Don't fight human nature

Mark teaches that human nature is a double edged sword. It can kill design or it can enliven it. It depends on how you approach it. He gives the example of a mechanic in Odyssey that was meant for players to gain an advantage by discarding their own cards to boost another. This mechanic failed and wasn't popular. Another mechanic from another set rewarded players for doing something they wanted to do. This time around the new mechanic proved to be successful. The lesson is about doing design which takes advantage of human behavior, not creating things that fight against human's nature.

The life lesson is that people are humans and fighting the human nature leads to failure. Mark recalls his early days of dating and how he had unreasonable expectations which lead him to fail multiple times. Mark advises people to look at themselves when they are constantly finding themselves failing with other people.

There is a level for monster hunt, a mod for unreal tournament 1999, which I played a lot. Monster hunt is a mod in which players battle monsters from unreal 1 to reach the end of the level, the goal. It's nothing more than playing unreal 1 cooperatively. The level that I'm using as an example is called "Assault That Area 2 (MH-ATAA2)". It has some rooms with a giant crystal. In each room there is a giant crystal to be destroyed. To destroy it, two players have to stand on some pads for as long as one minute. When the two metal beams touch each other the crystal is destroyed. Meanwhile a swarm of monsters keep spawning and the players have to keep firing at will while standing still. Players want to move, not to be forced to stand still while firing at monsters. 

In Unreal Tournament the announcer rewards the player's killing sprees. When some player kills multiple players in a short period of time, the game advertises it for every player "double kill", "multi kill", so on. It's a type of reward and the players want to score multiple kills in a row. I'm pretty much repeating the same argument as Mark. The worst that a game can do is to punish the players for something that they want to do (provided that the players aren't violating some rule). The previous paragraph is one of such examples. The level was designed in a way that effectively forces the players to go against their own nature.

The life lesson relates with radical acceptance, a concept that I first heard when reading about the borderline personality. There is a therapy model called "Dialectical Behavior Thepary" which was introduced by Marsha Linehan to treat patients with severe emotional instability, which is one of the key features of the borderline personality. I'm not well versed in psychology but from what I can understand, radical acceptance borrows concepts from buddhism to teach people to understand that there are things that just are what they are. To give an example: if it rains, it rains. Rain by itself is a natural event. Rain can mean many different things and this is up to the person. People can associate rain with any emotion, be it negative or positive. People have no control over the seasons and if rain is associated with negative emotions such as sadness, they can't change the rain but they can look at themselves and try to change how they feel about the rain.

It can be easily confused with passivity but radical acceptance is not about accepting that changes are impossible. It's more about our suffering being connected to unreasonable desires or the pursuit of things that we just can't achieve or have. Suppose you are good at telling stories and bad at football. If at one time in your life your ability to tell stories became deeply connected to some bad experience and you said to yourself "I'm never ever going to tell a story again!". While you, for some reason, choose to pursue a career in football without being good at it. Chances are that this forced change in life is going to have negative consequences in the future. I'm not talking about telling stories to deceive or lie, mind you. Another example would be falling in love with some person which is later revealed to be a toxic person or we have a dream of working for a company which later proves to not match what we were expecting from it. This pretty much relates to Mark's own story about failed dates and also to the beginning of his career as a Hollywood scriptwriter. If we can't transform the other person or the company, what can we do about ourselves then? We can't become another person either. That's the acceptance part of radical acceptance. If I'm not good at football and train very hard in an attempt to be as good as a famous football player I may fail and be deeply wounded emotionally. I don't have to feel devastated and be forever sad, I can be as good as I'm happy with or as good as enough to play with friends. Pain is inevitable, but the suffering is optional.

Sometimes we have dreams, desires, aspirations and they aren't wrong by themselves. It's how we look at them or how we treat them. In the case of toxic relationships one element that I've read about is that we have a couple. One person may be thinking that they have to give up themselves for the other's benefit, which is misinterpreted as saving or rescuing the other person. I'm not criticising religion or Jesus, but think about the image of Jesus healing people with pure faith. If there is a psychopath for example, expecting that some magical power is going to "fix" them or that the power of love is going to bring some sanity to them. That's not how it works. If we can't "save" (to save someone can mean very different things for different people) that person, then what do we do? Give up? I think there is an important lesson in radical acceptance which is to learn to see things without judging them as neither good nor bad. A person is a person, what we judge is their actions. If I'm good at something I just am. Whether I do good things or bad things with that ability is something entirely different. 

Sometimes we criticise too much the actions of others and we don't notice that we are more concerned about them than we are about ourselves. Another thing that I've learned about personality disorders is that they are often associated with extreme projection. What is projection? We all sympathize  more with certain things and less with others and often those things are persons and/or their beliefs and/or behaviors. To give a very brief explanation, projection is about our minds recognizing in others something that is coming from us. Most of the time this process is unconscious and we can't control it. One example comes from narcissistic personality. One trait of narcissists is to blame everyone around for what they are doing, because their minds is projecting what they perceive as bad onto others. They fail to see it on themselves and may even call everyone else a narcissist. You don't have to be a narcissist to do that, but when it happens all the time there must be something wrong in the person's mind. The question is what motivates this behavior? One possible answer is that the person is envious of others and not aware of their own enviousness. Taking this to an extreme level and we may have a person obsessed with another to the point of either desiring to become that other person or, somehow, having the crazy idea of replacing them. I have a strong belief that people often suffer because they aspire something or have dreams which lack some sense of reality and a degree of self-awareness.

Going back to my example of being a story teller. Suppose I write a story for a magic set and that story is ill received by the players. I say to myself "I'm not going to tell another story ever again. This is over!". Now Mark has a lesson about mistakes being valuable. In this example I just gave. I have the choice to either accept that my story wasn't well received and was heavily criticised or deny the reality and run away from ever writing another story. There is perhaps a third response which isn't exactly a choice: to deny reality and become delusional. Then we have mental disorders related to being delusional or completely detached from reality itself in extreme cases. I just gave an example of delusion in the previous paragraph. Mark tells us that with a job such as his, which is all about design, there are more mistakes than successes and this is reality. Can we accept it? I didn't read a lot about the borderline personality, but it seems that over time, the knowledge that clinicians gained from studying the borderline personality began to expand onto other areas as well. There is a lot of knowledge about the borderline personality that can be applied to depression, anxiety and many other conditions. Even healthy people can benefit from it.

I think that one misconception about therapy is that the person offering mental health services is there to change people.  What I read about personality disorders in general is that the change is not at the hands of the therapist, but at the hands of the person who sought them. To treat depression or anxiety is not to offer a magic bullet or potion that is going to transform the person and end the suffering. It's about the therapist offering paths and tools and the person having the choice to follow a different path and to take advantage of the new tools at their disposal to make the change happen on themselves. Another misconception is that some people think that the therapist is going to fill the role of a babysitter / nanny or even a parent. A therapist isn't there to treat clients as their own children. A good therapist understands how the mind works in different scenarios, how people behave and why they behave like they do. There is a lot of science behind that. They aren't there to take decisions for you either. They can give opinions, but therapy isn't all about "What should I do? Where should I go? What do you think?".

I discussed therapy because one thing that is at the core of mental health is the question: "What causes the disorder? What are the reasons?". When you look at all personality disorders there is a series of behaviors and beliefs that the person is not aware of. Some people are aware of their own behaviors and/or beliefs, others are not. Sometimes they do recognize that there is something in them that needs to change, but even then they may be attempting to change what doesn't need to be changed. For example: if they are more emotional ou colder, that can be adjusted but not transformed from one to another. Each personality disorder has some features, beliefs and behaviors that aren't exclusive to them, but in the case of a personality disorder they are taken to extreme levels. Can we separate the person from the disorder? That's the hard thing about personality disorders. Is it natural for them to behave that way? Some cases are deemed untreatable, such as extreme narcissists or psychopaths. From what I know, the therapist's first concern isn't to fight the person's nature, but to try to see what is the main driving force behind the person's behaviors and what beliefs are associated with those behaviors. The ultimate goal isn't to change what the persons feels, but understand why they feel what they feel. Armed with that knowledge both the therapist and the client can better understand why the person responds the way they do.

One of the features associated to personality disorders is a communication problem related to what the person means and what the person does. It can happen to anyone, but if it happens too often and at levels which can't be right, then we have something. Suppose I'm a parent and tell my children that they are forbidden to use bad words and they can't ever insult anybody. In spite of this, I use bad words multiple times and insult them or others in front of them. They are going to perceive that there is something wrong, because my behavior doesn't match what I say. Another example is to punish good behavior. Suppose I instruct my children to brush their teeth after eating. If every time they brush their teeth I criticise them and tell them that they are wrong without explaining why. They are going to perceive that something is off, because it doesn't make any sense to do what they were supposed to do and be punished for doing it. Those are examples of "cognitive dissonance". Mark has a lesson about not confusing interesting with fun and I believe that this relates to cognitive dissonance because we may be trying to convey an idea in the game that doesn't feel right to the players. To give an example with a magic card, imagine I make a spell that destroys a creature. I name it "Peaceful Sleep" and the art shows a creature in pain. We have conflicting messages within the same card.

Let us think make an exercise of creativity and empathy here. Let us think on Mark as a therapist and players as clients. Magic has five colors and each color is associated with some strengths and weaknesses. To maintain balance they try to make the colors interesting and fun to play with, while keeping each color's identity. They try to not make one color too powerful and another too weak. The players can choose to build their decks with as many colors as they want, from an all colorless deck to all five colors. Green has creatures with high power and toughness, but it also lacks creatures with flying and spells to destroy creatures, except for destroying creatures with flying. Think about a player who loves to play with an all green deck. He or she wants to win but their opponent have creatures which he or she cannot destroy with a spell. What can Mark do about it? He cannot make the player not feel what they feel or change their behavior, much less force them to play another color. But Mark can look at what he can offer to that green player to fight off opponent's creatures. He can think about what kind of spell or ability he can add to green spells to make the green player gain access to some tool to fulfil their wishes.

That's how I see Mark's lesson about not fighting human nature. In the previous example Mark can't change what the player is or what the player does, but he can at least give a tool to make the player happier. Mark can offer paths for the players to follow, if they choose to. Every person has strengths and weaknesses and when they have access to tools to manage or deal with something, it's their choice to use or not that tool. There are things that won't change, but we can change how we look, think or feel about them. A weakness doesn't have to be always associated with negative feelings. We may change how we look at some strength and think differently about it. If I were to design a level I'm sure I'd have to think similarly to Mark. The level would have to match the player's behavior and not fight against what the player wants to do. The same for therapists, they aren't there to fight the person. They are there to offer wisdom, choices, tools and different paths to choose from.


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