This is going to ramble. Then it’s going to go to an unlikely place or two. My hope is that it will make sense in the end.
If those three sentences aren’t a rough approximation of TheHumanExperience, well, hell I don’t know what to tell you.
I’m pretty sure my philosophy in life was delivered to me by a lady named Roberta Williams. Actually, let me add to that: It was taught to me by my parents, but the first time I got to really experience it, and have it ‘installed’ if you will, was by Roberta, and her husband Ken.
Roberta Williams is a video game designer. She designed the King’s Quest video games. Later spin-offs include SpaceQuest, and PoliceQuest. I must have spent hundreds of hours of my life working through these games. So much so that I still, for NO reason at all, will think “Use Orat Part on Face” some days. Because of the amount of time it took me to figure out that I needed to pick it up.
They were little (8 bit?) games wherein the protagonist, Sir Graham (or Roger Wilco and Sonny Bonds, respectively) was off on a quest (no urim or thummim) so he/you ran around and did stuff. The graphics at the time were revolutionary, 16 colors and everything. The game play was pretty “wide open”, and word based… if you walked into a room, and saw an axe, and you wanted it you would type in “<B>GET AXE</B>” and Sir Graham, your obedient avatar would sure as hell pick up the axe.
This was a mindboggling amount of control over another person. Inevitably you would try something stupid like <B>HIT YOUR OWN FACE WITH THE AXE </B> and depending on how outrageous your request was, the computer would say <I>I’m sorry I don’t understand</I> or <I>Why would you want to do something like that?</I>
This post doesn’t end with me hitting myself in the face with an axe.
Eventually you matured a little bit and decided to stop testing the bounds of the command parser, and you got to doing whatever the quest was. I think it was probably saving a princess.
Inevitably there were obstacles on your path. You would be traveling, and there’d be a river, and you needed to get across the river. Half of the game was trying to figure out what you were supposed to do, but the other half of the game was trying to word stuff in a way that the computer was expecting to hear it.
<B>CROSS</B>
What?
<B>SWIM</B>
<I>The water is too deep you’ll drown</I>
<B>CROSS RIVER</B>
<I>How would you like to do that?</I>
<B> CROSS RIVER IN BOAT</B>
<I>Shouldn’t you get in the boat first?</I>
<B>GET IN BOAT</B>
<i>Ok.</I>
<B>CROSS RIVER IN BOAT</B>
<I>You don’t have anything to paddle with.</I>
WELL SHIT. You would think to yourself. Except in this case, I was young (6? 7?) so I didn’t have the word “shit.” I just had the feeling of profound frustration, which is actually worse if you don’t have a word to place it. A pot to piss in, as it were.
So you wandered away from your initial obstacle, frustrated in a way that only a seven year old could be, and you wandered. As you wandered, you might, for the sake of argument, find a green key. “Well that’s weird.” You would think to yourself.
<B>GET KEY</B>.
Then you’d wander over to the next area, and a grizzled old guy would be POUNDING on the door to his house. Totally livid. He was stuck outside his house. Because you were a kid, and a bit naïve, you didn’t immediately see where this was going.
<B>TALK TO MAN</B>.
The old geezer stops his pounding. He turns. He monologues. Apparently he’s locked out of his house and he can’t find his… oh. <b>You</b> know where this is going.
<B>GIVE KEY TO OLD MAN.</B>
Rejoice! The oldman is OVERJOYED. Thrilled. He dances. A little melody like an early ringtone played. Suddenly you have more points, even though you don’t feel like you are any closer to your goal. Your immediate thought is “What if I need that key later on? Damn.”
Homeboy is ecstatic though, and invites you inside. You don’t have anywhere else to go, so you follow him. (it is worth noting that only as I got older did I start to worry about the intentions of these people “Is he gonna KILL me when I go inside?” never crossed my mind initially, only later in life. Pesky cynicism.)
So you stroll into the house and….guess what the old geezer has in his shack, that he’s getting ready to throw away?
<B>TAKE OAR FROM OLD MAN</B>.
While this scenario isn’t real, the whole game, worked more or less like this.
Now I’m going to sound like a raving lunatic when I say this, but deal with it.
This game might be the single most important impact on my worldview, at least as far as helping others goes, from birth to present.
“Help Others” was definitely something that my parents instilled, and instill in me to this day, but that was an abstract rule, something that you just –did-. The King’s Quest series, made it tangible. Made it real.
Think about it. A little six, then seven, then seventeen year old, hour after hour, getting tons and tons of positive reinforcement from doing one simple thing, helping others attain their goals in the process of reaching his or her own goals. Your brain is so fragile and so malleable at that point, and super ripe for pavlovian conditioning.
Frustration. Frustration. Frustration. Frustration. Help Someone. SUCCESS.
Frustration. Frustration. Frustration. Frustration. Help Someone. SUCCESS.
Frustration. Frustration. Frustration. Frustration. Help Someone. SUCCESS.
Over and over and over again, for hours, days, weeks and years.
(A secondary lesson was “grab/read/learn everything you can, because it’ll probably be useful later.”)
This is something that I hadn’t really figured about myself, nor had I really isolated the source of it. Anyway, it’s something that I do, and am going to try to do more consciously, because as ridiculous as it sounds, I really like helping people. It makes me feel good. I’m not nominating myself for person of the year mind you. I was more or less conditioned to feel this way, by Roberta and Ken Williams. Selfishly, I truly think that it helps me get closer to my goals. I guess the difference between this and the more negative version of this (the quid pro quo, clarice) is that I don’t expect the help to come from the person I’m helping. I suspect that it’ll come from somewhere else. If you believe that, it opens up the world for you, just a little bit more, I think.