Agency and Pokemon

I was recently turned on to a web series called Extra Credits. It is a show that talks about video games and how they can be used to push the media into a serious state of debate, as well as how it is now becoming an intragle part of our culture. They're latest episode set off something in this time of lots and lots of introspective thinking.



Topic #2: Agency.

This is me. This has been me for a long time, actually. Trodding through everyday life with no long term goals. While I don't feel like I can't control my destiny, I do feel that I'm stuck in a situation of my own creation due to some seriously bad life choices. Even my short-term goals tend to fail due to one reason or another. I don't feel motivated at all to do anything, not even draw. It's becoming a habit to force myself to do things I don't want to do, like work out for half an hour every day or look up job listings. But when everything is all said and done, I sit here in front of all my technology under motivated to do anything else.

If agency is really a scaling system, then there has to be a way to increase it. Much like confidence building, some kind of factor must allow agency to build in a person to the point where I can become that "Oh well, that's life. Let's try it again." guy described in the episode. While the show may suggest video games, the games I play don't really give me any kind of agency due to the choices I make. Even the ones that actually do reward that, such as Pokemon (which I've been playing a lot of lately), don't really make me feel like I'm controling the outcome of the battle. If anything, because I have the option to power through the game through constant leveling up, I've learned how to save my strength and energy for when something really matters. Like, I don't know, SCAD.

SCAD mattered to me, and after getting fired from my job, I actually found myself motivated enough to go through the application process. Why? Because I knew what would happen if I didn't attempt to better myself. I would be in a worse situation than I am now.

But that was then, and this is now. Having dropped out of the school after being accepted and paying the deposits, I'm in the situation I was trying to avoid in the first place. Why? Life. Lack of funds. That Ego-shattering moment when reality bitch slaps you in the face and says "NO SCHOOL FOR YOU!" in a booming, God-like voice.

It's similar to how I would be able to dominate the competition in the Gameboy version of Pokemon, but the moment I transfer my killer team to the N64 game and enter them into a stadium tourniment, I get my ass handed to me. Powering through isn't enough. I needed to reanalyze my tactics and then retrain my Pokemon, or catch new ones that could fill in the slots in a better way. Eventualy, I would find a strategy that would work, albeit it still fell on the whole "hit them hard and hit them fast" mentality I have with battling games like these. But I set no real long-term goal with myself or the game. All the choices I made were on the spur of the moment, which is kind of the point of the episode when they illustrate that the cycle between choice and consiquence is shorter in games than in real life.

What they don't really talk about is the fact that the consiquences in the game aren't nearly as impactful as the ones in real life. In a way, you have more to lose from failure in life than you do in a Pokemon game. But the key is to know how to start over again. The Game Over screen isn't the end of it all. It just means you need to try again. For some people, they can do that in life. Their Game Over moments may be big disappointments, but they don't last long before they try again. For a normal person, it could be a week or a month or even a year before they try again.

For me? I don't know if I'll ever try again. My sense of agency is so low that I just learned that I had one today when I saw this episode. That's how small it is. At least with self-confidence, I had that and knew when I was starting to lose it. The idea of a scaling sense of agency is new to me, but it makes sense. It goes hand-in-hand with self-confidence. The more of either you have, the better your life can be.

For now, however, I need to find out what gives me motivation in general. The SCAD thing was out of urgancy if anything. The want was there, but never the drive. Which, surprisingly, has always been the case. I need to find that one want that is actually in the driver's seat with the key in the ignition just waiting for me to say "Fire it up."