Blog

I live now in an Age of Intellect. This is because I have been in recent weeks

1) Reading fairly advanced stuff in Philosophy, in preparation for my Honours Thesis
2) Learning the ins and outs of new board games, as well as being involved in teaching and playing them with students, in line with an internship I am under; and
3) Playing Agricola, a complex board game requiring various thinking skills, both on and offline.

In other words, I have been, and will be using my brain a lot, more so than in any 3-month block in the past.

I live too in an Age of Cockroaches, as I have spotted (and killed) 2 cockroaches in my house in the past few weeks. One might point out that this could simply be a coincidence and not due to any systematic occurence that would justify the hailing of an era. But we should ask which is the more reasonable explanation to adpot: a statistical anomaly giving rise to the spotting of such unsightly creatures, for before these past few weeks I have never spotted a single cockroach in my place for at least a year; or the fact that cockroaches are now actively breeding in my house. Before you go eew and postulate that I live in an unkempt place, allow me to suggest that even extremely posh and clean houses have their own share of cockroaches lurking somewhere, always. At this very instant, there should be at least 1 cockroach either in your home, or in a place readily accessible to your home. The question is whether these cockroaches are just tourists or citizens.

I had a dream last night. In the dream I invited 2 female acquaintances and 3 male friends for a jog. 1 of the females called another along, whom I recognised but who went somewhere else. Another was quiet, someone whom I haven't seen in a long time, and who didn't mind the fact that she didn't know anyone else but me. Cut to a scene where we were all attending a mass exercise conducted by a trainer. I was alone with many other strangers, on a muddy field. Everyone else was on a dry sandy ground some distance away.

Cut to a cosy underground room, fully airconditioned. I own this room. I like this room alot, especially in afternoons where my whole family isn't around and I can have the whole place to myself. I recall that there's a concert going on - and for some reason I find myself wanting to stay in the room and listen to the concert live, as though the concert would unfold itself in the room. I lie down on a mattress and feel an immense sense of tranquility.

End of dream.

I haven't had a dream in a long while. Or, at least, I haven't had a dream I can recall upon waking up in a long while. I like dreams; I like dreams like the one above. They make me think of things I don't ordinarily think of, in ways I don't usually do. They make me feel surreal for some time; the really powerful and unique ones linger for days.

I think I shall go play Agricola for now, a reward for finishing a written assignment earlier.

Games and the feeling of inhibition

I play mahjong. I play board games. I play computer games that pit players against other players. One of the common threads I observe in these activities is that psychology matters when it comes to results. This shouldn't come as anything new: I'm sure there are tons of literature on the psychology of sports, and these activities can quite naturally be considered mental sports. But it's another thing to experience it first-hand.

When I'm on a losing streak in any of these activities, my morale dips. Against strangers sometimes I feel a sense of frustration. Against friends I don't feel unhappy, of course; but I start feeling more and more inhibited. I feel like I'm not in the flow. I feel like I can't flow. I feel like...ok enough. You get the point. If you have ever been on a losing streak playing a win-or-lose game with friends, you will get the point. I will say 3 things about this feeling of inhibition.

The feeling of inhibition is most acutely felt when one has been on a winning streak before. In fact, one can go as far as to say the feeling of inhibition arises precisely because one has either been on a winning streak or has done generally well before. If you've won the first game, you start feeling good. Win the second, and you grow more confident. Your morale rises. You start being "in the zone". When you're in the zone, everything seems to flow. Perhaps different people feel differently when they're in the zone, but for me, I know I am in the zone when I actually process information in the game more quickly. The time it takes for me to take a turn on mahjong is usually around 2-3 seconds upon drawing a fresh tile. When I'm in the zone, the turn is taken lightning-fast. Upon seeing the new tile, I know instantly what to do, and my turn can be over in under a second. This has nothing to do with me having a near-complete set already; this fast processing can still occur even when a full picture of what to take and discard hasn't emerged. And we note too that the time elapsed could actually still be the same: I could still have been taking 2-3 seconds to think and make my move. However, it could have felt faster than that because I could have been subconsciously processing a lot more information in that 2-3 second time frame than if I were not in the zone. In other words, when my morale is high, when I'm in the zone, I become extra-sensitive to all the information around me.

Now, having been in the zone, I feel inhibited when I am unable to attain that level of heightened sensitivity, that heightened feeling of feeling the game. My sensitivity to information in the game becomes dull. And I feel like the more I lose, the more I am taken away from that heightened awareness of the game. The more I lose, the more I feel out of the flow.

The second thing I want to bring up is that the cause of inhibition is not limited to the experience of a losing streak. Many things outside a game can lead one to feeling inhibited while playing the game. This can range from issues like having a deadline to meet a few days later, to playing in an uncomfortable environment (perhaps a player is smoking in the room, perhaps you are unused to playing under warm fuzzy lights, and so on), to simply feeling out of place socially with the company you are playing with (for example, perhaps they are making jokes you don't quite find funny, but still feel obliged to laugh).

The final thing to say is probably the most important thing to note, and that is that being in the zone is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for victory. One can be in the zone and yet still lose - sometimes this might spark off a steady spiral of defeats. Neither is being in the zone a necessary condition for victory. One can repeatedly win a game without feeling like one is in the zone. A usual indicator of this is when the serial winner remarks: "Well, actually, I'm not sure what I was doing. I was just playing and I won". A winner who was in the zone, on the other hand, might tend to say something like: "Yes it felt great. My opponents were good players, but I played my cards right and when an opportunity rose I took it and ended the game." And between friends, usually someone who wins and is in the zone would feel buoyant and start giving out advice to his or her mates.

That being said, feeling uninhibited probably boosts one's chances of winning any game. The challenge when one is on a losing streak, or when one is feeling inhibited for any other reason, then, is to try to get rid of that feeling of inhibition. This can sometimes mean getting rid of the source of the inhibition (can we open the windows for some fresh air please?) This can sometimes mean ignoring the feeling altogether (I need to relax, if I think straight I can eventually win). Being confident of yourself helps a lot. I find that music helps a lot too.

Hmm

As part of my school curriculum this semester I am a part-time intern at a company that teaches thinking skills to young people through the use of board games. As part of my internly duties I went to a church yesterday to help out in a marketing event, and I was mildly surprised that at 730am a mass was already in full swing and the followers already well-advanced in their communion with God. I think it would be pretty cool if there were masses at 3am. I can imagine a sparsely populated, air-conditioned hall filled with soft, peaceful hymns to be quite the sanctuary to be in to digest one's food after supper.

Nothing much else. We roped in people to either play the games (it was a carnival), buy the games, or sign up for our programmes. A young child nearly beat me in Blokus, and one of the things that pleasure me greatly on this job is to see the development of shrewd, strategic thinking on people so young.

One of the things that saddens me, however, is to see discrimination happening among people so young. On one occasion with Primary 4 kids, an Indian student had tears in his eyes because the Chinese in his group kept attacking him in the game, for no tactical reason at all. So I tried to comfort him and I told the others off. What happened after, though, was good: the Chinese eventually bent the rules of the game to help the victim - a certain card that helps a player has only limited effect but they decided to expand that effect even though that isn't allowed in the game.

Discrimination doesn't just occur along racial lines. Walking around facilitating the games, I see on occasion students of any age and of any gender persistently persecuting someone of their own race whom they don't like, even when doing so doesn't make any sense in the game. I think they do so people they don't like the looks of the person - ugly, geeky and fat people face the brunt of this. I think some part of it goes to their lack of grasp on the game: if you don't know how to enhance your position in the game then just spend moves sabotaging the person you dislike. Some part of it also goes to the design of the game: some of the games have the identities or resources of players hidden, so given a lack of knowledge you just have to randomly target someone first. But underneath all that is I think the drive to always congregrate in groups and adopt a hostile-first approach to outsiders - tribalistic behavior, we might say. We can only hope that as people advance in age they become less parochial.

On another note: Xenophobia in general is unjustified; but sometimes the issues xenophobics raise are valid issues. More precisely: the cause of xenophobia is unjustified. But the consequent issues that some xenophobics raise (that is, an effect of xenophobism) might be valid concerns. It is the effect of xenophobism that is the cause of more moderate positions. Take overcrowding as an example. Xenophobics may complain of overcrowding because they hate foreigners (usually for unjustifiable reasons). But overcrowding is the cause of why some other people may dislike foreigners. Because of this overlap, we might find that more moderate positions tend to get mislabelled as xenophobism.