3 October 2022
Have you ever played the game Getting Over It? Your objective is to climb a mountain with the only help of a hammer. The physics are realistic, the controls are very tight.
Some obstacles require a significant level of dexterity. It’s a difficult game. But what makes the game stand out is how merciless it is. Any mistake along the way can very easily send you down to the beginning. Check:
Getting Over It is a reference to the immense frustration of losing a lot of progress and going back to the beginning. Here’s the first lines of the voice-over:
There’s no feeling more intense than starting over. If you’ve deleted your homework the day before it was due, as I have, or if you left your wallet at home and you have to go back, after spending an hour in the commute…
That’s Bennet Foddy talking about the flip side of starting over, that I covered in last week’s post.
His warning continues:
Starting over is harder than starting up. If you’re not ready for that, like if you’ve already had a bad day, then what you’re about to go through might be too much.
We’ve all been there.
Now, playing this game taught me something I want to share. But I need you to see something first. Watch please how my 8 year-old son Fernando plays the game.
My son plays the game in a completely reckless way. At first I thought he was unaware of the risks, then he fell down the mountain. “Now he will get it”, I thought. But instead, he laughed. Then started climbing back right away.
My son seems to be indifferent—I would say he’s even attracted—to the risks that paralyze me. I was confused.
This is what I believe is going on:
Let’s call this the trigger curve. It defines the threshold where the joy of succeeding outweights the cost of screwing up. When that happens, I move; otherwise, I don’t.
My son seems to have that curve tilted downwards. Compared to me, he overweights joy and underweights risk.
Let me go a bit further. By definition, the further away from the origin of coordinates you are, the higher the stakes. The higher the stakes, the more conservative I become. It’s just too risky at a certain point. So my trigger curve really looks more like this:
(Fer seems to be immune to this effect too.)
The difference between my son and I is this:
You know what that is?
That is the space of things my son would dare to do that I won’t.
A garden of possibility where Fer laughs and plays.
That garden is extramural for me, and my son had me wondering whether I had raised my walls too tight.
I just drew a door in there
so that I can venture beyond the wall
to meet my son in laugh and play
and hold his hand while he walks me into the wildlings lands.
We know nothing.