83 – Attitude – The Game of Life

The Game of Life, a real challenge for everybody, the idea of the topic is game. What is a game? We often hear and think in terms of a game. I looked up all kinds of definitions of it. I want to refer to and bring in the idea of The Game of Life.

Make projects a game yields a positive Attitude

A game, something that is structured, has rules or whatever, you use it for play or enjoyment, but it can also be educational. Gee, if a game can be educational, that brings up other topics and other ideas. There are some definitions that say the difference between game and work is that a game you’re not paid for, whereas work you’re paid. But wait a minute, there’s golf, tennis, baseball, football, and lots of games that people are paid for once they learn how to do it well. Even the video games, there are things out there that people make money competing in a video game. The difference between game and work is really blurred, so what I want to do is get back down into it really deep and talk about how YOU can make life a game.

First let me start by telling you what I used to do when I would train some of the programmers, developers, database administrators, etc. across the country. Very often I would go in there and they were at their computers already, etc. or I was standing up front as they entered. After we got everybody there and we got started, I would usually say something on this topic because I already noticed many of them playing things like Solitaire.

Most of them were playing Solitaire. I would say: “I can’t understand why people play games on the computer.” I’d get a lot of odd looks as I’m probably getting right now, but fortunately this is audio, so I can’t see what you’re saying or what you’re thinking, but think about it for a minute. I would say: “Think of it this way, you’ve got Solitaire. Okay, you played Solitaire yesterday. How many games did you win or lose?” They have no idea. “How many games did you play?” They have no idea. It was a mindless exercise of some random occurrence of cards and trying to put them in the right place. What happened? Nothing. You got nothing out of it.

Instead, these are people that are there on the computer to learn. By the way, this involves everybody today. There are things on the computer that you need or should know. That could be anything as simple as learning Excel or Word better. For them it was every single object on the computer.

You notice when you right click something, you see all these things, all these choices and actions, etc. You can set things. As a programmer, you actually develop those and write the code for those items. You write the code to decide that when you click on “Open,” it opens it and maybe opens up a new thing with certain colors, certain properties, what size it is, etc. All of those things are done. Even the idea of clicking on the icon or double clicking on the icon has different events, and those events cause different actions. Those are all things they need to learn.

So, what the hell are they doing playing Solitaire?

What if instead of sitting there, waiting, playing Solitaire, they went to figure one of those things out or two of those things out? I asked them: “What happens if you figure it out? You’ve won. What happens if you don’t figure it out? You get to play the game again tomorrow. No big deal, and you’ve learned something along the way which is what you were supposed to do in the first place, but by making it a game, a challenge.”

By the way, that’s the definition or part of the idea of a game. A game, basically you have some sort of goal, you have rules, you have challenges, and you have interaction. I just described what they’re supposed to be doing. The same thing.

The goal was to figure it out, the goal was to maybe how to set the properties, or figure out how to cause it to do something.

The same thing goes for most of everything you’re doing. You’re sitting there in front of your computer.