Lose your Soul

I've been reading self-help and spirituality books by Eckhart Tolle and Gary Zukav. They talk about ego and identity and how to lose it. I also like playing video games and I hate getting killed. It really hurts inside me when I get killed. I've been thinking about where my ego is and how they say it is a false sense of identity, an illusion meme that is self interested, and it occurrs to me that the best place to get a sense of identity is in a video game where you create and lose your identity every time you get a new guy.

So the proposal is to play around with this. I have been playing Adrenaline Challenge at CrazyMonkey Games obsessively and trying to lose my sense of identity so that I dont care when I get killed. it is really hard to not care but I feel the door opening a little bit each time it happens.

This game would be a similar game to adrenaline challenge but where things just randomly came in and killed you every once in a while. So you couldn't blame yourself for dieing. It occurs to me that the reason why you feel bad when you die is that you have spent some time building up an identity, according to some rules, and you feel like you get the game and the strategy you have been using is that you pay attention to the rules and try to push the limits and when you screw up you look back to assess how you could have done better. And you try to change yourself to do better the next time. But the strategy you use to change yourself is you threaten yourself with the bad feeling if you screw up. So in this more random video game that could hopefully integrate as much control over parameters as possible so that players could play around with the rules in real time, the designer would include a certain bit of randomness so that the players sense of identity and strategy for maintaining that would be opened up or maybe eventually broken down.

The way military training games work, I bet there are already games like this. It would probably be an effective way making someone fearless.

(Added December 24th) Looking back, the idea of random killings probably would not work. It would probably be better to experiment with the game and whenever the subject felt like they were losing their sense of identity, the game could be redesigned, or adjusted so that the sense of identity changed. So give the player the chance to adaptively play with the boundaries around the sense of identity created by association with a "guy" in a video game.