Life is a Strategy Game, Too

Occasionally, I make reference to the fact that I play World of Warcraft. I generally use it as an example—something purely recreational, something I could cut out of my life in order to leave more time for art-making.

Not today though. Today I want to talk about my proclivity for gaming in the context of doing creative work. Don't worry, I'll keep it simple so you won't need to turn in your membership card to the Cool Kids Club at the end of this post.

For those not in the nerd universe, World of Warcraft is an online, multi-player game with more than 12 million subscribers as of this writing. Players create a character and enter into a virtual world where they can interact with various beings/creatures, complete a wide range of missions, join social groups with other players, and progress through a plot and leveling system sort of similar to Dungeons and Dragons.

The game has no end, really—to keep their loyal following addicted and paying their subscription fees, the game developers need to change the playing field from time to time.

Recently they introduced a new system for consuming your character's energy and converting it into abilities and attacks. Players now generate a secondary resource when their character performs certain actions, and consuming that secondary resource provides access to extra abilities.

I've been thinking a lot about this change to my game play, and I've concluded that it really jives with me. It encourages higher-level strategy and decision-making because you need to work out what ability is most appropriate for any given situation (lest you run out of resources before your task is complete), both in terms of short-term gains and long-term investment.

Sound familiar? We're all working with a very finite resource: time. Waking hours. Energy. We need to choose carefully what we do each day so we don't eat through all our time and conclude our evenings feeling exhausted but not having gotten what we needed out of life.

At the same time, we need to know what replenishes our stores in a more profound sense than just sleeping off a long day. We can't just pound away at our hardest, most productive work without a break. We'll burn out. I have to fight the urge to feel guilty every time I watch a movie or fire up a game on my computer. After all, shouldn't I be devoting every spare moment to my novel?

Despite my knee-jerk reaction, the answer is no. To spend creative energy, I have to generate it first. And sometimes unwinding and having a good time loosens my mind, lets me forget about the six stressful things happening at the office, and puts me in a frame of mind where I'm ready to sit down and work. It generates creative energy in the background so I have something to draw from later.

The more I play strategy games, the more I realize I never really stop playing. Life is all strategy, like the old adage says: don't work hard, work smart. We all start out with a unique set of resources, but it's how we invest them that makes all the difference in the world. And sometimes that investment means slipping replenishing activities into the rotation to make sure we have the creative energy to burn when it really matters.

Busy Summer

Things have been a little tough lately: lots of weekends away, the end of my online class looming close, WoW beckoning me to power through the home stretch to level 80.  So many distractions!

Tonight, I'm turning that around and putting off outlining my final project in favor of posting a little something on the blog.  Also, as I recently posted on Twitter, Hemmingway wrote 500 words per day.  500 words seems like hardly anything at all, and it makes me want to set a similar goal for myself.  However, I got to wondering, where does this leave me for editing?  Sometimes I'm doing a lot of cleanup work and might not make a net gain of 500 words even though I've written/revised that many.  This is a quandary, but on the bright side, I opened up my manuscript tonight and noticed 1000 words had jumped in there somehow!  I'm now up to 52,528.  In case you were wondering, here's the latest addition (comments welcome):

Bouncing Around, But Getting Things Done

Despite code red air quality alerts, unpleasantly hot (99°) temperatures, and a lack of sufficient air conditioning throughout my house, I made today's paid holiday hours productive ones.  This is encouraging, since the forecast is calling for highs of 103° for Tuesday and Wednesday.  Hopefully I'll be able to keep a positive outlook on life until things calm down (read: cool down) later in the week.

On the bright side, today felt more balanced than my life has in a long time.  I woke up in a good frame of mind, thinking about various professional development I've undergone lately, specifically where I've heard the words "don't fight yourself."  Clever girl that I am, I contemplated how I could apply this to my life at home, too.  I think ADD adults spend a lot of energy fighting our natures, and sometimes it's important to remember we need that energy for creating positive, self-affirming strategies for living our lives.

I'm past making excuses for my house: it has become a pit.  I love a clean, simple, orderly environment, so this makes me feel bad down to my core.  And since I've gotten behind on so much stuff, catching up seems positively overwhelming.  To make matters worse, the second I see clutter in the hallway, I tend to discount all my efforts in, say, our office.  Today I decided to be more reasonable, setting a goal of one room per day and no more.  So today I cleaned the bedroom, for real and true, and then accepted the fact that more work would lead to intense fatigue and eventually bad feelings about myself/the house/life in general.  Clutter in the hallway was okay, because it gets its own day (not today)!

This small victory really started me rolling, and after I was done I didn't go back to my reading for class (time for that later).  I took a break and played some WoW.  Then I went back to my reading, added 1000 words to my manuscript (exciting!), and took another WoW break.

I work best when my life is fragmented, likely because I lack the attention span for longer tasks anyway.  I get interrupted nonstop at work, but this rarely throws me off because, as I see it, I would have interrupted myself anyway.  My mind bounces from one thing to the next, and it's often best to preempt it if I can.  Forcing myself to work really hard on a single task (like cleaning out my basement) for a painfully long time leaves me feeling drained and often irrational.

Today, I encouraged myself to stop a task before I got super fatigued and celebrate my victory.  This left me feeling energized for the next activity, especially since I built in breaks for myself throughout the day.  In the end, I got an amazing amount of stuff done, including washing dishes, doing nearly all my reading for class this week, hitting level 75 with my druid, making my bedroom tidy and clean, and writing 1000 words on my novel.  Yay for days off from work!

Inspiration #12: Minimalism

We must first identify what's most important to us, what we're passionate about, what we want to spend our time on. And then we must focus on those things first.

But the distractions. They get in the way of this focusing, no?

-- mnmlist

Sometimes I think I work best with lots of distractions, when multi-tasking and/or facing a lot of demands.  We all went back to work today, and quite ironically that's when I finally felt productive and motivated and ready to work hard on my manuscript.  My life routine helps me focus, helps me prioritize important work -- because I have to.  Too much down time makes me listless, unmotivated.

At the same time, clearing distractions is essential: setting in-game alarms to make me aware of how much time I'm spending logged into World of Warcraft, grabbing my stack of note cards, and really getting ready to work.  The only real progress I made on my editing this week has been when I disappeared to my writing room with my notes and disabled the wireless adapter on my laptop.  No Skype, no Google Talk, no Facebook, no Script Frenzy information pages, no Twitter.  It's then that I worked peacefully and diligently, focusing on the task at hand until my time was up.

 

Inspiration #10: Team Sports

I know I just wrote "team sports," but don't run away!  I was sitting at the dinner table tonight looking at my guitar in the corner when I thought -- again -- about how unfortunate it is that I don't play more.  The thing is, playing guitar is sort of like snowboarding.  You can do tons of cool stuff, it's awesome fun, and everyone likes to watch you do it well, but behind the scenes you've got to log a lot of time falling down and not doing so great.


What makes it all worth it to me, though, is being on a team.  During my life I've run three miles every day to be the best I could be on a sports team, endured intense pain playing my violin through a shoulder injury in musicals and operas and orchestra concerts, logged hundreds of hours in World of Warcraft because I like the role I can play in a group with my friends.  


People sometimes call me anti-social, but the truth is when I push myself to excel at something, it's usually because I value my role in a team.  When our high school put on a fantastic performance of Fiddler on the Roof, I needed to feel like a small part of that was because of me.  When we're in a crunch time at the office, I need to feel like my contributions are the best they can be.  I can't see someone on my team struggling with a project without asking how I can help, staying a little late, and maybe stepping a little bit outside my job description.  


Likewise, when I decided to do National Novel Writing Month in November, I made sure I told my friends all about what I was doing.  Their support kept me motivated (no one likes to bring home bad news), and when I had succeeded at this tremendous individual challenge I took the next plunge: I asked for some heavy review/editing from trusted friends who are smart, know what good writing looks like, and most importantly are able to be 100% honest with me about my manuscript.  Now that I feel like more people than just me are invested in this project and its success, failure or giving up is just not an option.  I'll work as hard as I need to to make sure I finish with something truly great.


Now I want to figure out how to bring that spirit back into music and performance.  Opportunities to perform in groups come easy in high school and college, but in the years since graduation I haven't found an engaging group of people I can be close to and make music with.  That personal connection over hours of doing something you love and refining a technical skill is really important to me, and somehow I don't feel like I'm willing to let it get away.  Some of my best friends and best loves have been forged over music. In fact, one of the first ways my husband and I bonded as friends at age 19 was over a piano in the practice rooms at Lehigh University.


The thing is, it's not like I don't have talented friends -- I do.  It's just a matter of figuring out how to bring it all together.  But that's another inspiration entirely, so maybe I'll think more about it tomorrow.

Inspiration #8: Communication

We've been snowed in since Friday night.  Slowly but surely, this has pushed me to clear out the backlog of emails and notes I've been wanting to send to my friends.  After you hit a certain threshold of playing video games in your pajamas it just has to happen.

Part of this is 100% social, but I've also been thinking more and more about how I might use my friends to research my novel.  Quite a few of my characters have had life experiences that I find very impactful and have seen tangentially, but I haven't actually been through it myself.  Right now these characters are basically likable, but underdeveloped because there are aspects of their lives I need to learn about and understand in greater detail.

So when I'm not pushing for that level 70 milestone in World of Warcraft (really have to reign that habit in), I'm going to be catching up with friends who are far away and -- hopefully! -- learning a bit about my fictional characters as well.

Breaks.

Lately I've been wondering about my creative process, wondering if breaks are a necessary gear keeping the process spinning or whether breaks are just that, a break in character.  A skip, a foible.  Between Christmas and New Year's I took an honest and true break.  Though I carried my notebook to Pennsylvania for Christmas, its pages remained largely undisturbed for the length of the trip.

But now I'm typing this with my laptop on the kitchen counter, reheating the last of the Christmas leftovers, and really telling myself -- it's over.  Break's over.

While I was home from work (lucky us, our office closes between Christmas and New Year's) I stayed up late, mostly slept late, drank champagne and played board games, spent whole days in my pajamas watching movies and playing World of Warcraft.  Occasionally I'd feel a twinge and think, "I should be working on my novel," but then I'd realize I'd let writerfriends take it away, force this break.

By Sunday, though, the last Sunday before returning to the office, I was finished.  Even on Saturday I had an inclination to start planning a zine, got out a sketchpad and some old stuff and laid in my writing room, back on the floor and eyes glued to the ceiling fan.  So much of the creative process can be laying on the floor surrounded by papers and books.

But on Sunday I was full-on done with breaks.  I twisted an incense burner out of tin foil and struck out to the basement to sort through some of the boxes down there, thinking I might find inspiration in purging, sorting, making plans for the space after I empty it of clutter.  I watched Angels in America and relished the way it put my soul through a wringer, lost myself in it as an artist and a human.  I started writing again in earnest, returned to my daily practice.  I had a significant personal revelation.

My question is, did my break pave the way for all this?  Did it prepare me to work again on my novel after I receive it back full of red pen?  Did it leave my heart open for new ideas, new inspiration, did it give me new eyes? Or was it just a delay, a hiccup, a missed opportunity to immerse myself in a project?

We have such a need to create, but I'm feeling oddly guiltless about taking some time away from "real" things, "productive" things.  Accomplishments.  I'm feeling like the past week left me open to realize even after taking so much time out for myself, I still voluntarily return to my words.  I miss them, need them.  I can take a break from them, go on vacation, and know full well I'll be more than happy to come back.