Ready Player Sun (don’t judge me for bad puns, I’m just a gamer)
Where the Eyes Go, The Car Goes Part 8 – in which Hari talks about birds, skirts around her obsessive need to achieve and offers a playful alternative to serious things
Image Credit: Stock Cake
I am the sort of person who doesn’t really do anything unless she can have the satisfaction of ticking it off a list. I love the feeling of marking something off a checklist, particularly if that checklist is digitised and that tick is accompanied by a cute little animation and some haptic feedback. Many of the most outlandish undertakings of my life have been fuelled by this very satisfaction. In lockdown, I watched a horror film a day for 265 days, partly in preparation for my PhD, and partly simply because it was a thing I could do that had a tangible and satisfying reward. Every day, I would watch a film, often recommended by someone, and I would post a brief review on my Instagram stories. Every day that I did it, I had the satisfaction of pulling out my little template, writing something down and hitting ‘send’. It was great (for the most part – there’s a lot of really bad horror out there). I am often driven by the sense of achievement that comes from hitting send; I truly am a 21st Century gal.
This is the thing about nature, in the main: it just doesn’t give you that immediate dopamine hit that ticking something off a list does. That’s why teenagers often complain when you take them to a forestry or something – their little brains are fuelled by achievement at that age, they thrive on doing. Don’t get me wrong, I get my kicks in other ways – I like designing projects for my garden and birdwatching and all the other lovely things that come with going for a walk in the wild – but I’m a girl gamer and we do like a payoff. In the world we currently live in, more and more of us live for the payoff, and I wonder whether there is a way of adapting the way we approach nature for our fast-paced, social media-conditioned brains.
‘Hari,’ I hear you say, ‘no! To change the world, we must change our expectations of it! You are feeding into the very thing that is destroying society!’ Yes I know, I hear you – we all need to give up our smart phone addiction and learn to live without hot showers – I get it. But I just don’t want to (not yet, anyway), and neither do most people on the planet, so let’s try to find a middle ground.
I have always been a gamer. We have discussed part of the reason I love gaming so much here before. Another reason, though, is the very thing I highlighted above – that ongoing sense of achievement. As part of my ongoing professional development in teaching, I’ve been looking into gamification and the impact it can have on learners’ lives, and I’ve begun to realise that many of the most joyful achievements of my life have been fuelled by this very concept, without me even realising I was engaging with it.
Gamification is essentially the notion that we can take aspects of games (any game – board games, video games, playground games), and draw them into our day-to-day. By doing this, we make ourselves happier, more fulfilled and more productive. Let’s take a recent example from my life:
I’ve got into bird-watching. It’s pretty rad, to be honest with you. I was first inspired to start a while back when We Are Stardust hosted a free dusk chorus session where we listened to the birds in our garden and created a little collage informed by all the different things we heard. We ended up notating our local dusk chorus, akin to how bird song visualisers help to identify calls.
I then spent about 18 months not knowing where to start with this whole ‘bird’ thing. I was very inspired, but when I listened to a call and tried to learn it, I would forget it by the next time I was out. I couldn’t find bird calls online that sounded similar to the ones I heard in my back garden because ‘bird song that sounds like hoot hoot chirrup chirrup chirrup’ doesn’t really bring up many meaningful results on google. I was stuck feeling like I wanted to be involved in that world, and having no idea where to begin.
Then, I set myself a challenge: learn and identify five new bird calls in the wild. Ok, this was do-able. I started with robins and blackbirds, because I was reliably informed that they were the easiest to pick out of a crowd. Then I moved onto sparrows, because we had a lot of them nearby, so I would be able to practice with them regularly. And then, and then and then. I was introduced to the Merlin App after asking for an ID online, and I learned that we have wrens and coal tits and great tits and chiff chaffs and all sorts of other things in the woodland near us. By the time I finished, I knew far more than 5 new calls. I’d picked up a pair of second-hand binoculars to spot the little friends singing to me, and got to watch crows roosting and blue tits bickering and all sorts of other things. I set out with one small task and created a whole new world for myself.
For me, this is the joy of gamification: you set yourself a challenge – you make a game – and suddenly there are new challenges and opportunities that you personally hadn’t even imagined. It is, in my opinion, one of the easiest ways to broaden your horizons.
I, as you can imagine, am an achievement-oriented gamer. Bartle, in his taxonomy of gamers, had a specific category just for people like me: the achievers. But, not all gamers are achievers, and not all gamification should be set up for achievement. Some of us are ‘killers’, who like besting others in combat. Some of us are socialisers who take on new roles and do new things just for the joy of being with others. Some of us are explorers whose greatest joy in life is to discover every nook and cranny that the world has to offer. It is my gut feeling that much of nature communication is set up to appeal to explorers; this makes sense, because nature is big and expansive, and the most intuitive thing to do with a big expanse is to search it. All of us though, have a way of playing in and with nature. Next week, we’ll talk more about how we can maximise on different player types to make the more-than-human a more appealing place for everyone.
As a little aside, I recently won an award for ‘Excellent teaching and quality enhancement’ in my role as Creative Writing teacher in Cardiff University’s Centre for Lifelong Learning. If you’re near South Wales and you’d like to hang out with me for 10 weeks, I’ll be leading the ‘Writing Cardiff’ short course starting on May 8th. I hope to see some of you there!
In ‘Where the Eyes Go the Car Goes’, Hari gives over some time to media and mass communications theory as it relates to nature and the environment. I would love it if these discussions were not just fielded by me. If you would like to contribute a piece to the discussion, or post something on your own blog as part of the series, please get in touch.