Why Hyperfocus?
Alec
Nobody every told me I was high-functioning. They just told me I was weird.
I embraced the weird early on, like I embraced a series of different interests. I absorbed details like engine displacements and horsepower out of Gran Turismo and magazines; I was fascinated by stellar dynamics; I was endlessly building new things with LEGO and I disassembled everything broken to figure out how it worked; I consumed every available media related to Star Wars and the second World War.
And I loved games, of all kinds.
My grandmother was much older than typical, as I was a late-born child of one of her late-born children, but while I was in single digits and she was a septegenerian, “June Bug” was spending her days staying mentally sharp by playing card games, and was a fiercely competitive bridge player. She spent a lot of our time together teaching me simpler games like Gin Rummy and Skip-Bo, and most of my memories of her were formed across a dining room table.
Her other obsession was owls. She had owls everywhere – little figurines and knick-knacks on every shelf, pictures and paintings and string art on every well, interleaved with family photos.
I don’t think anyone told her she was high-functioning either.
I love the “brain feel” of problem-solving that comes from getting into a really good game, trying to think through the puzzle of the next move, or sequence; figuring out what the best or most interesting move is. I find the challenge endlessly satisfying, and some of my favourite, most-played games are ones where there is no perfect solution but allow for constant improvement, always learning and adapting as the game changes.
I also love the way games can transcend simple stories by placing you fully into someone else’s shoes, letting you experience and live through someone else’s life in small ways I genuinely believe that it’s incredibly important to have the ability to step outside yourself and your lived experiences and to be able to understand other people, and the way that different roleplaying games and video games allow you to transplant yourself into another world: to live another life and experience, where the broad strokes are all fiction, but the emotional core is still a human truth.
Where social media and the rest of contemporary life create social bubbles and feedback loops, games are one of the few places to truly step outside those. Much of it is by definition face-to-face interaction, often outside those typical bubbles. Games gives you a different place to be truly real – through fiction – where social media serves a fake version of reality.
My time as a Magic player has shaped a lot of my daily mindset. There are often situations completely out of your control, you just lose, and there’s nothing you can do about it. There are times when you just get lucky and succeed, and it’s important to pay attention to that luck and stay humble about that success. Then all through the middle it’s less clear-cut, but all you can control is yourself, and your decisions, you can’t always control your situation. What you can control is doing everything in your power to make things better for yourself; to set yourself up for success; to never give up when things are going against you; to push for that small chance where you can actually win: It’s about making decisions, not the results. Sometimes everything still goes against you, but sometimes – sometimes – that tiny chance goes your way because you made all the decisions to let it.
You can’t control the cards that you draw, but you can control how you play them.