Perspectives

A few days ago, a friend sent me the link to a video about Tetris world records and how modern Tetris players have iterated on ways of playing to a point where the only way to improve is to push the buttons on the controller in a fundamentally different way. It's fandom, and sport, and innovation, and it's all in pursuit of "making number go up" in a way that the developers of the game never intended. I know several people who think that breaking videogames in that way is fundamentally the wrong way to play it and get very annoyed with speedrunning in general. I also know people who delight in breaking games and watching others do so. I am married to someone whose career has been made in games QA. (My spouse is one of those who enjoys watching people break games, for what it's worth.)

Regardless of your perspective on this, the diversity of humans allows for all perspectives to exist simultaneously. The degree of difference in perspective is nuanced and always complicated. The life experiences leading a person to have a certain perspective are unknown to us, the opposite perspective-holder. Luckily, when it comes to things like videogames, most of the time we agree to disagree and talk about something else when we encounter people who play them differently than we do, and we all agree that we love the game of Tetris.

It's fundamentally the same as being friendly with your neighbor even though their life seems way different than yours and you cannot understand how they would want to live like they do. The only difference is that with videogames we can just turn off or skip past that part of the community with which we do not agree. With a neighbor, they still are going to be there at the end of the day, every day, until one of you moves.

So, all of this is to say, today's action item is to practice shifting your perspective when you encounter someone who seems vastly different than you. What brought them to that place is unknown, but something did, and you can always find a way to be kind, even if it's just complimenting the color of their hair. Just make sure you mean it :).