DIY Ecology of Games
Tomorrow’s events:
Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck. Every Friday @ 7:30 AM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck. Every Friday @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Shadowplay w/ Arran Rogerson and Alyssa Polizzi. Every Friday @ 6:00 PM ET for the month of November. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Settler Sexualities w/ Kim TallBear. November 6th @ 8:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Newly posted events:
Stoic Provocations: Sex Positivity and OnlyFans w/ Default Friend. November 16th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Existential Dance Party w/ Raya Sun. The last Thursday of every month @ 9:00 PM ET. 90 mins. RSVP here.
An event to (maybe) get excited by:
The Metagame Mastermind: DIY Ecology of Games Edition w/ Peter Limberg. November 8th @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
The Metagame Mastermind is back again. This will be a follow-up on last Sunday’s session.
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November 5, 2020
I have been musing about an “DIY ecology of practices” approach for a while now. I first publicly used that phrase in a tweet to brother Andrew on September 12th, 2019:
I like John Vervaeke’s term “ecology of practices,” interconnected practices that deal with the spirit and shadow. Wilber was talking about this with his ILP framework, which is a DIY ecology of practices.
Andrew responded by writing a blog post titled, DIY Ecology Of Practices Or Iterative Best Practices? He mentioned four critiques to a DIY approach, which I summarized in a follow-up Letter exchange I had with him:
To summarize your post as best I can: the potential problems of an individualistic approach to designing your own ecology of practice are 1) you might filter the practices through an inaccurate category framework; 2) said framework might not be exhaustive, especially with regard to spiritual modalities; 3) success in one category might not be consonant with success in another; and 4) (your main concern) the DIY approach might be co-opted by the ego. You end your post by referencing the Monastic Academy’s superior approach towards practice architecture, e.g. testing out different ecologies in different monastery branches in an iterative fashion, to see which ones produce the most transformative results.
I agreed with him for the most part, and then engaged in some both/and-ing. I foreshadowed our recent Metagame Mastermind (MGM) experiment with the following suggestion:
What if the DIY pursuit is undertaken openly— in some transparent mastermind setting, for example? Could individuals sharing their bespoke ecologies en masse, while remaining open to adjustments, provide a fruitful approach towards transformational development?
I like this, and I like the thought of us stepping it up for the next iteration of the “Metagame Mastermind” happening this Sunday. Instead of just adding one negative game, we add a slew of both negative and additive games, to serve as a “DIY ecology of games.”
I sense this individualistic DIY framing is critical. The memetic tribe that The Stoa is a part of is probably best described as the “metatribe,” and unlike people in other memetic tribes, people in the metatribe have radically different bookshelves from one another. Why do I mention our bookshelves? Because nobody here has the same intellectual journey. This can also be said for our spiritual or therapeutic journeys.
There is a metapattern I see with all of us though, which is that we all got “grey pilled” at one point: we were all “red pilled” once, but got disabused of our intellectual certainty, along with the tribal affiliations that come along with that. We are all skeptical of metanarratives here, even though some of us secretly long for them at times.
Given this, I sense it is important to lean into the rich individuality that is happening in our metatribe, and engage in those bespokely designed DIY approaches, and do so in a way that is transparent and open for feedback. Our lone-wolf days of philosophical and psychotechnological adventuring are over.
We are engaging in a collective “shadow journal” for this week’s MGM, and Christian Sawyer mentioned something which would be good to call “game alignment.” If we solely pursue a “don’t do this” or “do this” game, which have clear success/failure parameters thanks to the SMART framing (specific, measurable, achievable/attainable, relevant, and time-bound), then this could rapidly lead to feelings of shame if failure occurs, and failure will occur.
These negative and additive “SMART games” are basically finite games in the James Carse sense of the term, and I see the problem with the Game A world is that it attempts to gamify existence into a finite game. Let us not make the same mistake here. I sense it would be wise for us to house our finite games in infinite games.
As an example, let us take the finite game I am playing this week, which has a very clear SMART criteria: only 15 minutes of social media (Twitter/Facebook) a day. What is the infinite game I am playing here? Maybe I am playing the “love thy temptation” game, which is a subset of the “love thy fate” (amor fati) game. So this finite game of not going on social media, can be seen as an excuse to allow my temptations to emerge, so I can shine some love on them.
A few new meta psychotechologies might need to emerge in this Metagame Mastermind to give us the following capacities: 1) how to design finite games, 2) how to design infinite games, 3) how to test if there is game alignment between our finite and infinite games, 4) how to choose our DIY ecology of games, 5) how to test if there is game alignment between all the games in our ecology.
I strongly sense we should swat away any attempt to impose some meta-systematic framework that affords us a perfect top-down understanding of this shit. Fuck that noise. Relying on simple questions is more heavenly.
What games are the daemon asking you to play?
Do these games have a “heaven yeah” quality to them?
Most importantly, are these games seriously fun to play?
We all have finite games we know are wise for us to play, such as eating “right” or working out, but we do not because they either feel burdensome, or we have deep shame surrounding them.
I think we can transmute this rather quickly, by tagging on an infinite game that is deeply aligned, which will make the finite game fun to play. I also think the correct alignment between finite and infinite games can make our gameplay therapeutic, and melt away any shame or trauma associated with whatever finite games we are currently playing.
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