Searls of Wisdom for June 2023

This month, I wrote 3500 words for you about my life—a Searls of Wisdom record! But, unfortunately, things got a bit too softwarey for these parts, so we're going to put it on the Test Double Blog instead. (Stay tuned—hopefully we'll have it up in the next week.)

So now I gotta come up with something else to write about. You people pay good money (lol) for this monthly newsletter and another month has elapsed. That's why I'm going to write about something so unrelated to software that Test Double can't claim dibs on it: video games!

Which, yes, I realize. Also software.

I grew up around games. My dad and his business partner had been living together as housemates before I was born and I want to say they had a Magnavox Odyssey? My grandpa (mom's dad) stood in line to buy a TI 99/4A the day it launched, and I remember thumbing through multiple paperback books of source code for games you had to type in yourself to play (for lack of any other way of loading software onto it, unless you bought the external cassette tape player). My other grandpa (dad's dad) was an executive at Ohio Art, and though he passed away when I was still a toddler, he left me a limited edition Etch A Sketch Animator that I really loved creating terrible animations with.

So from a very young age, not only did electronic games feel normal, but exceptionally weird electronic games felt normal.

Like many privileged white boys raised in the US midwest in the '80s (the "Ready Player One" generation), I grew up playing countless games across every platform and genre. My taste in games evolved rapidly, but settled into a pretty consistent groove by the time I was… 10 years old? And it hasn't changed much since. Yes, that is embarrassing. But in hindsight, I'm super fortunate to have figured out how to use games to flex mental muscles I otherwise wouldn't have, especially at such a young age. Today I can point to countless ways games had a positive impact on my development into an adult human person as well as in how they help me regulate my daily mood and mindset.

This is worth illustrating with examples, because the above won't make much sense to someone who isn't a (ugh) "gamer". But even if you play a lot of games, the stories below might inform how you pick the next one from your backlog.

Without further ado, six video games that influenced me:

• The Sims: I had a peculiar playstyle: create a family, turn off Free Will, pause the game, and then queue up a half day's worth of activities for each Sim at a time, minimizing collisions by carefully coordinating who'll be doing which activity, in what room, and when. All in service of accelerating each individual Sim's career development in order to maximize household income. The isometric dollhouse view and the row of tiles representing queued actions imprinted on me somehow, because I still basically live my life this way: planning out my next ten or so actions to accomplish tasks as efficiently as possible. I didn't become a neat freak over night, but when I was struggling to juggle my college coursework with taking care of myself, having played The Sims helped me develop highly-productive habits around the house
• Pokemon Blue: the phenomenon surrounding this game struck at the perfect time, because enough of my classmates were playing it that I was able to trade my way to collecting all 151 Pokemon. I became a broker by putting myself in the middle of every transaction—convincing Jamie to temporarily take my (garbage) Ratatat for his Tauros so I could trade it to my friend Alex for his Golduck, before giving the Golduck to Jamie the next day. They both got what they wanted and I filled my Pokédex in the process. Early insights about the power of positive-sum outcomes like this are probably why I've never seen cut-throat competition as a virtue and why I'm always happy to connect others to opportunities even if I see minimal (if any) immediate benefit myself.
• Earthbound: Its story arc is no more sophisticated than any other early '90s-era console RPG, but its quirky modern-day setting and deployment of irreverent humor got its hooks so deep in me that I remember every single plot beat despite only playing the game twice. Every time I'd start to feel bored, I'd find a monkey asking for bubble gum so he could fly onto the head of the Loch Ness Monster and sail away. The game also used irreverence as a shortcut to establishing a genuine emotional connection with the player. Earthbound taught me that when your default tone is silly and you keep the stakes low, you'll catch others off guard in moments of seriousness—their weight breaking through when an earnest and direct approach wouldn't
• Harvest Moon: Time moves fast in Harvest Moon, with each in-game day lasting only a few minutes. As such you have to plan certain kinds of actions "hours" in advance, others need several days notice, and certain actions might have to wait entire seasons. If I want to plant potatoes tomorrow, I need to spend most of today buying seeds, or I won't have time to both harvest and plant in a single day (losing a day of income). The game's 2-year time limit turned wealth accumulation into an urgent concern, and gave me a surprisingly durable intuition about capital's compounding effects: the more you plant, the sooner you'll have cash for chickens, the more income those chickens will generate, the sooner you'll have cash for cows. Not too proud to admit that everything I know about farm and non-farm-related personal finance, I learned from a 16-bit farming sim. (I have been accused of min-maxing my way through life as if I'm playing Harvest Moon or Stardew Valley more than once.)
• Elite Dangerous: I've always loved optimistic sci-fi worlds where I could envision life among the stars. So when I bought my first VR headset, I immediately installed Elite Dangerous and flew from space station to space station to understand how the game's economy worked. That's right, in a universe where I could have been a combat pilot, or an explorer, or a space pirate, I started a completely above-board space truckin' business. The game's surprisingly-complex commodities market had me creating spreadsheets to track constantly-changing prices in order to design multi-system trade routes (buying Insulating Membranes here to trade for Food Cartridges there, and so on). Additionally, to understand the profitability of any given trade, one had to factor in the distance and security risk of each route (as well as the local price of fuel and cost of repairs, respectively). Making complex decisions that hinge on multiple variables doesn't come naturally to me, but Elite tricked me into regularly weighing so many qualitative and quantitative factors that the skill transferred to my working life (the thought of drawing conclusions from financial data no longer terrifies me!)
• Shenmue: This game painted such a realistic portrait of slow-paced, everyday life in Japan that I'm not sure a real week-long vacation would be capable of leaving as strong an impression. If your family is rushing through train stations from Tokyo to Kyoto to Osaka, you probably won't have time to notice the catchy little jingle that plays at the convenience store. Or the jingle that plays in the slot house. Or the jingle that plays every night at 5pm over the town's emergency speakers. The game's presentation of such a radically different daily existence in a suburban town broadened my perspective by proving that many seemingly-constant details of my own suburban existence were actually highly variable. I'm honestly not sure I'd have taken a semester abroad if I hadn't played Shenmue—which makes it a pretty significant fork in the road, since living in Japan is a big reason I got into Ruby

Over the years, I've observed that the things I do in my leisure time seem to carry on an unconscious dialog with the activities I occupy myself with at work. When my work is repetitive and draining, I seek out narrative experiences in games that help me shift contexts and escape a bit. When I'm working on something speculative and abstract without a visceral sense of progress each day, then a mindless grind in a braindead MMO like Star Wars: The Old Republic can be enough to at least feel like I'm making forward momentum to keep trudging along tomorrow.

Once I gained an awareness of this, I started planning how to spend my evenings and weekends as carefully as I plan my workdays. The particular way every activity fuels and fatigues me can be paired with a complementing activity to arrive at a kind of exertion equilibrium. It's normal to consider how leisure activities interact with our needs (dinner before movie) and it's normal to do the same for work (creative before email), but it's less normal to consider how they might interact with each other (spreadsheets before bedsheets?). This realization unlocked my efforts to find a healthier balance in my energy levels and mindset each day, though it has come at the cost of blurring the lines between life and work more than I'd like.

The late Roger Ebert claimed games could never be art, and it made some people mad, but then he died in order to ensure nobody could prove him wrong (which is a level of commitment I can respect). But today's reflection has me wanting me to flip this on its head and ask: what's so great about art? (Please don't take offense at this, I'm actually a long-time art critic… as in, I've always been critical of whether art is worth anyone's time.) But seriously, asking myself the question made me realize I most appreciate art that combines (or is constrained by) practical utility, the same way games express their design through (or in spite of) user interactivity. Complex, dynamic works seem like a higher form of creativity than purely static ones, but what do I know.

Ok good talk. So what else happened in June?

I'm disappointed to say I don't have much to show for June. Not because I used up all my content juice on last month's Ruby Kaigi Field Report, but because the first thing I started working on has managed to take me more than a month to finish. So this'll be brief.

In the first half of June, I got to attend my 20th high school reunion, and it was awesome! We never had a 10th and I doubt we'll have a 30th, but it was such a treat to catch up with so many of the people I grew up with. The trip confirmed my suspicions that I graduated with some unusually brilliant, interesting classmates.

Speaking of reunions, Test Double had its first in-person retreat since January 2020 this month and I was shocked to discover that we've more than doubled in size! It was so great to see so many folks in person after so many years of Zoom calls—although I'm still adjusting to finally knowing how much taller (or shorter) everyone is than I thought.

This month, I also had a personal goal to get through this newsletter without mentioning Artificial Intelligence or the Apple Vision Pro and I just came so close to succeeding! Next time!

Okay, let's call it. Whatever you got up to in June, I hope it was great! And if you have any feelings about video games that you want to share, mash that reply button and let me have'm.