Facebook reminded me today of a post I had made a couple of years back when Unplugged Games was operating, in it I talked about how I was feeling some stress from various sources, but it had been balanced by a couple of favorable events that day plus the arrival of a man named Skull who gave me 15 pounds of rice.
There really isn't more to the story than that.
Anyhow, a response to that post said something about how things always work out for the best. I always get responses like that when talking about the shop, that and how it was good that I even tried and how brave it was and so on.
This bothers me, here's the thing: by any objective measure, Unplugged Games was an abject failure, it made no money, lost tens of thousands of dollars of other people's money, crippled me and my wife's financial future by forcing us to declare bankruptcy, and was two years of intense mental stress on her that would have been completely avoidable if I had simply chosen to do something, anything, else.Now I work as a low end manager of a pizza shop, it isn't like it catapulted my career or anything either.
There were definitely intangibles that I gained, I did pick up some skills and knowledge that I still use, I made some friends that I still see, even if only rarely. I can win basically any "who did the nerdiest thing" contest. And I showed myself that I am capable of starting a huge project and taking it to completion without flaking out. That isn't nothing, but I don't know that it makes up for the negatives.
So the compliments make me uncomfortable sometimes is what I am saying... I am trying to figure out how to clearly say this.
Okay so when I ran the store I taught people how to play various games pretty regularly, Magic in particular of course. My tactic for those games was to take some decks that were premade for that specific purpose and just play games while explaining the rules, I used the same style of deck as my pupil so there was no chance of me doing weird shenanigans and taking advantage of the newbie, and once in a while I would pass up on exploiting a weakness if it meant I could show off some other part of the game, other than that I did not pull punches when playing, which means I won far more often than not. I did that for two reasons.
First I feel like you learn more from losing than winning, after the game I would talk to the person about the cards in their hand and the state of the board, we'd discuss what went wrong for them or what opportunities they might have missed, and next game attempt to correct those errors, losing allows you to think of what you might need to do differently next time.
The second reason is more metaphysical I guess, I feel like a legitimate loss is worth more than a fake win, and my opponents seemed to agree as well, they tended to be younger and I notice with kids there is a tendency to let them win because that is more fun for them, now I don't actually like kids very much for the most part, however I don't think that is doing them any favors at all and furthermore I think it is actually wrong, kids are smarter than we give them credit for, they do realize, even if it isn't on a conscious level, when they are being talked down to and actually do have less fun when they are being allowed to win rather than learning to lose.
What I am trying to say is sometimes it is okay to let a loss be a loss.
Did I learn a lot from my experience? Sure did. Am I a better person now than I was before I embarked on the project? Possibly. Was Unplugged Games a failure on virtually every practical level? Abso-friggin-lutely!
I guess what I am trying to say is that treating it as a win when it isn't is sort of devaluing the actual lessons learned from failing at it.
My life would be quite different right now if I had never attempted that particular project, and in many ways it would probably be significantly better, so in a sense saying that the way things worked out was for the best is also saying "You couldn't have done better no matter what" which I don't really think is true at all.
I realize when people talk about that they aren't really saying the above, I hope, and they truly are impressed and proud of my "accomplishment" this is just my explanation for why those compliments make me uncomfortable I guess.
No comments:
Post a Comment