Playing To Crush with Life
This blog entry may get a little weird and fuzzy. For that, I apologize.

The last week I've been poking around with the game "The Sims," simply trying to re-aquaint myself with the design decisions that turned it into the best-selling computer game of all time. I'm kind of a goal-directed "play to crush" kind of guy, so I learned back in 1999 how to max out the sims so they could reach the top of their career ladder as quickly as possible, and have all the wealth and friends they needed. Of course, I also understand that the thing that made the game successful was that it was NOT designed for my style of playing the game.

I'm now trying the game out with the expansions which I'd never tried before. They are dirt-cheap now that The Sims 2 is out. The expansions have screwed up my little maximization strategies. I can no longer turn a perfect stranger into a true friend or romance in the course of a single evening. And there's tons of more options to consider. And I haven't played the game much in about five years, so my mad Sims skillz are a little rusty anyway.

So I find myself projecting a little bit into these little computer people (oh, wait, that was a different game...) as they are shifting career tracks with the new options available to them. In spite of not getting too serious about job-hunting yet (it's only been two weeks, and we went to Disneyland during one of them!), I've found myself in a few interviews and getting offers for doing a few different things (all programming-related). Some are permanent, full-time positions. Some are contract. None are "perfect."

I haven't really run my own life in "play-to-crush" mode. But being in a minor transition as I am now, I'm reevaluating the goals in my life - with much discussion with my wife - and we're trying to zero in on some strategic goals of where we want to be five, ten years from now. That makes considering the job offers a lot more interesting - it's not just which job pays the most, but which one yields the highest chance of getting us where we want to be.

It feels kinda weird trying to manage my life like I'd manage a software project. But if you can quantify those goals, you can then set a path for measuring your progress to those goals. This appeals to the gamer in me, as I can keep score and maybe work the system. And maybe apply a little bit of my "play-to-crush" mentality in my own life.

Labels: productivity

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 11:01 PM (Permalink)