video games | Learning is Change

Question 265 of 365: How many pieces am I playing with?

Published on September 22, 2010, by Ben Wilkoff in 365 Questions, Blog.

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Chess has a certain amount of pieces, as does every other game that I can think of. If you put too many pieces on the board it doesn’t look right and you can’t play. Having too many pawns makes moving around the board more difficult and having two queens on one side would be a most cruel advantage. Games are set up so that each person has an equal chance to win, so long as they have the skills. We don’t put more pieces on the board just because we want to. We don’t take them off just because it makes the space look prettier. We have to earn each piece that we take. The winning moves are precise and exacting. The right amount of pieces is required to pull off any kind of upset or comeback. These are just givens.

And yet, I can never seem to keep track of all of them. I sacrifice valuable pieces just so I can see the board better. I trade them because it makes sense at the time and I think it is moving me ahead, but later I regret it. I can’t do 15 possible moves in my head because I don’t know what the other person is going to do with their pieces. I can’t keep track of the relationships and the distance between the pieces. They all seem to jumble together into these fits of excitement that lead to their own destruction, without strategy of coherence. I am not orchestrating a win so much as I am hoping that my positioning and outward confidence is somehow hiding my complete lack of experience or research.

I am lining my pieces up for the game that will ultimately decide what my future looks like. They all look good right now, and I’m hoping it holds. I am reading the instructions for the hundredth time, but with each conversation I have about the way this game is supposed to be played, I notice that I need specific techniques and to think through every move before I make it. Others can see the board too, and I am looking to them for advice. It is my responsibility to set it up, but I feel like each move is being crowd sourced.

That is how I am going to keep track of all these pieces. That is how I am going to make sure that I am playing the right ones at the right time. I won’t bring my queen out too early, because she is one piece that I will never sacrifice. I have to send out my pawns as scouts to see just what is out there. I will castle at the right time, moving myself away from danger. I will strike and set up gambits that are too enticing not to take advantage of. And my faceless opponent will have little choice but to confront all of the pieces that I have set up. They will have to engage my contributions and they will have to give something up in order to get access to anything else I have to offer.

In short: I will win.

I will win because I have all of my pieces in place. I will win because of everyone giving me resources and knowledge and knowhow. And, I will win because there is no alternative for me. It can’t shirk away and I can’t come back later. The game is happening now, and the game clock has started.

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Question 200 of 365: Are we on a roll, taking roll, role models, rolling the dice or just rolls of toilet paper?

Published on July 20, 2010, by Ben Wilkoff in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.

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We worry about being fathers. We worry about being sons. About being employees and entrepreneurs. We worry about the things that we are and what we will never be. But I don’t care abut the roles we are prescribed or the ones that we take on over time.

Perhaps it is more important to be on a roll. It so happens that I am on one so that makes sense that I would hold it in higher esteem. In 200 days, I have asked questions and sought guidance. I have commented and collected. Not being done is the best part about being on a roll, too.

Taking roll was never my favorite part of teaching, but I do find it convenient now to see exactly when all of the people I have become are present. Every once in a while, I just look around the room to see if I am still here. As it turns out, I am.

And the role models: The ones I actually look up to are the ones that surprise me. I want those that do not fit into any role at all, other than that of interesting and passionate. For in those two things, I find that we are all fodder for progress.

I’m betting on consistency winning everyone over. I’m putting my future on the line because I promised myself that nothing would be too sacred to not let it ride one more time. This roll of the dice is special, even beautiful.

It is okay that people wipe themselves with what I care about. So long as they find it useful, I have done much of my work well. Now, only if I could get people to see just how clean these ideas will get you.

I am most a roll of toilet paper because everything else is too removed from the truth. If we do nothing else except for wipe away the worst excrement, then we will have fulfilled our role perfectly. The other rolls and roles don’t matter.

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Question 192 of 365: Where is the crazy?

Published on July 12, 2010, by Ben Wilkoff in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.

: Image by jah~ off n on via Flickr

Crazy people are everywhere. Not just the run of the mill crazy, either. I’m talking about completely out of their head insane, unable to reason their way through modern daily life, wringing their hqnds of all connection to reality, playing the fool way too well for it to be considered acting.

The reason I mention this is simply because I don’t think I have been doing a good enough job of rooting out the crazy in my life. Not for years, in fact.

When I was about 14 or so, I realized that being bored was a choice. I realized that I didn’t have to sit through whatever someone was talking about without letting my mind wander on to more interesting and productive things. Whenever I was alone and had little to do, I would just start writing. Whenever I was in the presenence of a boring subject, I would read or doodle. People who kept on complaining of boredom just weren’t interesting to me. Whqt I realize now is that they are, in fact, crazy. Or, they are about to become crazy.

It is my belief that crazy is a result of not thinking enough or not being able to find something engaging to occupy your time. Not having passion is just plain crazy. And it leads people to do the worst things imaginable.

Like blaming folks for how they try to experience the world around them. Like shaming others for grieving or for feeling or for thinking about much of anything at all. Passionless people are incapable of perspective, and that is what makes them crazy. It is also how you can pick them out of a lineup.

Sitting in a meeting or even in talking to a relative, if you get the sense that someone else can’t consider another point of view, you may want to check their crazy level.

We used to play this game called colored eggs on thenplayground in elementary school. It was a type of tag, where everyone would line up and think of a color out of a typical crayon box (64 crayons being the max that we thought was okay to try for) and then one person would stand opposite of the line and start to guess all of the colors. If the person guessed one of the person’s colors that was standing on the line, the person whose color was guessed would have to run to the other side of the playground without getting tagged. If the person was caught, they would become one of the taggers until there wasn’t anyone left on the line.

There was one boy who never chose any different colors. He always picked the same one: goldenrod. He thought that he was so brilliant in his choice that he would brag to everyone else at lunch about it. He would say, “you are never going to guess what I’m going to be today.” and then when we got out on the playground, the guesser would inevitably go through the more common colors first to try and get as many people off the line as possible. And there this boy would stand, completely confident that he was going to outlast everyone.

He never did, by the way. To my knowledge he never technically won the game. More of the time, he would claim victory because we had to go in from recess and he would still be on the line. We never guessed goldenrod because we didn’t much care about capturing him. We didn’t understand why he didn’t pick a different color so that he could play the tag part of the game. That was the fun part. Thqt was the part that got your heart pumping, that actually helped you to make friends.

When I look back on it now, I can tell that the boy was crazy for choosing goldenrod every day. He was crazy because he had to have his way rather than to join in. He had to have the obscure color rather than learn what the game was about.

The crazy is in each of us, when we find we are in a rut. It is in us when we are stubborn. It is in us when we stop looking around and seeing the differences between us that make us interesting enough to want to sit down and talk to. It is us when we allow ourselves to be bored.

I need to do a better job of rooting out my crazy, whether that is within myself or in the people around me. Otherwise, I might as well be choosing the same color for every day of my life.

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Question 122 of 365: Who yells out during a live recording?

Published on May 3, 2010, by Ben Wilkoff in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.

: Image by commondream via Flickr

One of my favorite bands of all time is Ben Folds Five. There was always a certain nerdiness that went along with listening to them that I never really could explain away. The one song that resonated with me longer than any other during early high school was “underground.”

It is a song about not fitting in as well as about finding a niche somewhere within which to be happy. While I no longer feel the need to seek out the underground of life in order to be accepted, there is a part of the song that continues to intrigue me. At the beginning of the song, Ben Folds does some spoken word magic to tell the audience about how he was never cool in school. In the studio version of the song, everything goes swimmingly and the song begins on cue. However, in the live version on Naked Baby Photos, there is an incredibly inarticulate heckler that screams out reactions to Ben’s statements. Things like, “who the ______ are you” are given their own time and space on the record. They are paid as much respect as the song itself, in fact they have mostly changed the song for me in that I can’t even play the studio version without his harsh words making their way into my mind. It makes me even more uncomfortable each of the times I have seen them live when they play this song. Other folks have tried to mimic this character hundreds of times, and I can’t imagine just how annoying it has all become for Ben.

And that is why I wonder who the person is that is willing to ruin a song and an experience for millions of people. I wonder just who is able to put themselves out there on the side of forgettable discourse. I wonder who is even thinking about placing themselves in fronton the world just to tell everyone that their worth can be summed up in leaving a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.

And ye tit is this very phenomenon that is stilting our ability to go on the record for much of anything. It is the fact that we know that almost everything is being taped for posterity that makes us not want to yell out at all. We don’t want to be put into the meeting minutes as having a contrary opinion. We don’t want to be recorded in a webinar as going against what is being officially proposed. Conference calls are even worse because the action items almost never resemble exactly how harsh or interesting the actual recording would have been.

We don’t shout out loud anymore knowing that we could be influencing the mixing of information for years to come. We find satisfaction in an approximation of what we said or worse still, in self-censorship. The gag reflex kicks in way too early for everything that we do now that being a part of a lasting record doesn’t really seem like an option.

Our options have been whittled down to staying silent or becoming q chorus of similar voices. We become the audience for a cult of personality, instead of leading our own performances that may conflict with the stated purpose of the event.

Now I am not sanctioning heckling or yelling out profanity at those who are willing to be up in front of others, what I am simply suggesting is that it should be possible for us to scream out valid critiques of what is going on. Not only possible, but necessary. And, I am not talking about Twitter. You can yell out profanity in that microblogging service easier than broadcasting it any other way, but there is very little chance of it being mixed down into the final version of those events as you have stated it.

Rather, I am talking about yelling out in person. I think that it is all about push back. It is all about going on the record as asking questions and providing solutions. It is about being loud about your reservations for the topic at hand.

Because at the end of the day, you don’t want anyone to be able to think about the events you shared without hearing your reaction to them in their head. That is the real stickiness: to be remembered in the context of important work.

While the heckler in “Underground” has ruined the beginning of the song for me forever, It gave me the opportunity to question just what I believe about the words being said. Because of him, I may have figured out just how unimportant underground ideas really are (at least ones that stay there).

Saturday Night Video: Ben Folds Live Chatroulette Improv (benzinga.com)

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Question 11 of 365: Why does the world need perpetual beta?

Published on January 11, 2010, by Ben Wilkoff in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.

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Beta testing used to be something that a few early adopters did. It used to be a big deal to be a “beta tester.” I remember applying to become a beta tester when I was in the 8th grade for Epic MegaGames, the creators of Unreal (although, I was wanting to beta test things like Jazz Jackrabbit and Jill of the Jungle). I went through quite a process of Non-disclosure forms and written interviews. After all, I was getting to see a product long before others were. In fact, the process was so long (about 2 months), that I got fed up with it just as they sent me the final Beta Tester Contract and I never saw a single game before it was released.

Now though, there is almost never even an application to be a beta tester. It has become something that everyone does. The word beta is attached to products for much longer than was ever thought reasonable (gmail was in beta for 5 years). Why has this shift occurred, and more importantly, why is it a good thing?

It is my contention that everyone should be a beta tester and that perpetual beta should be the norm.

Beta teaches us that we are never finished, that there is always something to do better. It teaches us that we are all fallible and that we all make mistakes. Beta asks for a community to be formed to discuss what is working and what isn’t. Beta requires feedback. Perpetual beta means that new discoveries are around every corner. It shows that single contributions can have a great affect on the overall experience for millions of people. It allows us to become better. It also allows us to fail.

So, why not put beta on other institutions besides software? Why can’t we call our schools “beta” and our students, “beta testers”? Why can’t we call our Government “beta”? Doesn’t saying that our educational systems and our systems of government are finished products seem a little arrogant? If we were to apply the label to more than just software, I believe that many more people would feel comfortable to try new things and get feedback for those things.

I realize now that when I was in the classroom, I really did think about my students as beta testers for their own learning. They were trying out hypotheses and seeing what feedback I would give them. They would change drastically from version to version sometimes, but would always settle on who they really were. Their user interface would get reinvented every single day, but their bugs were never so terrible as to get them shelved.

Perhaps the metaphor is stretched a little thin here, but I think that if we could show just how much beta has done for the american psyche (not having to be perfect at every step, learning from mistakes, being innovative), I think that we may just have a chance to create change without having to dismantle entire systems. I think that a big rubber stamp should be fashioned with that iconic word for our time and we should apply it to anything that doesn’t already have the moniker. Because whether we believe it or not, if you don’t say you are in beta, you are just fooling yourself.