Game-a-Day Journal Archive

Build character by cleaning dishes

My Unusual Background with Cleaning Plates

I was never allowed to do dishes growing up. My (wonderful and sweet) mothing was overprotective, so I actually had the privledge of not being able to do many things: mow lawns, operate microwaves, ride my bike on the street, get a job (”school is your work” she said), or clean dishes.

When I started college, I began a free-for-all full-tilt binge on cleaning dishes that continues to this day, now a full half year after graduating.

There are two important ways in which doing dishes has been different in my life than in the lives of my peers:

1. I have never been forced to do dishes. It was never presented to me as a chore or punishment.
2. Ever since I was old enough to do dishes, I was in an environment where dish cleaning was a shared need. It has always been “our” dishes, never just “my” dishes, that needed to be cleaned.

Let me also put out there that I enjoy playing this game. I strongly suspect that you (no matter who you are) probably do not. But that is precisely what I wish to call attention to in today’s journal entry.

Wrestling and Programmatic Self-Discipline

I believe that the first point - that I have never been punished or forced to do dishes - is the most important by far.

Shortly before I started wrestling in high school, I made a habit of running every day for 30 minutes. I found this rewarding, and built up a very positive outlook on exercise. During this time, I began to think of running as simply “running = feel good”. For the next few years as a wrestler, extra running was frequently demanded by coaches as a form of punishment for the team; this reinforced almost daily the idea that “running = feel guilty”. They never got through to me, or broke my positive association with exercise, but I watched many of my peers develop a resentment for this healthy activity.

When someone is forced to do something, in a way that either takes time away from what someone otherwise wants to do (”see my friends tonight”) or is conveyed as punishment (”extra chores for you this week young man”), negative feelings get programmed into us about those activities.

That’s unfortunate, because well into the foreseeable future, there will still be plenty of dishes to be done. We might as well be happy about it, instead of indifferent or annoyed.

I refer to this concept as “Programmatic” Self-Discipline, because at the root of it, it’s about being aware of or deliberately affecting our programmed responses to stimuli. It is different from more traditional thinking about self-discipline, because instead of being about denying ourselves what we want (fattening foods, TV, leaving a mess, sitting around like a lump), it is instead about reprogramming how we look at things so that we want the things that we decide are good for us (healthy foods, self-guided learning, cleaning, exercise) and develop an active distaste for the things that we decide are bad for us.

“Conditioned” behavior would be a more traditional word for the psychology underlying this affect. I deliberately choose “programmatic” since “conditioned” suggests mysterious environmental circumstance, whereas “programmatic” acknowledges that a person is responsible for their logical cause-effect relationships (there must be a “programmer”, and it’ll be someone else if it isn’t you!).

Other Ways to Benefit from Programmatic Self-Discipline

I am a strong believer in reprogramming what we like, instead of letting what we naturally like control our lives. I extend this type of thinking in the following ways for my life (what makes sense for someone else is likely different):

• Food - “Healthy Vegan food tastes good.” If what I like is up to me, why not make up my mind to like things that align with my good health and personal values?
• Use of free time - “Teaching myself new things or seeking new experiences is more enjoyable than watching TV.” I would rather make conversation about unique personal stories and creative output than what happened last week on a sitcom.
• Friendship - “I’d like to be better friends with him/her” is used to mean that I believe I will develop in positive ways with that person as part of my life. It isn’t about who happens to live next door, who is most popular, or (as media would like to program us to believe) who is wearing expensive clothing.
• Dating - “I find her attractive” is a reflection of whatever is known about a girl’s creativity, intelligence, and values. Advertisers would like to suggest that attractiveness has to do primarily with anatomy, make up, hair dyes, fashion, and brand association. What good are those things?
• Source of fun - “Solving problems and making creative things entertains me more happy than consuming alcohol.” I have no objection to anyone else drinking. I just don’t see a reason for it to be a part of my life, when there are so many other things to do that I find more interesting.

This form of self-discipline begins by understanding that these positive and negative feelings are really quite arbitrary, and knowing how they get programmed gives us power over them. This means that someone can:

1. Seek circumstances that reprogram us in ways we wish to be different, such as applying to schools or initiating healthy habits.
2. Catch and correct events in life when the natural series of circumstances might otherwise break our programming in ways we don’t want changed. For example, introducing this tool into our mental vocabulary opens up the meaning of thoughts like “Even though it is my turn to clean the common area, I will maintain a positive outlook on cleaning, since doing so will enable me to live in a clean environment no matter where I go.”

Dishes and Programmatic Self-Discipline

The second point, that dishes have always been a shared need, is related to my relationship to dish cleaning.

In college, I joined a fraternity, and lived in the fraternity house for three years. (As an aside, that I am a strongly individualistic, non-drinking, Atheist Vegan did not pose any problem; it was a zero-hazing and pledge-free house, where common values were respected but all other differences were celebrated; truly extraordinary men.)

During that time, every leftover dish was the responsibility of everyone. If someone had to run off to an event, or accidently left a cup/plate laying around downstairs, there wasn’t punishment, argument, or hard feelings - whoever else saw it and had a minute to spare would just take care of it as a way of helping everyone else out.

In this way, I replaced my then empty association with doing dishes, “cleaning dishes = ?”, with a positive mental association: “cleaning dishes = helping friends”.

To this day, whether those friends are my roommates, my older brother, my coworkers, or (some day, maybe) a wife, I enjoy doing dishes because I feel good about taking care of something so that someone else doesn’t have to.

The Joy of Cleaning

My positive connotation with cleaning plates has helped me discover the properties of cleaning that make it a nice activity:

1. It must be done. Ignored, it will become a health and organization problem.
2. The next time I need something, I’ll be glad it’s done.
3. It must not be put off. It only gets worse and harder to clean otherwise. Furthermore, since cleaning is not a one-time event, putting it off is really the same as not doing it (see point #1).
4. Each little bit of progress you make counts toward the goal. Stains won’t reappear until those dishes are used again. No effort can be wasted by going the wrong direction (unlike creative, business, or engineering efforts!).
5. There is a finite, reachable goal. This task can be finished, and will be, if a known quantity of effort is put into it (also unlike some creative, business, or engineering efforts).
6. It occupies the hands but not the mind. The brain can be turned off, or better still, it can be set on tasks that otherwise are hard to do while mentally occupied or surrounded by other people (like “getting over” something by untangling confused thoughts).
7. Other people appreciate it. (Unless they, like me, enjoy cleaning plates, in which case you probably should be nice and share.)

These benefits are part of everyone’s dish doing experience, but I think most people don’t pick up on how nice they are, becuase they’re instead thinking about, “I wish I was doing something else instead”, a thought I believe was unfortunately programmed in at an early-age through structured chores.

Note that it’s never too late to change that, though! Brains are very reprogrammable.

That’s Nice. What About the Videogame Part?

In terms of mechanics, this game interests me because it introduces something you don’t see in many other games: rubbing. Perhaps a better term to use here, one with less sexual connotation, might be “scrubbing”.

As everyone that has cleaned dishes with breakneck efficiency surely agrees: incorporating the corners of a sponge into the scrubbing action has considerable advantages over simply using a broad side. This method alternates direct cleaning action with exposure to running water, sweeping away the most recently freed bits - it’s a formula for success, and this game’s model rewards that method of scrubbing.

As an emergent property of the control model, this game also makes sweeping, circular motions the best general move for nearly any plate at first, and once the minor areas have been wiped free the harder spots can be addressed via more focused scrubbing.

Computers are capable of doing many, many things. One of things computers can do is simulate characters shooting each other, and there are plenty of people using computers to do exactly that. Regardless of whether anyone else on Earth enjoys this game besides me, it’s a worthwhile exploration into the deep end of different things we can use computers to communicate.

Misc. Production Notes

The art style was chosen because it allowed me to have “running water” without animating anything. For the game’s background image I took a photograph of my hand holding a plate under our faucet, then painted Photoshop layers on top of it (”rotoscoped” in 1 frame). A quietly looped (bad) water running sound effect I added helps suggest that the water should be thought of as running.

Also note that I’m using a black screen plus sound effect to “swap dishes”. This made for substantially less work than other ways to go from one plate to the next, and it also made for a substantially more acceptable effect than just leaving the plate onscreen and popping fresh food onto it. In comic book terms, I’m using this as a “gutter” (space between still frames) to prod the player’s imagination fill in the action between, and once again, further aiding in this step by use of a sound effect.

Time to do the dishes.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 22nd, 2007 at 11:18 pm and is filed under Commucept, Experimental, Free Flash Games, Game Design, Literal, Personal Development, The Mission. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.