I must confess that I have a few of games on my smart phone.
Okay, maybe a lot of games. I like variety in play. I have everything from
match 'em and crash 'em (Bejeweled), board games (chess and backgammon), to pop
'em and slop 'em games (Marble Saga), to kill 'em all (Galaxian and Meteorite).
When I sit down at my computer, I also like to play games,
online and on the computer. It alleviates the boredom of mass news media and
comic strips.
Twenty years ago, when playing solitaire, I would play until
the very end, letting the cards beat me over and over again. I would wait until
I was completely stumped and then shuffle the cards and try again.
When I was a child, playing Monopoly, Scrabble, Checkers,
and any other board game, we finished the game. If we lost, we bravely smiled
and congratulated the winner and vowed our revenge in the next game.
Today, when a game isn't going the way I want it to go on my
phone, or my computer, I close it. I "end task" on it.
The thing is that I am competing with the stats of the game.
If I end the game before I lose, then it doesn't alter my stats. That's all
that counts, right?
I remember watching my younger cousins play Super Mario
Brothers. I would watch as one of them strived for unattainable goals like
getting the coins from an un reachable spot, or getting an extra life with an
incredible jump.
There is nothing more demeaning, in a electronic game, when
you are going for that unattainable goal and you lose a life.
I would watch as they would close out of the game, even
though they had plenty of lives left, and then they would start all over again.
Going for the unattainable goals. Making the un-jumpable jumps.
I have thought about these things a lot recently, and my own
obsession for beating these games. I have had 20 years of conditioning with the
computer age, and now the smart phone and tablet age.
The computers have become the perfect opponent. With no
human brain or fast reflexes, it can whoop us simply through its programming.
So technically, there is no way to actually beat the game all the time, so we control
the only thing we can: The Stats.
We close out before defeat. We undo the moves that no human
competitor would ever let us do. We get our do-overs, when life has no
do-overs.
We have had so many new parenting techniques emerge over the
years: Don't spank your children, DO spank your children. Humiliate your
children in public, DON'T humiliate your children in public. Control your
children through firm discipline, let your children make their mistakes. Don't
give your children too much praise, there is no such thing as too much praise
when raising children.
Personally, I believe that parents need to be open to
different personality types needing different raising techniques. But that's
another thought in the distant future.
The reality is that maybe it's not the parents that have
created this Entitlement Generation. Maybe the biggest lesson that ever needed
to be taught has been a lesson that has been taken away from children... The
Lesson of Losing.
In turn, losing this valuable lesson is not the fault of any
parent, but the fault of allowing computers and smart phones to teach our
children the right way to lose: Being a good sport, even when you just feel
like bitch-slapping someone.
So I made a resolution yesterday to let my smart phone win.
I am going to continue playing solitaire even when it looks like a sure loss. I
am going to ignore the stats. I never kept a win loss score on paper when I was
playing cards by hand. I shuffled after my loss, and I tried again. And this is
what I will do to recondition myself to the fact that life is full of losses.
And get over it...
