Creating our own games
Children create their own games instead of complaining. Have you ever seen poor kids complaining about not having money to buy a football? They’ll just make one with cloth and play. I remember when I was a kid, I used to play self-made games. Games that didn’t exist before but I brought them into existence just because I wanted to have fun. One such game was Handball (I didn’t know at the time this name had already been taken). so in my version, two players sit at a 20-or-something-meter distance from each other and hit the china ball( a very tiny bouncy ball, we would play with that because it was cheap) with their hands and the other player has to stop the ball from crossing past him. he could use any part of his body to stop the ball. and then it’s his turn to hit the ball across.
we had other games that weren’t invented by me, one example is two kids would sit on the ground in front of each other at a hand’s distance and they would make certain figures joining their hands and other players would have to jump over those hand figures and those figures would keep getting higher and higher as the game progresses. What I am trying to say is that kids are so good at birthing games that didn’t exist before. that’s so creative. they would just literally make up shit to have fun and play it with full earnestness.
we adults lose this ability to create games for ourselves. we give too much importance to pre-established games even when we do not feel like playing them. even when they are not fun, we play because everyone else around us is playing. we cave in to societal pressure. okay, kids also do this, it’s not that they are totally independent, but kids from 3 - 7 are more creative when it comes to making made-up games. As they grow older, they start having peer pressure and they start losing this ability to make their own games, own rules, and to play with full earnestness. Now they play games with lifeless energy; this is the process of becoming an adult.
This isn’t about sports, it can be but it isn’t. It is about everything. Career, relationships, hobbies. We keep forcing ourselves into playing games that we don’t want to play with full-heartedness. so we play them half-heartedly and we suffer. We definitely have a choice to not play them. But we are scared of being isolated, we are scared of truly standing out.
Career: why do we always need to have pre-established careers? A career that is so easy to define that people have stopped asking for its definition, have stopped asking what they really do and just think it must be valuable without questioning. God forbid you want to do something that is valuable but hasn’t been done before. let’s look at some of the careers that were not careers before:
stand-up comedy: imagine going up there on stage and telling jokes without any props or costumes. This was Charlie Case, who allegedly did the first stand-up. How did he create his own game? he just tried something different. forms of entertainment had been there since the 1880s like vaudeville, theatrical, and stuff. So the games are always there. but Charlie modified that game a bit for himself. One doesn’t have to invent a completely new game out of thin air. they can modify the game they are already in according to their personal taste. For that, the development of taste is very important.
“He broke all of the usual structure of the minstrel show. he was never a part of a group, and he didn't dance, but he did sing, however.”
Game within the game-
People have created their own games within already pre-established games. The one way to do is to do it differently. find what personally intrigues you.
Examples:
Senegalese YouTuber who points out things people do wrong: Khaby Lame just mocks people doing things in overly complicated ways.
One of his most popular videos
Mitch Hedberg was doing stand-up in the era when storytelling comedy was popular. But with his unique one-liner non sequiturs he made a space for himself. From the surface level view, it might seem like he played the same game as other stand-up comics and yes he did but he was playing a sub-game as well inside the game of stand-up comedy. And, his game was simply telling his unique observations. People don’t particularly use the word ‘observational’ for a one-liner comic but one can’t make a joke without observations. Mitch, especially, had a very different style of one-liners. He wasn’t switch and baity like present-day popular one-liners such as Jimmy Carr and Anthony Jeselnik (tho, jeselnik is not a one-liner comic but his jokes are mostly non-sequiturs) Often his jokes didn’t have a punchline or any set-up; it was pure absurd observation. one of his jokes I really liked was “ One time, this guy handed me a picture of him. He said, "Here's a picture of me when I was younger." Every picture is of you when you were younger. "Here's a picture of me when I'm older.", "You son of a bitch! How'd you pull that off? Let me see that camera!”
Steven Wright's style of comedy—Steven Wright was before Mitch, but he had the same thing going on. His jokes were more existential and absurd than Mitch’s. It’s crazy how one can sound existential on the stage without crafting a long story or going on a rant on life for minutes on end. He would just say jokes.
“I thought it started talking to this very French-looking girl. She was a bilingual illiterate she couldn't read in two different languages. that's how I started”
I think it’s important to take a step back and let the mind do its own thing to create our game. Constantly judging, evaluating, and interfering can stop us from creating the game cuz the mind making those evaluations is a societal mind and it will always look for ways to fit in into the society.
here’s Steven Wright describing how he found his unique style:
“In the beginning, I would sit down and look at the paper, like look for a word to Jazz my mind or look for something and I would try to find jokes on purpose in the first six months and then after that like I had this thing once I was looking through the paper and it was an advertisement for electrolysis and I thought what an interesting word, just the sound of the word, what it means, both things - what the hell right, so I made a note of that and then I don't know my mind… you know because your subconscious is like a factory it's working when you don't even know that it is… minding your own business, you're in line doing something… that's this just in… and what in my mind did with that was I came up - I had this thing about living in an apartment building where they allowed pets and I had a pony I had a Shetland pony named Nikki and he… he was once involved in a bizarre electrolysis accident all the hair was removed except for the tail now I rent him out to Hari Krishna family picnics and that whole thing came because I saw the word electrolysis so I would try to find things on purpose but then after a while, I didn't. my mind was I would just notice things because I think Comedy All art is based on noticing what's around you”
It’s so cool to see how creativity works without knowing how it works.
Hobbies: We even seek guidance and suggestions as to what hobbies to follow. like, even for hobbies. We want to try cool hobbies. Hobbies that are considered cool in our group. Why are all hobbies from pre-established domains? no one wants to have a new hobby. no one is interested in the weird amalgamation of two or three hobbies that is made of interesting parts of these societal hobbies. I’d use the word societal for already existing hobbies with clear boundaries.
sometimes you have to participate in other games because you live in society. but while participating you totally forget these are not our playgrounds. You are supposed to use other games as a means to meet your ends. not as an end in itself. When we forget that others’ games are not ours we lose focus on our real goals and start caring about something and the care is not genuine. It is not pure. Now, we don’t what’s necessary and what isn’t. We are stuck in limbo when it comes to making decisions. because our priority is now fucked up. decision-making would seem like a tedious overwhelming task. for example - if you like sharing ideas, but don’t like video editing and find it rather depressingly tedious, either you should hire a video editor, or if you can’t afford that you should not focus on editing much. give just a little bit of time and energy investment to editing and focus most of your energy on what can give your videos a real edge—your ideas. Cuz you are passionate about it. There are YouTubers out there who don’t edit videos but their content is either too unique or good or a mix of these two and other qualities that they’ve gathered quite a huge following. one such example is the Pakistani YouTuber duo - Wasey Habib and Iffi Bhai. they just do livestreams and thousands of people watch their livestreams. they have more than 400k subscribers.
Half-heartedness: half-heartedness is the root of all suffering. If you give a fuck, you’re good, if you don’t give a fuck, you’re still good. But if you don’t know whether you genuinely give a fuck or not, you’ll suffer.
You’ll suffer even more if you pretend to give a fuck when you actually don’t or pretend to not when you actually do.
But is it really half-heartedness that is the problem? Or is it a lack of clarity? Half-heartedness seems like a symptom, not a cause. Lack of clarity seems like a cause. Lack of clarity about our game. I’ll share my thoughts on navigating the world with so many other games in part 2 of this essay.