalities that result from having a dense population, abound.

NOTES

185

This is because more different kinds of people with more different kinds of skills get to transfer their knowledge to each other more easily, which drives innovation everywhere it happens. ‘Innovation in cities’ (1998) by Maryann Feldman and David Audrestch further addresses this, as does ‘Scale’ (2017) by Geoffrey West. Juergen Schmidhuber theorizes that beauty, interestingness, and curiosity are driven by compression progress. That is, the more that the data you have experienced is compressed in a pattern, the more beautiful it is. So the more you compress what you’ve learned from very different contexts and skills, the more beauty you will find. https://arxiv.org/abs/0812.4360 Data on the effect of gamers wiggling during gaming sessions was collected in ‘eSports ProPlayers Behavior During the Game Events: Statistical Analysis of Data Obtained Using the Smart Chair’ (2019). https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.06402.pdf Stanislas Dehaene, in ‘How We Learn’ (2020), writes about how video games increase a child’s ability to focus, and that necessary factors of learning are active engagement, attention, feedback, and consolidation. In play, if you recall, we are always engaged- part of why schools aren’t designed for learning is because they do not promote engagement, and they discourage feedback. That is, feedback is interpreted as failure, and failure is interpreted as punishment.

THE ARENA

186

However, to learn anything, we need to pay attention to the gap between a task we’re attempting and the result we get. By making school about grades, children are taught to avoid failure as much as possible. From Steven Johnson: “Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore”. A crucial step in learning any skill is giving yourself a small way to fail big, so that you can learn from that error, and then keep on failing. Without a constantly shifting feedback loop, you will not be able to explore a space of possible adaptations. For example, when learning music, it would be useful to setup a tiny experiment, where you just play with one string on an instrument, and explore as many different ways to use that string as you can. While doing so, you might setup the feedback loop of identifying what is harmonious (in contrast to what is discordant). So if you pluck the string on one end and stroke it at another, is the space between those two sounds harmonious or discordant? And that might be a game you play for a bit, until you do start to do well at it, and then it’s time to explore some other part of the instrument, some other part of music, which means you should be constantly seeking the next way to ‘fail’ in a small part of the whole you’re trying to learn, if learning is what you want. Explorable Explanations are a great way to familiarize yourself with the idea of turning anything you’re learning into a constrained feedback loop.

NOTES

187

They offer ways to play with many models across several sciences. If you can think about how to turn what you’re learning into an explorable explanation for yourself, you can probably come up with more embodied methods to experiment. https://explorabl.es/ Such an embodied method to experiment is exemplified by constraints-based learning, which is slowly permeating through the field of athletic training. Instead of repeating a particular movement over and over again (as in rote memorization), constraints-based learning involves zeroing in on one aspect of a game and then setting up a constraint to play within that aspect of the game. The game of catch is a basic example of constraints-based learning that every ball sport player uses at some point or other. ‘The Constraints-Led Approach’ (2019) goes over this in detail. In grappling, the emphasis of experimentation allows us to single out parts of the game that are typically ignored. The Island Top Team boys call this ‘Fuck Your Jiu-Jitsu’- basically, ‘if your BJJ is so good, can you do it without X!?’, where the removal of ‘X’ is the constraint. https://youtu.be/6tT3--XyQVE

THE ARENA

188

To show that there is an alternative to simply following recipes in cooking (which, you might notice, mimics the rote memorization of schools or kata forms in traditional martial arts), Michael Ruhlman talks about how you can constrain your cooking with simple ratios instead of being tied to a particular recipe in ‘Ratio’ (2009). This unleashes an element of play in the kitchen that is lacking for most people. The lack of play makes cooking a choresince finding and following a recipe involves little experimentation, other than interpreting and following instructions well. Richard Feynman implies all this when he says, “The game I play is a very interesting one. It’s imagination in a tight straitjacket.” There is something about being in a bigger group that seems to result in less persistenceperhaps a feeling that there is always someone who can help, someone who can take over, someone else whose job it is. This comparison between wolf and dog persistence gives us a hint. ‘Differences in persistence between dogs and wolves in an unsolvable task in the absence of humans’ (2018). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0NIDOQe_hk Starting with a tiny part of what you want to experiment with is key to learning now, rather than pushing your experimentation off to the day that you finally have everything you were told you’d need to do it.

NOTES

189

If you decide to write a book, you might have all these ideas about what you need in order to write a book, but all that’s really needed to get to the book is one average sentence. You don’t need a publisher, a guide on writing, an editor, a book deal, or anything like that. Just a sentence. A sentence average for younot your very best sentence or a polished sentence, just something you would think to yourself, something you would say off-hand to someone you trust. As you craft more sentences, it becomes easier and easier to simply spit them out, and eventually, when you put them all together, you have a book. ‘Foxhole Players Are Striking Over Increased Stress and Responsibility’ (2022) reports on the curious case of an in-game strike. Many things like this have happened in the past, especially in the multi-user dungeons of the past, but also in any game with a dynamic economic system and enough people for politics, but this one is especially curious because of how well-covered it is- the reporter actually interviews the players, and it showed up on a media site, instead of us having to dig through old logs and forums to find such a case. https://kotaku.com/foxhole-players-arestriking-over-increased-stress-and-1848370043 An online Beer Game Simulator is here: https://beergame.masystem.se/ For tracking airplanes synchronously, there’s Flightradar24: https://www.flightradar24.com/

THE ARENA

190

For tracking ships synchronously, there’s Marine Traffic: https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/ centerx:-12.0/centery:25.0/zoom:4 The game of science is ultimately a game of predictions, as was prophecy before it. A key difference is that in effective scientific experimentation, people check the results of the prediction more closely. Robin Hanson addresses the value of predictions to other parts of life here: http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/futarchy.pdf In ‘Superforecasting’ (2015), Phil Tetlock records what he found from the Good Judgment Project, which tested the viability of using aggregated predictions to figure out what may happen in the medium-term (a few weeks, months or years, for this project). ‘How to Measure Anything’ (2007) by Douglas Hubbard details when and how you might make predictions in an organization, but much of it can inform your everyday life. Warren Buffett, billionaire investor, mentions that, “it’s not predicting rain that counts. It’s building arks.” That is, if you predict there’s a flood coming, then you would prepare for that flood. Simply being ‘right’ doesn’t really make use of your information advantage, and oftentimes, we might make correct predictions without really believing in them enough to act on them. In this way, action, such as preparing for a flood, functions as a sort of bet.

NOTES

191

As Alex Tabarrok says, “a bet is a tax on bullshit”. https://marginalrevolution.com/ marginalrevolution/2012/11/a-bet-is-a-tax-onbullshit.html The concept of our perception of reality as a user interface that does not necessitate a 1:1 match with whatever's going on outside of us is explored in 'The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes' (2019).

THE ARENA

192

NOTES: Gold, Prestige, Piety --------------------------------------------‘Game Theory’ (1970) by Morton Davis is an introduction to game theory for anyone reading this, but Nicky Case’s excellent ‘Evolution of Trust’ is a playable explanation: https://ncase.me/trust/ ‘SuperCooperators’ (2011) by Martin Nowak traces the evolution of cooperation at scale, partially using models from evolutionary game theory. It establishes the nature of altruism as ubiquitous in all human societies, even in areas that might seem selfish (such as ambition). Northwestern University has a simple agentbased model example, the ‘Wolves and Sheep’ sample. You can access an online version of it and an accompanying tutorial here: http://ccl.northwestern.edu/nettangoweb/ Rick Falkvinge, one of the founders of the Swedish Pirate Party, mentions that a lot of the organizational acumen they had was from leading raid guilds in World of Warcraft. Today, organizations like Raid Guild are explicitly modeled on that experience- gamer culture coming out and affecting the rest of the world. https://www.raidguild.org/ In ‘The Social Order of the Underworld’ (2014), David Skarbek shows how when a prison population is large enough, it forms its own shadow government and economy.

NOTES

193

These governments require clear identification and reputation systems to form. In documenting the rise of gangs which rapidly turned into shadow governmental organizations following the Soviet collapse, Vadim Volkov again hints at what minimum features are necessary for governments to pop up with ‘Violent Entrepreneurship’ (2002). In ‘Resisting War’ (2017), Oliver Kaplan shows that stronger communities have better odds of survival. An account by Selco Begovic emphasizes the importance of a large family in his surviving the anarchy of the Balkan Wars. https://archive.org/stream/ TheSHTFAnthologySelco/ The%20SHTF%20Anthology%20-%20Selco_djvu.txt In ‘Money and the Early Greek Mind’ (2004), Richard Seaford touches on the role of money in an earlier society that influences us strongly today. Nick Szabo, the inventor of BitGold (a precursor to BitCoin), has a collection of the most in-depth investigations of early money (so it provides clues about the nature of money) that I’ve found. Elsewhere in his blog, he goes over the rest of its history, including the history of non-governmental money. https://twitter.com/nickszabo4/status/ 954225789129469952

THE ARENA

194

Benjamin Ross Hoffman puts forth that our current debt-based economy was solidified in the World Wars. http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/the-debtorsrevolt/ In ‘Sacred Economics’ (2011), Charles Eisenstein goes over a history of debt-based money and proposes some alternatives. A side effect of looking at these alternatives is to get a better idea of what money is, if we can look at more possible variations of its functions. With ‘Hierarchy in the Forest’ (1999), Christopher Boehm takes a close, anthropological look at the nature of status. In ‘Two ways to the top : evidence that dominance and prestige are distinct yet viable avenues to social rank’ (2013), Joey Cheng delineates the difference between prestige and dominance. ‘Prestige-biased Social Learning’ (2019) by Jimenez and Mesoudi paints a picture of how prestige affects culture and behavior. ‘The Big Man Mechanism’ (2015) by Henrich, Chudek, and Boyd looks at how prestige, leadership, and community are related. Paul Graham frames wealth creation in terms of giving people what they want. http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html William Nordhaus addresses the vast benefits of the lowered cost of light in ‘Do real-output and real-wage measures capture reality? The history of lighting suggests not’ (1998).

NOTES

195

‘Interpersonal Neural Entrainment during Early Social Interaction’ (2020) reviews what entrainment is. ‘A Duet for One’ (2015) by Karl Friston and Christopher Frith suggests that a model of another person is held in our brains during entrainment, and that is how we communicate- by syncing up our models of each other. In ‘Organizational culture and scalar stress’ (1982), Gregory Johnson introduces the idea that the larger a group is, the harder it is for it to communicate well enough to function. Groups deal with this by splitting off into smaller, more manageable groups- this is also typically how leaders emerge. At the moment, the distance between us and whoever most people would consider their leaders is vast, both in literal physical distance and the number of people you’d have to call to get to them. Consider the Three Sisters- squash, corn, and beans. Native American societies planted these together traditionally, since they work symbiotically to replenish the soil. They did not have a way to communicate this to settlers in terms the settlers would accept, so this practice was diminished until it was scientifically confirmed in the latter half of the twentieth century. ‘Seeing Like a State’ (1998) by James C. Scott goes further into a myriad of similar examples, showing how modernist projects to micromanage locals often resulted in wasting and draining local resources.

THE ARENA

196

‘Drones, memes, and plastic’ is a play on Jared Diamond’s ‘Guns, Germs, & Steel’ (1997), a book which tries to explain how Western European societies conquered all others. ‘Innovation in the collective brain’ (2016) by Muthukrishna and Henrich details the connection between large populations, culture, and innovation. ‘The segmentary lineage: an organization of predatory expansion’ (1961) connects honor cultures with cultures that are organized along familial clans which are nested in a larger group composed of other clans that they are also related to. To look at how and why animals fight, I invite you to search YouTube, Reddit, and Instagram for videos of animals encountering each other. Randall Collin’s ‘Violence: A Microsociological theory’ (2008) mentions that child-on-child violence is the most common kind, but you can probably easily infer this by being around children and searching your memories. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations were first popularly theorized by Vitalik Buterin. Ethereum gives a snappy overview. https://ethereum.org/en/dao/ Aragon DAO, which was the first organization to provide easy-to-use tools to spin up a DAO with, has the trailer ‘Aragon: the fight for freedom’. https://youtu.be/AqjIWmiAidw

NOTES

197

‘A Distant Mirror’ (1978) by Barbara Tuchman covers much of the Hundred Year’s War by following the life of Enguerrand de Coucy. Froissart’s ‘Chronicles’ is a shorter read, though it might be more difficult to digest. ‘The Free Companies in the Hundred Year’s War’ (1944) by Beauregard offers more detail on Free Companies. ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ (1926) by TE Lawrence provides a first-hand look at how the Arabs ousted the Ottoman Empire, and how the British made use of them. More on the US Navy’s Doctrine of Faith and the American Navy’s effort in China during World War II can be found in ‘By the Water Beneath the Walls’ (2021) by Ben Milligan, in as far as those events contribute to the formation of the Navy SEALs. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith present the selectorate theory of politics in ‘The Logic of Political Survival’ (2003), which highlights the importance of coalitions to keep anyone in power, even if they’re dictators. Mission-type tactics, that is, clarifying a strategic aim and leaving combatants on the ground to make decisions about how to achieve that aim, were probably best adopted by the United States Marine Corps, at least doctrinally. It is best exemplified by ‘The Squad Leader Makes the Difference’ (1998).

THE ARENA

198

Many companies today emphasize a ‘bias for action’ as one of their values, but the willingness to actually push leadership down to the people at the bottom of the hierarchy is harder to find in practice. The Red Queen pattern was hypothesized as ‘A new evolutionary law’ (1973) by Leigh Van Valen. In ‘A Comparison of Ambient Casino Sound and Music: Effects on Dissociation and on Perceptions of Elapsed Time While Playing Slot Machines’ (2009), Noseworth and Finlay attest that the audio environment of a casino is designed to minimize the sense of a passing of time. Victor Gruen, father of the mall, influenced Walt Disney’s design of Disneyland, which introduced theming to the world. Gregory Turner-Rahman notes the world-changing impact of theming in consumerism- pointing out that Trader Joe’s is designed with those principles in mind. Cathrin Jansson-Boyd’s ‘How IKEA’s shop layout influences what you buy’ (2018) mentions the long walk that IKEA stores funnel you into. Colin Popell’s ‘On Love’ (2020) points out that we have higher expectations for our parents. https://colinpopell.com/blog/on-love ‘A deep depression after the Olympics’ (2022) by Emily Russell. When he was interviewed by Lex Fridman, Judo Olympic coach Jimmy Pedro also mentions depression after the Olympics for some competitors.

NOTES

199

The history of grappling in Brazil is covered in part by ‘Ep. 58: The Gracies’ of the BJJ Mental Models podcast, ‘Mastering Jujitsu’ (2003) by John Danaher, and assorted hearsay. From Steven Johnson, again, “The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.”

THE ARENA

200

NOTES: BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD --------------------------------------------Somehow, people who verbally attest to believing in the theory of evolution manage to think that it’s possible to get where we are without constant competition. In ‘Emerging mechanisms of cell competition’ (2020), Nicholas Baker reviews how cells, even within the same organism, compete. In ‘Human orientation and movement control in weightless and artificial gravity environments’ (2000), it is shown that human bodies change in response to low gravity. ‘Situational and personal influences on space perception with experimental spectacles’ (1957) stated that participants reacquired upright vision with inverted spectacles after some time, however ‘The Myth of Upright Vision’ (1999) reported that participants were adapted for motor skills, but did not re-acquire upright vision. Both studies had around ten people, and there aren’t many more on the subject, so feel free to experiment. ‘Ultrasociety’ (2015) by Peter Turchin uses statistical analysis of historical events to say that the formation of mega-societies was driven by war, given the competitive advantage of size in war. In ‘War in Human Civilization’ (2006), Azar Gat describes a sweeping history of war, the constant presence of raiding, and its use to set up our states.

NOTES

201

This echoes Charles Tilly’s ‘Formation of National States in Europe’ (1975), where he draws a similarity between early states and organized crime groups- where the state rises through a racketeering process. This echoes what happened after the fall of the Soviet Union, but note that it usually becomes beneficial for whoever’s collecting taxes to provide services, so that the golden goose will keep on laying, and in this way, direct, kinetic wars eventually become too costly in relation to the very wealthy peace they enjoy. Of course, this doesn’t really mean that war isn’t around- it’s just carried out softly. Looking at what the state of Malaysia did to the Penan people, it’s hard not to see it as war, even if the war was fought by bringing them into the economic system and making them dependent on the state. Capitalism is built on competition and the continued colonization of poorer states. This kind of competition doesn’t kill as quickly, but it does kill slowlyswitching many localities to corn and wheat instead of crops that were better suited to their area, for example, results in food shortages. Similarly, logging devastates local resources for hunter-gatherers, and their children are assimilated away from them.

THE ARENA

202

In ‘A Death in the Rainforest’ (2019), Don Kulick mentions that those who were taught to read at school learned to have impossible preferences- the textbooks depicted lives that no one in Papa New Guinea has access to, which creates a sense of lack that wasn’t there before. This unrest results in young men getting violent, to try and work toward their aspirations of living in a Western, suburban society. We compete in this way continuously, and mostly pretend not to notice it. We compete among ourselves for sex, jobs, attention, and status at home, while competing for resources abroad. This is not written for you to feel bad about it, though if you do, let yourself feel that- it’s the first step to accepting it. As the psychologist Eugene Gendlin says, “what is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse. Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away. And because it is true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it”. Perhaps Nietzsche would differ on that last bit, given his view of strength as the ability to endure reality. With the rise of animal welfare and vegetarianism, people seem to think that eating plants is not killing life, not an act of competition. Plant researchers, meanwhile, are having a fierce scholastic war about whether plants are intelligent and conscious.

NOTES

203

In the last ten years, it appears that many have begrudgingly admitted some sort of selection and modulation, but cling to the idea that consciousness requires a nervous system like ours. The Minimal Intelligence Lab offers a snapshot overview. To peek at this war, the relevant search terms are ‘plant’, ‘pain’, ‘cognition’, ‘intelligence’, ‘qualia’, ‘meristem’, and ‘quasicrystal’. A foundational assumption of this book is that if you compare a cat to a dog against the standards of a cat, the dog will always come up short. We might consider Blame a causal model, where the cause is an agent. The more an agent appears to cause, then, the more likely they are to receive blame. ‘To escape blame, don’t be a hero- Be a victim’ (2010) by Kurt Gray and Daniel Wegner shows this. Given that the relationship between money and happiness is weak, ‘If money doesn't make you happy, then you probably aren't spending it right’ (2011) advises people to consider spending more money on experiences, other people, many small pleasures rather than a few large ones, avoid overpriced insurance, look at how purchases affect everyday life, go easy on comparison shopping, and pay special attention to others’ happiness. ‘What do we need to be happy: evidence from a psychosocial perspective’ (2015) stresses the importance of marriage and social ties for happiness. ‘Strategy: The Indirect Approach’ (1941) was B.H. Liddell-Hart’s reaction to the results of a lack of strategic aim in World War I.

THE ARENA

204

Case-by-case, he shows that armies win when they can adjust their strategic ends to their means, keep their missions in mind, advance where the enemy least expects, take advantage of where the enemy resists least, and move in such a way as to keep the possibility of pivoting. This was a book on strategy and a strategic lack, but they spring from a lack of grand strategic aim. For grappling, John Danaher talks about the need for keeping a strategic end in mind- that without it, the fighter is tempted to execute rote chains of moves that are predictable- and so take a direct approach. The indirect approach, then, comes from having a very clear idea of the end, so that unexpected and seemingly chaotic ways to get to it are accepted and utilized. What Liddell-Hart says is also reflected in Bruce Lee’s “be like water”, and Miyamoto Musashi’s “there is more than one path to the top of the mountain”. In general, if people had taken in what Musashi put out, there would have been no need for Liddell-Hart to write what he did, since ‘The Book of Five Rings’ (1645) contains all the same lessons and more, though additional context always strengthens sound principles. To move in such a way as to keep the possibility of pivoting is to keep balance, and Musashi stresses this balance in all times, at all levels- so that there is no difference between any skill, any moment, any place- it is all one. It’s not an accident that military theory comes upon the importance of unity, cohesion, and alignment over and over again.

NOTES

205

Alignment with a grand strategy produces unity in all things, for the entity that is aligned, and this is how a seemingly smaller opponent can defeat a bigger one. In such a state, your every movement serves the purpose of the grand strategic aim, and like a Xanatos gambit, no matter what happens, you win. It is for this reason that the military forces of the United Kingdom and Australia especially emphasize a “maintenance of the aim”, though those institutions are institutions, and so cannot manage anything more than maintenance of a strategic aim, at best. With a grand strategic aim, there is no difference between strategy, operations, tactics, and personal expression. ‘On Grand Strategy’ (2018) by John Lewis Gaddis hints that grand strategy comes seemingly out of paradox. The aim will seem impossible to a binary frame of mind, however, this is also why all the moves that someone with a clear grand strategic aim makes will appear to be indirect and unpredictable. So the way you drink coffee, the way you take a shit- these too, would reflect your grand strategic aim. “You must examine this well”. In ‘The Dragons and The Snakes’ (2020), David Kilcullen points out that grand strategically, the administrative leadership of world superpowers have been ascribing much agency to each other that is not actually present.

THE ARENA

206

The lack of grand strategy is interpreted as some sort of 5d chess, and each loses initiative by thinking its opponent is acting out of competence, so they cling to paths of action that are designed to stop and arrest movement and change, rather than paths than move forward toward an aim. This is the equivalent of watching a fight between people new to fighting- they flail wildly, and are that much more dangerous because of it, but they also use up a lot of energy, since there is great purpose to align that energy to. The more skilled the combatants are, the less each can rely on the other simply making a mistake, and the more important it is to have an aim that is not defined in reaction to their opponent. Stopping someone from choking you is not an aim- wanting to see your daughter flourish is. In such a situation, if you need to choke out your opponent to see your daughter have fun jumping on a trampoline, you will. If you need to break an opponent’s arm to see your daughter learning about what strawberries are for the first time, you will. If you need to show your opponent some love to de-escalate the tension generated from fear to be at your daughter’s wedding, you will. Another way to think about an aim versus defensive reaction is in terms of the kinds of aggression that mammals have, which is reviewed in Sarah Constantin’s ‘Mammalian Aggression’ (2021). ‘The neuroethology of predation and escape’ (2016) catalogs methods of predation and escape.

NOTES

207

In both of these, the aggression of escape and the aggression of predation are very different. Escape is a high-stress state that promotes volatility of action, which results in enough randomness to confuse predators. The social aggression categorized by Constantin is similar, though perhaps the volatility in this case is more of a signal of coordination. To contrast, predation is a low-stress, almost playful, state where predators can let go of prey if the chase costs too much energy. In micro-sociology, Randall Collins identifies something he named confrontational tension/ fear. An interaction between people is likely to turn violent when the confrontational tension/fear is high. Most violence comes from this confrontational tension/fear, though there is a tiny minority of people who are competent at violence, a violence elite, that do not engage as much in violence from this state. This may be those who are able to be violent from within a state of predatory aggression, rather than one of escape aggression. Anecdotally, hunters are overrepresented in those who perform extremely well in combat. Fighting with an aim, then, is more like hunting or taming than a confrontational social measure (as in the classic bar brawl trope) or a ‘forward panic’ toward violence. The Mongolian horde trained with a Great Huntnotoriously, steppe nomads fight ‘dirty’, they move backwards and sideways to lure more direct armies into losing fights.

THE ARENA

208

You can see this difference embodied in Muay Thai bouts between Thai Femeu fighters influenced by the Golden Age of Muay Thai and Western fighters who are more influenced by the Western way of war, which emphasizes direct confrontation. https://youtu.be/Wju4p41QLxE US Army Battle Drill 11: React to an IED (05-3-D1703) outlines 5/25 checks. Basically, as you get out, you check the 5 meter radius around you for threats, then the 25m radius, and finally the 200m. The Igor de Rachewiltz translation of ‘The Secret History of the Mongols’ takes a more literal approach than others. This gives us better insight into how the people who first sang it thought, short of reading it in the surviving Mongolian with Chinese letters. 5th May, 1945: Wehrmacht Major Sepp Gangl, US XXI Corps Cpt. Jack Lee, and SSHauptsturmführer Kurt-Siegfried Schrader led a group of American and German soldiers to free French prisoners of war (including Charles de Gaulle’s sister) to defend Castle Itter against the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division. If you think that’s wild, check out ‘Operation Cowboy’.

NOTES

209

NOTES: Looking For Group --------------------------------------------If you played the Beer Game mentioned earlier, you might have come upon the Theory of Constraints, which is explained through a novel about a factory manager called ‘The Goal’ (1984) by Eliyahu Goldratt. While the bottlenecks in that theory are primarily about production of goods, similar bottlenecks occur in more complex systems, such as human communication. One of those bottlenecks is sacred values, as outlined in ‘Thinking the unthinkable: sacred values and taboo cognitions’ (2003). These are absolute values, ideals that are held onto so tightly that considering anything that contradicts them is unthinkable- which means that people with sacred values are unable to even consider the position of other people whose existence depends on elements of reality they don’t want to consider, let alone themselves. The importance of biological cooperation and other-oriented motivations to the existence of civilization was noted earlier, but there is a dark side to all this altruism- people punish others for breaking norms. In the past, this could mean execution. Now, we simply do it to ourselves. ‘The evolution of altruistic punishment’ (2003) examines this mechanic. ‘How exploitation launched human cooperation’ (2019) further shows how this is necessary for largescale cooperation.

THE ARENA

210

‘A Man Without Words’ (1991) tells the story of a 27-year-old deaf man who was taught language by Susan Schaller. In ‘The Secret of Our Success’ (2015), Joseph Henrich shows the importance of cultural evolution for cognition, intelligence, and consciousness. “The list of “natural” foods that need processing to detoxify them goes on and on. Early potatoes were toxic, and the Andean peoples ate clay to neutralize the toxin. Even beans can be toxic without processing. In California, many hunter-gatherer populations relied on acorns, which, similar to manioc, require a labor intensive, multiday leaching process. Many small-scale societies have similarly exploited hardy, tropical plants called cycads for food. But cycads contain a nerve toxin. If not properly processed, they can cause neurological symptoms, paralysis, and death. Numerous societies, including huntergatherers, have culturally evolved an immense range of detoxification techniques for cycads. By contrast with our species, other animals have far superior abilities to detoxify plants. Humans, however, lost these genetic adaptations and evolved a dependence on cultural know-how, just to eat.” No human with language is actually an individual. Individuality of mind is a sort of social construct we use to organize ourselves collectively. Phillippe Rochat wrote about the origins of selfconsciousness in ‘Others in Mind’ 2009.

NOTES

211

In ‘I am a Strange Loop’ (2007), Douglas Hofstadter explores the interdependent nature of consciousness. There’s an excellent image that analogizes this visually in the book, but I’ve failed to find it online. “In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.” ‘I, Pencil’ (1964) is the famous essay by Leonard Read. “The lesson I [the pencil] have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society's legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can.” This, in response to the fact that the pencil needed millions of people over time to make it, and no one makes anything alone. Utah State University’s Spider Silk Lab experiments with multiple materials copied from animals, but the spidersilk synthesized from the milk of transgenic goats designed for that purpose is its most dramatic product. The Laskowski Lab at UC Davis uses clonal fish to study individuality in animals, so that there are no genetic differences to explain that individuality with. Yet, there are markers of individual personality. Individuality, then, comes from the interaction of the collective. In ‘Social Physics’ (2014), Alex Pentland emphasizes the importance of proximity of social networks in innovation. By tracking individual movements, vibrations, text frequency, and colocation in a community, MIT’s Human Dynamics group was able to predict wellbeing and mental health in individuals.

THE ARENA

212

‘Social Physics’, ‘Where Good Ideas Come From’, ‘Innovation in the collective brain’ all point out the importance of collectives for any individual, by pointing out that we only make new things collectively, rather than individually. ‘How Innovation Works’ (2020) by Matt Ridley ‘The Sociology of Philosophies’ (1979), and ‘Organizing Genius’ (1997) by Warren Bennis echo this. In ‘What complexity science says about what makes a winning team’ (2020), Jessica Flack and Cade Massey write that how the team performs together (what emerges from their interaction) may be important to winning, and measures for that are now possible. In it, they highlight NBA player Shane Battier, cribbed from ‘The NoStats All-star’ (2009) by Michael Lewis. “When [Battier] is on the court, his teammates get better, often a lot better, and his opponents get worse – often a lot worse. He may not grab huge numbers of rebounds, but he has an uncanny ability to improve his teammates’ rebounding … He also has a knack for getting the ball to teammates who are in a position to do the same … On defence, although he routinely guards the NBA’s most prolific scorers [he was one of the most effective to guard Kobe Bryant], he significantly reduces their shooting percentages. At the same time he somehow improves the defensive efficiency of his teammates – probably, Morey [general manager of Battier’s team at the time] surmises, by helping them out in all sorts of subtle ways.”

NOTES

213

‘Organizing Genius’ talks about the importance of someone who acts as a bridge, to bring a team together and get out of the way of their flow. Etymology of the word ‘King’ roots in ‘someone of the family’, which hints that a King is someone who is able to be everyone’s family. The practice of the long table, the longhouse or dining hall that everyone in a village was invited to eat at, the practice of providing feasts for your vassals, all suggest a similar role, especially when the Big Man Complex is taken into account. The Big Man in small-scale societies often gains prestige by providing feasts for a tribe, and functioning as a bridge between coalitions. Many gods started off as memories of dead ancestors, rumors of dead heroes, who were then deified. In Greek, charisma is ‘grace, favor, gift’, implying a gift from the gods. The root for ‘good’ is to ‘unite, join, and suit’. So good is what joins that fits well. Someone with charisma, then, is someone who can unite people in a way that everyone fits well. A gift who gives. ‘Napoleon Never Slept’ (2015) tracks great leaders, and shows how their interactions with people gave them the energy to accomplish what they did. ‘One hundred years of carcinization – the evolution of the crab-like habitus in Anomura (Arthropoda: Crustacea)’ (2017) reviews how many crustaceans on a crab-like body, regardless of genetic relation.

THE ARENA

214

Wikipedia’s list of examples of convergent evolution is an excellent way to pass an afternoon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ List_of_examples_of_convergent_evolution The tv show ‘Connections’ (1978) presents non-linear theories of change and innovation for a public audience. Grant Sanderson’s animation on ‘how discovery (and the retrospective telling of discovery) works’ is again extremely beautiful, here. Aerospaceweb has a collection of possible first people to fly with a fixed wing flying machine (to exclude gliders). http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/history/ q0159.shtml ‘Honeybee Democracy’ (2011) by Thomas Seeley goes through quorum sensing in detail. Reading this book alongside ‘Interaction Ritual Chains’ may be especially exciting, since the parallels pop out. ‘How ants use quorum sensing to estimate the average quality of a fluctuating resource’ (2015) describes quorum sensing in ants. Together with the results of the Human Dynamics lab, we could use quorum sensing to launch faster-moving teams today, since voting by movement and action is a far more reliable statement of preferences than voting with affirmative or negative statements. When you do something and have fun, that having fun produces more activity, and others will move toward you in the same way that bees who dance harder at a site attract more bees from their hive to that site.

NOTES

215

Playing is usually energizing, so playing in public attracts people. ‘Albert & Carl Friedrich’ (2018) shows some random walks. http://www.complexity-explorables.org/ explorables/albert-and-carl-friedrich/ ‘Sitting in the Fire’ (2014) by Arnold Middell shows a little of how to use group conflict to power that group. ‘Never Split the Difference’ (2016) by Chris Voss shows how to use conflict to get both sides of a negotiation what they want that they might not even have known they wanted. ‘The Science of Trust’ (2011) by John Gottman is aimed at couples, but it shows anyone how to strengthen relationships by noticing the bids of attention that people make everyday. Derek Sivers talks about “Hell Yeah! or No” in ‘Anything You Want’ (2011). This stack exchange question explores the origin of the saying “the army is prepared for the last war”. https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/ 60422/who-said-armies-prepare-to-fight-theirlast-war-rather-than-their-next-war A series of past wins is useful for building confidence and pride. David Hackworth stressed the need for a win in 'Steel My Soldiers Hearts' (2002), as has almost every competent warrior-leader for as far back as history records. The same is true for the individual.

Oh, you thought this was just a book? hahahhaha this is isn't a book it's an invitation to play if you've had your fill feel free to walk away but if you're hungry for more, join us on Discord https://discord.gg/7XdM3Qgd6N Shit's gonna be hard but you're not a filthy casual you're here for

IMPOSSIBLE MODE

gank the world

If you enjoyed reading this, feel free to translate it, modify it, add to it, record an audiobook, or remix it- whatever you are moved to do. Any proceeds you might get from this effort are yours, as stated under the Creative Commons license.