Isn't it strange that we feel comfortable and even positive about dressing children up in clothes worn by people from a different culture or religion, but clothes from a different gender is taboo?

IMAGINE: What if there were something as the "freedom of censorship" where you have a legal right realized through laws and technology to at a personal level completely remove all news and speech surrounding an individual, organization, or government?

What I learnt from Second Son

Just completed my first ever console game, and thought I feel uniquely qualified to write something about it, having 3 decades - including 1 year in the games industry -  successfully avoiding seriously playing any game. I used to dismiss the whole gaming thing on two reasons - 1) you will never get anything useful out of it 2) it's a waste of time.

What made me change this was that I decided I wanted to try something I have never done in my life. Sure there are things like bungie jumping and stuff, but playing a game seemed something very accessible that weekend. Plus, I could do with better hand-eye coordination. So without second-guessing my decision, I went out and bought myself a PS4.

Did some rudimentary googling and decided to buy Second Son from the InFamous series. It's "action adventure" - action, meaning you fight people, adventure, meaning there's a storyline. Action would not have been the genre I'd enjoy ten years ago, but hey people do change. Since my ex-colleagues used to say games are like movies, I decided to go with the genre I have come to enjoy.

To cut the story short, let me spend the rest of this piece simply listing down what I have taken away from the game - and why it's not been a waste of time:

(1) I didn't know how bad my hand-eye coordination was
I use the computer extensively and my hands always get the work done more quickly than people can understand what I am doing on the computer. But I realized that what I had was not hand-eye coordination, but hand-mind coordination. I had a mental image of what reality was, and my hands responded very rapidly to what my mind was simulating. But the problem was, my visual feedback was kind of disconnected from the system. I processed visual stimulus more consciously than I needed to, and I found myself hitting all the wrong buttons. Not to mention, PS4 comes with the "DualShock 4" game controller which has two joysticks, one arrow pad for the 4 directions, four thumb-controlled action buttons, and four index-finger-controlled action buttons - on top of the non-gaming buttons which you don't want to accidentally press. It was kind of confusing in the beginning, but the controller itself was like another keyboard so my hand-mind coordination helped there, but it was the game itself - I saw the guy coming at me, but by the time I responded, I was dead.

(2) Motion Sickness
As mentioned earlier, the DualShock 4 has two joysticks. For some games you won't need both, but in 3D worlds, you'd use one to move your character around, and the other to move the perspective (ie, camera) around. Having to move the camera around was really new to me - I had dabbled in some 3D design moving viewports around, but not at this speed. Not at the speed where you needed to look up and down and behind you while at the same time running to stay alive. The first day on the game I felt a tad like vomiting - and realized it was motion sickness. My mind was not adjusted enough to handle such fast changes in visual input.

(3) Flexible two-way thinking
At some point I came to this stage I couldn't pass. It was here that instead of asking myself "how do I kill all these people?", I asked "what did the game designer put in here that would make my next task easy?". And after some time, instead of thinking "I'm gonna go all out and kill all these people" I started thinking "what is the most effective way out?"

(4) Fear is irrelevant most of the time
We are programmed to be afraid of being hurt, even when the possibility of getting hurt is tiny. This kind of took hold of me in the beginning - until I drilled it into myself that I can always try again. And trying again and again was in fact more efficient than being too careful in every try. Fear is useful in real-life life-and-death situations, but more often than not, it overpowers and hinders performance.

(5) Deteremination isn't half as good as enjoyment
At some point, even when you apply all the above, there's still some level that you can't seem to pass, because the enemy is just so powerful. You die again and again, and you play through the exact same scenes again and again, to the point when you realize you can make the character do exactly what he did the last time round. This gets interesting because on one hand, the game starts looking boring because you can't win - you can either choose to be determined, or, you can see it as you are learning the game so well you can practise it again and again - and enjoy while you get better at it. The determination approach would sounds like what parents want their kids to learn, but what's the point of buying a game at all, if not to enjoy?

And there you go. 5 key take-aways that helped me discover myself from something that happened in a virtual world, disconnected from even the internet. They say "disconnect to connect". In this case, it is strangely true.

Can't wait to go shopping for my next game!

Random thought: what if we abolished standardized testing and instead have education and learning psychology experts regularly observe every class (via drones) to check on how teachers teach and assess teaching methodology instead?

There's no such word as a teachee, because learning doesn't automatically happen in the presence of teaching. Physical training is a different story. That's why the word trainee exists.

It takes 2 hands to clap and 1 to slap. Thanking people around you doesn't mean you stop thanking yourself for being awesome.