“Do you think he will make it ?”
I looked over at my fellow game designer, “Perhaps.”
Then again, we didn’t have a good exit rate for this particular challenge. Not that we had been intended it to be this hard – it was supposed to be a final check for players on their way out of the finite loop and into self-creation.
David (name changed to protect the innpcent) had a better chance than many players in the Corporate Loop version of the game. In fact, he was poised to be one of the few to break out of the loop having managed to avoid getting stuck deep inside the game. He wasn’t so low down that he was fighting for survival and wasn’t so high up that he was bound into delivering the corporate’s goal. He also wasn’t caught in the ‘high performer – chasing significance and rewards’ loop. Instead he was in what looked like a dead-end. Which was the point – to stop further motion and so allow the player to step out and start to create for themselves.
Everything was as it should be! The conditions were perfect. David was no longer comfortable with other people’s will being imposed on him and was tired of never being valued and appreciated. Even more importantly, he had stopped competing for significance and promotion – what was the point ? Now the last hurdle was to move through tempting resignation and victimhood into questioning if there was another way to spend the years of his life.
I felt like cheering him on, he was just so close. This was the tricky bit ,would he see that doing was the problem ? Would he even realise that ‘doing’ of lots of talking about being stuck so that others knew he was aware and responsible and doing his best was still ‘doing’ and playing the game ?
I couldn’t help wondering if we had designed this part of the game well, but how else could we shift a player’s focus from outside to inside themselves ? How else could we create a shift from ‘doing’ to ‘being’. The idea was sound – to create a space where the player was forced into self-generated fear, powerlessness and hopelessness. Once here they would then have the tension needed to remember that they create emotions, so if they can generate one set of emotions they can just as easily generate the other, creative emotions of acceptance, joy and abundance.
We knew from experience that there is no other way to escape the loop, no other way to become a co-creator that uses the loop instead of being used by the loop. We had done all we could, now it was up to him.
Would he remember he can choose or would he take the easy path and follow the pattern that everyone else was following ?
Would he be one of the few to find his freedom and power ?