Are video games the new spectator sport?

For those who are looking for it, the news is everywhere: video games are becoming the new spectator sport. The signs have been there for years, although they were subtle in many cases. I saw them in my own family room, with my kids sitting together and watching each other play. I always thought "how boring," and dismissed it, thinking my kids were probably the only weirdos who would sit and watch other people play a video game that they themselves weren't playing.

But when I think about it, how many times did I stand in an arcade, watching an expert player dominate Mortal Combat? (a lot.) If you ever saw the documentary King of Kong, you'll remember groups of people crowding around a Donkey Kong game, holding their breath as competitors beat level after level after level.

Just a couple years ago, I noticed another phenomenon. My kids were watching other people play video games on YouTube. Sometimes they watched to learn how to beat a level in a game they were struggling with. Sometimes, they just watched for fun. With the arcade gone and more players playing at home, YouTube became the place to observe and learn and go back to your Xbox and try again yourself.

But then, my kids weren't satisfied with just observing...they wanted to record themselves playing and share those videos too. New kinds of videos of game play emerged: color commentary! Some videos featured gamers recording their parents or grandparents playing, the ultimate noobs to laugh at. Other videos featured gamers whose funny quips and engaging personalities helped make them into celebrities in the gaming world. My kids started imagining themselves becoming YouTube stars, simply by recording the games they were playing.

I didn't have a name for this new genre of entertainment, but yesterday saw this article about arenas where you can observe video gamers competing. The term, I found out, is esports, and it's becoming huge. Want more evidence? Game developers and even colleges are now awarding scholarships to top gamers, recruited to play on the school's esports team.

"WHAT?!?! Shut the front door!" (This is an exact quote from me, as I forwarded the story link to my teenagers...)

But if you think about it, it makes sense...while kids used to spend hours and hours on the basketball court practicing to make it into the NBA (some still do, for sure), more and more kids are spending time in League of Legends or Minecraft. It logically follows that stars would emerge and systems to reward the best gamers would be created. And, as we do with professional basketball players, we want to watch the best gamers compete and flex their finely tuned hand/eye coordination against each other.

I'm not sure that we'll see our cities' football stadiums converted to gaming stadiums any time soon, but don't count out esports as our future national pastime.

All this useless beauty

I've been forming a realization lately, which either means that I'm gaining some form of enlightenment or I'm getting old (or both...it's probably not an either/or situation). I've been realizing that the Internet has become a source of frustration and disappointment.

Don't get me wrong, there are many reasons I love the Internet, even beyond funny cats. I can connect with people all over the world. I can save time and money doing research, planning, shopping and working. I can find information about just about ANYTHING that I want to know.

It's this last one that is actually pushing me over the edge. While I can find information on anything I want to know, it's often the case that that I get more information than I NEED to know. Finding what I want, when I need it, is priceless. Finding 1000x as much as I need and having to weed through it, or often getting distracted by it, costs me whatever time and money it might be saving me.

Worse, for every Upworthy-esque story I might read, there are just as many troll comments or Kardashian-bashing references. People say all kinds of mean things online, mostly to people they don't actually know, without thought to what the impact of their words are...or worse, with intent to hurt. The Internet is an amazing place and one that can suck the light out of you.

A few weeks ago, I got a song title stuck in my mind: All this useless beauty. It's a song by Elvis Costello. I read somewhere that he wrote it after watching people's reaction to art in a gallery, but it wasn't the song that got me...it is that one lyric, the title: all this useless beauty.

I live in an ridiculously beautiful place now and it often amazes me how many people who have lived here for a long time stop seeing and appreciating how beautiful it is. I can round a corner on the freeway in the morning and see the waves crashing against the sand, palm trees framing the Santa Barbara shoreline and I literally stop breathing for a second and sometimes some interjection escapes my lips, unintended. It is that beautiful.

All this useless beauty.

What good is this amazingly beautiful place if people don't appreciate it and protect it? What use is beauty if it doesn't inspire us to do good?

I'm starting to feel the same way about the Internet. There is beauty in the Internet, in what it can do to make the world better. There is connection and emotion and yes, even love. And yet, there is so much ugliness and hate and pain and despair and injustice that it has begun to eat away at me. It can paralyze me and it can distract me from the things that bring me joy and inspiration.

I can only make the world better if I can focus on the beauty. Because for me, it's not useless. It inspires action. It inspires hope. It spurs me on when I'm feeling discouraged. It reminds me that life is beautiful. The Internet has become a place where it's harder and harder to find the beauty, masked over and over again by the ugly. It's not the Internet's fault; the Internet is not the bully. People are. People who hurt and use this tool, this forum, this technology, to spread negativity and banality. The Internet has become the focus of that song lyric for me: all this useless beauty.

I'm going to do something about it. I'm going to step away from the things that distract me and focus on what inspires me. I'm focusing my energy on appreciating and protecting the beauty of the Internet and I'm letting it inspire me to do good. I have a plan, so stay tuned. The Internet doesn't have to be useless beauty.

.

The happy revolutionary

I read an article yesterday on the 21 Habits of Supremely Happy People. It's a good list (and it wasn't a top 10 list, so that made me less suspicious). I've been thinking a lot about happiness lately, because I'm pretty ridiculously happy. It's taken me a long time to get here and there were a lot of missteps and big ol' mistakes that I made along the way. But here I am! Happy! And yet...

There's a big part of my personality that has always been perpetually dissatisfied. These are the parts that want to make the world better. These are the parts that want to call out injustice, the parts that get angry at the liars, the cheaters, the bullies, the mysogynists. These are the parts that want to take on new challenges. These are the parts that want to write books and start new ventures and fight against a broken status quo. The dissatisfied parts of myself are the parts that have pushed me to do the things of which I'm most proud.

Should we want to be supremely happy? Can we reconcile the complacency and contentment that comes with happiness with a desire to change the world? Can we be revolutionaries and still be happy?

I'm struggling with this. There are some days that contentment wins, and I embrace this wonderful time in my life with gratitude and appreciation. And then...the inevitable guilt: I'm not doing enough. I should be doing more. Am I wasting my life?

There are some days that the revolutionary wins. I write, I plot, I rally the troops. I get shit done. But I long to just be in the moment, to stop and read or listen to the waves or watch old Farscape episodes and just be happy.

I don't know that there's an answer, or that I'm asking a question. I do know that just being "supremely happy" or only focusing on changing the world would both leave me unsatisfied. So the eternal struggle for me is being a happy revolutionary: embracing happiness without being a sheep, changing the world without letting it jade me. 

Misery loves company

My second service as Worship Associate at USSB is this Sunday, and since we're still in the month-long theme of "despair," my reflection is another serious one (I really hope my next service's theme is "joy" or "love" :)! The theme this week is "Misery Loves Company" and I'm posting my reflection here.

I have a friend I refer to as Eeyore. Eeyore, if you know the character from Winnie the Pooh, always sees the clouds instead of the sunshine. Despite her gloomy outlook, I know I could count on her to be there for me whenever I need her, because she has been. She's the friend who's known me the longest and best, the friend who no matter what life threw at us, I knew we'd be there to hold each other up. For years, through budding careers, new marriages, new babies and world travel, we shared in each others' lives and struggles.

Our friendship was easy when times were good. We seemed to run on parallel tracks and these connections of work, marriage and motherhood kept us bonded as we traveled down our happy paths, finding support and love and sisterhood in our shared experiences. 

Then, slowly, life wasn't so happy anymore for either of us. We shared in this transition too. Eeyore embraced our time together as a place where all of her grievances against life could be shared. Every interaction with her, every girls' night out, every "catch up" lunch was filled with a laundry list of everything bad in her life. Her ex is crazy. Her other friends don't call enough (I suspect I don't either). She hates her job. She doesn't have enough money. She feels trapped in her new relationship. Her clothes are getting tight and she doesn't have enough time or will power to diet and exercise. She worries she's drinking too much. She wants to go on vacation but she doesn't have the time or money. 

There was a time, looking back on it, maybe too long of a time, when both of us participated in commiserating. I, too, had relationship drama, money problems, self-image issues. Our conversations, with each of us taking turns sharing our problems, were a safe place to work through all the bad stuff. We were both deep in places of sadness, grief, depression and with each other, we didn't have to hold back or pretend that everything was ok. Neither of us were fine and it seemed like our friendship was the one place where we could embrace where we were without shame or guilt or ego. 

And then something changed. More accurately, I changed. It wasn't enough for me to talk about the bad stuff anymore; I wanted to do the work to make things better. I started focusing on the good things in my life and realized that even in the darkest hours, there were still good things - lots of them. I started moving on. It didn't happen all at once, but I noticed that when we met for lunch, I'd start feeling frustrated or annoyed, maybe at her or maybe at myself reflected in her, that every conversation was a repeat of the last. We had been stuck in despair together, a support system for each other when it seemed like no one was listening. But I wanted out. I had hope. It was becoming clear to me that she didn't.

There are certain crossroads that we come to that are so subtle that we don't even realize we've past them until we're well down our new path. So it was with Eeyore and I. I had taken a sharp left at some point while she was forging straight ahead. My new path was lifting me up and my heart was becoming lighter. Every day it was easier to breathe. Talking to her was a harsh and unwelcome reminder of where I had been and where I didn't want to be again.  It felt like she was clinging to me, trying to hold me down with her as I was struggling to claw my way up. The very things that had drawn us together and strengthened our friendship were the things that were making it impossible for me to maintain it. 

When I would talk about selling my company, she’d answer “it must be nice for you. Too bad I’m stuck in my job forever.” If I’d bring up the cooperative parenting my ex and I had established, she would invariably respond with a story of her ex’s attempts to disrupt her efforts to have a peaceful relationship for the sake of their kids. She seemed to be bitter, almost angry, that my life was getting better while she still felt stuck. I started to feel guilty that I could see the silver linings when she could only see the clouds.

I tried to lift her up with me, encouraging her to try new strategies: take a class! Stop responding to your ex’s abusive emails! Let’s plan a trip! Let’s go shopping! Her answer to everything was “I can’t.”

It is hard to let someone you love move on without you and it’s difficult to leave someone behind. I finally had a glimpse of light and I needed to grab it without a shadow eclipsing its warmth and promise. Eeyore and I stopped getting lunches. I suspect that as difficult as it was for me to hear her continued despair, it was just as difficult for her to see me happily moving forward. We each needed a different validation and our parallel paths had diverged so much that we couldn’t see each other reflected in our own lives and experiences any more.

I still feel the loss of our friendship. There are things I’ve wanted to share with her, happy things and yes, new sadnesses and frustrations, too. Our conversations now are strained, shallow – only touch points of the realities of our daily lives. While I know Eeyore values our friendship as much as I do,  we both seem to have come to the place where we know that we need to love each other from a distance to allow ourselves to grow beyond the things that once bonded us together.

There is mourning that comes with letting go of despair; the mourning of what you lose when you let go of the people who once held you up but have begun to hold you back. As we move past despair, we grow and evolve and our hopes and dreams change. We should hold the people who have helped us get there in our hearts, even if, for awhile, we cannot hold their hands. 

Competencies as achievements in the game of life

As another follow up to my participation at TechKnowledge this year, I tackled some big ol' buzz words today on the Ayogo blog: learning experiences, activity streams, and game mechanics. 

My brain works at intersections and these are three major concepts that seem to be moving towards a perhaps inevitable conclusion: technology already exists to build personalized curriculum, but the challenge is, can we DESIGN to support it? 

Looking forward to your thoughts...and more panel discussions with my co-conspirators, Aaron Silvers and Reuben Tozman. 

Activity leads to...everything

Several years ago now, I was taking on sales responsibilities as part of my job. I had never sold anything before and I had no idea how to do it. My mentor and then boss, Kevin Kruse (@kruse), wisely advised me "activity leads to sales." His point, as I understood it...you won't sell anything if you're not actively trying to sell things. With enough activity, opportunities come your way and eventually that leads to sales. 

I've found over the years that his advice isn't just relevant to sales. Activity leads to opportunity, change, and growth. I'm not talking about random or unstructured activity...I'm advocating strategic activity, activity backed by a plan and purpose. The most successful people I know are the people who throw themselves out there, take risks, make mistakes and keep moving forward. With their activity, new options and opportunities present themselves, their plans and activities change and expand as they accomplish their goals, and they are constantly evolving. 

Evolution is the ultimate change. Change is constant, but evolution is not...evolution is a fundamental change in form or structure, a change that is an improvement, that demonstrates an adaption to context and environment. Activity is the catalyst to change, to adaption and to evolution. Without activity, there is little chance of accomplishing your goals, fewer chances to try new things, fewer opportunities to learn new skills. 

Activity leads to everything. So, what are you doing?

Thanks to Marcia Conner for the tweet that inspired this post:

@marciamarciaMarcia Conner

Achievement seems to be connected w/ action. Successful ppl keep moving. They make mistakes but don't quit. Conrad Hilton