Everything Is A Game (Here's How To Play) — Part II

III. Pattern Recognition

A boss launches a special attack at you. Unsure of how to evade or block this attack, you take moderate damage.

Here it comes again. It hits you again, but you notice that it's a low, sweeping attack and he performs a unique animation just before the attack begins.

Here it comes for the third time. The attack animation begins, warning you to prepare. As soon as you see him begin to swing his blade, you jump — successfully avoiding the attack.

That is pattern recognition.

It feels pretty good when you have a gaming moment like that, doesn't it?

It's because you learned. You connected some dots. Then, you took what you learned and applied it almost immediately, and you were positively rewarded for it. Or more precisely in this case, you at least avoided punishment (taking damage from the attack). While fear is a powerful emotion and drives much of our behavior, especially if we default to our more 'primal' responses, positive reinforcement is an equally powerful force.

When we do something that is positively reinforced with our desired outcome or some other reward, it stands out in our minds and it gets baked into our memory. Our brain associates the action that we did with the reward and the positive feelings surrounding it, and says "yeah, more of that please!"

Even though you might have messed up that part of the battle 30 times in a row, as soon as you get it right the first time (and it wasn't out of sheer luck; the first time you did it correctly and you know why and how you did it), it becomes a lot easier to keep getting it right.

That's because that one time you did get it right, your brain took a snapshot of exactly how it looked and felt when you got it right. It's true that being aware of what happened the other 29 times it didn't work also helps, and can sometimes lead you to success by process of elimination. But this process simply helps lead you to 'getting it done right once', which is really the thing that gets burned into your memory.

Pattern recognition feels good because we earned it, and we now feel more in control of the outcome of the situation. That second part is key; if we recognize the aforementioned attack pattern, dodge it seemingly perfectly and are somehow still hit by the move… It's infuriating. Either there's some bug in that section of the game or someone was lazy with designing hitboxes.

This is a micro-example of the Effort-Reward Match mentioned in Part I — we put in effort to recognize the attack pattern, we expect a reward… If the reward is there, it feels good. If it's not... feelsbadman.

Where else do you notice yourself using Pattern Recognition in your life?

What activities or areas of your life do you think you could make better use of Pattern Recognition?

What activities or areas of your life could you pay more attention to so that you can even notice patterns to begin with?

Perhaps by keeping a food journal for a week — writing down everything you eat and drink — you might notice that every time you eat a certain food, you seem to digest it well, it gives you good energy and your stomach feels 'light'. Pattern recognized.

Maybe you notice how much better your mood is after you exercise compared to before. Pattern recognized.

The more positive connections you can make to an action, the easier it is to reinforce and get yourself to keep doing it, without feeling like you have to 'force' yourself to do it.

An Aside on Positive Reinforcement

Oftentimes when we focus on 'don't do X thing' our attention gets drawn to the thing we're trying NOT to do. "Don't miss this free throw." "Don't get hit by this attack."

It's the whole "don't think about a pink elephant" thing.

I guarantee you just thought of a pink elephant, even though I said not to do it.

Seriously, stop thinking about the pink elephant.

Instead of drawing your attention to the negative/what you don't want ("Don't miss this free throw"), think of the thing you do want to happen ("Sink this free throw right down the middle of the net").

If you want someone to change their behavior, don't yell at them every time they do what you don't want them to do; instead, draw as little attention to it as possible or outright ignore it.

When they do something you want them to do, make a big deal about it and make sure they noticed that you noticed and that you care.

Their attention will be drawn to doing more of that positive thing, and they will naturally do the negative behavior less because they aren't even thinking of it, at least not as often as before.

Negative reinforcement & fear can work, at least on the surface and usually only temporarily. But it's a survival mechanism. It comes from a place of scarcity, fear and insecurity.

Positive Reinforcement is more resilient. It's a thriving mechanism. It comes from a place of abundance, love and trust.

IV. Strategy (and Synergy)

Strategy and Synergy are probably my two favorite concepts when it comes to video games. They are closely intertwined concepts though not entirely the same.

Strategy is the more overarching of the two terms, and is simply your overall plan to achieve a desired outcome. Oftentimes planning your strategy becomes an entire game within itself that you play before, during and after the actual game you're playing.

Perhaps you have built a Pokemon team designed with the overall Strategy of Stall: using defensively oriented Pokemon to absorb attacks and slowly whittle the opponent down through passive damage.

Or perhaps you're playing an RTS and your Strategy against a particular opponent is to harass and rush them so they are pressured into reactive and defensive play and struggle to carry out their own intended strategy.

In terms of aRPGs or MMOs, you can even think of your character build or even team composition as Strategy. You are constructing your team or designing your build in a specific, directed way to achieve the desired outcome of victory in a battle, raid, etc.

If you have 'no strategy', i.e. no thought went into your choices of gear, skills, team composition etc., you're probably not going to do very well — at least, not compared to how much better you would have done with a strategy.

But what makes for a 'good build', or a 'good team composition'?

This leads us into the second concept: Synergy.

It's hard to talk about Strategy without Synergy. Synergy is a large part of what makes a strategy good.

Synergy occurs when you combine two or more independent things and they produce a greater effect than the sum of their separate effects. A simple way to think of Synergy is simply "1 + 1 = 3".

We can look at another Pokemon team archetype to see Synergy in action.

Let's say we want to create a 'Sandstorm' team — a team that revolves around having the Sandstorm weather effect on the battlefield.

So, our Strategy is probably to find a way to create a Sandstorm, and use it to our advantage.

One of our favorite Pokemon is Excadrill, who just so happens to have an ability that doubles his speed while in a Sandstorm.

'That's perfect! Now, we just need a way to activate a Sandstorm…'

Well, there simply is a move called 'Sandstorm' that will do this. Excadrill can learn it, but he is meant to be dishing out damage at high speed, not wasting a turn setting up a Sandstorm and possibly getting KO'd in the process.

We could teach Sandstorm to a different Pokemon, but giving up a turn in Pokemon is huge, so we want to avoid doing so at all costs…

In comes Tyranitar's rocky ass.

He just so happens to have the Sand Stream ability, which immediately activates a Sandstorm as soon as he enters the battlefield — no setup turn required. This is insanely useful in its own right, and then you factor in that Tyranitar is an insanely powerful Pokemon itself (back in the day, anyway).

Your Sandstorm Strategy just got a lot better by having both of these Pokemon together on the same team. Both can be good in their own right, but they both make each other better, and make the team better as a whole, compared to if you only used one or the other.

That, my friend, is Synergy. And it's not just found in Pokemon, or just in video games. It is everywhere.

If you can come up with a Strategy or a Plan for something, there are synergies to be found. It just takes some time, critical thinking and experimentation to find them.

You can synergize your nutrition.

You can synergize your exercise program: you'll likely find that doing a little bit of conditioning and mobility alongside lifting weights will get you far better results than if you only did one or two of them.

You can synergize the way you work.

You can synergize your gaming.

You can synergize all of these areas of life with each other, so that your life as a whole becomes greater than the sum of each individual part.

Much like an aRPG character is limited in equipment slots, so are we limited in our time, attention and energy. This is why searching for Synergies is so important — so we can get more out of these precious limited resources.

Forget about just 'balancing' your life: work, family, fitness, hobbies and so on. You can make aspects of your life enhance one another.

You can take lessons you learn from a video game or any other hobby, and apply that lesson into your work, fitness, or anything else. You can also do it the other way around — using a lesson learned in work or fitness and applying it to a video game.

When we live our lives in this way — interconnecting all the things that make us who we are, rather than trying to keep them separated — our life becomes greater than the sum of its individual parts.

Our life becomes Synergized.

—Shane