Re: [FRIAM] A talk of possible interest to FRIAMers: Harpers 2008 July, The Perfect Game, Joshuah Bearman, tells how Pac Man video game masters use profound "flow" states, ranging from perfectly rational to highly intuitive: Rich Murray 2008.07.13 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rmforall/messages/81
At the end of Jeannette M. Wing's jubilant talk, I added that Computational Thinking also promotes expanded states of awareness, including access to information and processes that range from intuition to parapsychological to revelatory, leading to faster irreversible personal evolution. A lady told me she totally agreed, while Jeannette was graciously approving when I chatted with her, as I added that profound ethical values are also inculcated -- trustworthiness, honesty, generosity, openness to many viewpoints, fairness, fearlessness, optimism, playfulness, humor, directness, tact, politeness, cooperativeness, prejudice free, accuracy, rationality, service, community evolution, continuing education, innovation, harmlessness, gentleness, beauty -- values essential for world evolution. http://harpers.org/archive/2008/07/0082097 http://www.localseoguide.com/off-topic-great-weekend-reading-the-pac-man-master/ The Perfect Game: Five years with the master of Pac-Man describes how a great master, starting in 1982 achieved the first perfect game in 1999, with the highest possible score of 3,333,360 points for all 256 levels, playing without eating from July 1 to July 3, "...executed 30,000 precisely calculated turns for a perfect run..." The screens of these championship games are videotaped to allow verification, and should enable innovative detailed studies of human capabilities. Walter Day, the field's master referee, an expert in Transcendental Meditation, comments, "I believe the players are connecting to something really profound, but to see that yourself, you need to see real champions at the controls." "True quests, he says, are about losing yourself, which in the end is finding yourself. 'Top gamers have yogic concentration, combining utter focus with extreme relaxation, like what I studied with the Maharishi.' Walter says the players, like all great athletes, can enter flow states when navigating Pac-Man or marathoning on games like Nibbler. And many players do in fact report moments, deep into the hours, when everything but the game recedes. 'It's happened to me many time,' Dwayne says, 'It's like you have some kind of automatic comprehension.' Russians say this is 'the white moment.' Zen action describes it as the ability to 'do without doing'. Walter calls it 'an expanded insight' that just might lead to a new world record." Two masters studied the game for many years. "They thoroughly internalized Pac-Man's programming rules, its telos and its gestalt, and they came to realize something important, which was that this closed system was perfect -- a controllable, predictable universe in a box. 'What I learned, is that everything has a reason.'" However, Abdner Bancroft Ashman, a Jamaican immigrant from Queens, 41, a construction worker, shy and soft-spoken, spends most of his evenings practicing in the basement of his mother's home, under a bare overhead bulb. "Unlike Billy, he has no explanation for how he does what he does. He can play with either hand and recall entire games in his head, and yet he takes no notes, compiles no data, and has never once thought about the game's code. 'All I see is the joystick,' he says.'' "Abdner's chosen game, Ms. Pac-Man, is substantially more difficult than Pac-Man. 'Pac-Man can be controlled,' Abner explains. 'But Ms. Pac-Man is random.' As each level starts, the movements of the ghosts are briefly unpredictable, and therefore the player must create a new technology on the fly. Every time, order anew....After crafting his game alone... Abdner emerged as the seventh confirmed master...." "Ms. Pac-Man's non-Newtonian ambiguity is frustrating for Billy and Chris, because it confounds perfection and challenges Billy Mitchell's belief in universal causality. Abdner has no such grand theories, but he has set three record scores in rapid succession. each higher than the last." "'Billy plays literally,' Dwayne says. 'He is a reductionist.' Dwayne is good friends with Billy and holds his game play in high regard. 'But the thing is,' Dwayne adds, 'Abdner takes an ecological approach. He'll take insights from anywhere, even from dreams. It's the consummate technician versus the artist.' What Dwayne is proposing -- what the players all propose, in fact, when they whisper among the consoles about Abdner's secret knowledge that can only be guessed at -- is not technology at all but a kind of magic. 'Billy's the best at zeros and ones,' Dwayne says. 'But what if truth is in between?'" "Struggling to describe his playing, Abdner once said he tries to make 'logic out of chaos.'" So, for me, this is confirming evidence about higher levels of reality emerging into personal experience, transcending "causality", taking "insights from anywhere even from dreams," "a kind of magic", as "truth is in between", as we "make logic out of chaos." In mutual service, Rich Murray [EMAIL PROTECTED] 505-501-2298 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rmforall/messages/1 Lively Communion: Invoking Mutual Meditative Exploration 2001.06.22 ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
