Last weekend, my son Michael introduced me to a couple of online games. Since he’s a world-class gamer and we’ve talked a lot about the leadership lessons in gaming, I gave it a try.
What a come-uppance! I’m a pretty smart bear … but I fell down the hole of my incompetence as soon as he handed me the control piece.
These games are puzzles that cast you into the middle of a strange world with no idea of what’s happening and no clue as to the purpose or rules of the game. So why play them? He says because they teach your brain a different way of thinking about your surroundings. I say because they can teach you a lot about yourself.
We started with Portal.
“You’re in a test chamber,” Michael said. “Start by looking at your environment.” I looked, but didn’t see much.
“Try moving around,” he said. I moved our character from one room to another.
“What do you see?” I described the few things that caught my attention: a little fireball pinging back and forth between two opposing walls … some icons on a wall in another room … an oval orange hole in a wall with an occasional glimpse of a human-like character in it.
“That’s you,” he said.
Slowly I began to get it. I was in a multi-level building and the goal was to escape. Each level posed harder challenges than the one before. And once I got the right equipment, I could create portals of my own for moving myself and stuff I needed through the chambers.
Michael kept telling me, “Pay attention to what’s around you.” I looked but I had trouble seeing. So he patiently pointed out things that I was overlooking—things that were important for escaping but, given my lack of context or rules, had no apparent relevance.
My frustration level climbed quickly. I followed Michael’s commentary and on-screen moves, but when he gave me the hand control to figure out the next moves on my own, I was clueless. I was also incredibly impatient.
I’m unaccustomed to seeing no options and having no sense of how to influence my situation. As I struggled with the onscreen challenges, I was also struggling with the frustration and futility of not being able to GET this!
I fought the urge to just turn off the computer and go do something familiar. I know it well: the urge to contract, to stay on safe ground when I can’t master something quickly. I spent the first 40 years of my life doing that. I also know the thrill of staying in the fray.
We played for an hour, and when the challenges got really complex, Michael suggested we switch to another game: Limbo. It was easier for me to figure out, but I still struggled. As he said, “The environment’s scary. It’s limbo, the prison of your mind.” He was right.
Again, our character was in an alien environment, this time with creatures and characters trying to kill us. The scenes were beautiful—animated and in soft-focused black and white, like an old ‘40’s movie. Escaping from the threats seemed haphazard at best until Michael pointed out that while much of the background was in soft focus, a few things—our character, a trap here, some tree limbs over there—were in sharp focus. Again, he was urging me to pay attention to my surroundings.
In Limbo, sometimes the way forward is behind you. Other times it requires reassessing things you’ve already done in order to find different possibilities that take you farther in the long term. As Michael said to me, “Everything you need is right in front of you.” The question is, can you see it?
A practice that’s an integral part of my work as a leadership coach is to observe and inquire, here and now, about what’s happening. What’s going on right now in this meeting or this conversation? So when I dropped into an entirely new context—the artificial, beautiful, disorienting world of gaming—and was unable to generalize a familiar practice to this unfamiliar territory, I got booted back to some basic lessons my clients struggle with regularly.
- When faced with an entirely novel situation, frustration and impatience can be bigger obstacles to overcome than what’s out there
- In the face of those feelings and others like them, we have a choice: pull back to something safe and familiar or stay with the feelings, observe them from a distance, and see where they lead
- Opting for the latter means being aware that we have a choice
- When we have no context, we can miss meaningful things even if they’re right in front of us. Having a guide who knows the land can help.
- When we miss things right in front of us, maybe it’s because we’ve become so solidly planted in our everyday context that we’re no longer open to novel stuff. We’ve lost our permeability. Let’s hear it again for having a guide.