How to Be Aware that You Are Your Own Anthropologist

Self-discovery isn’t meant to be painful. If it is, then you’re working on yourself, lost in the story of your life, or simply resisting what is. –Ariel & Shya Kane, Practical Enlightenment

Introduction to awareness

You might agree that to play fun, self-motivational, and uplifting games you first need to design them. You need to be the designer of your games.

Great game and gamification designers have one thing in common. They don’t judge what they see in themselves and the players of their games. Instead, they observe and learn to be aware of what their players want, like, and need in games to experience them as fun, and to fortify happiness.

Let’s see what awareness means and how you can tap into its power of enlightenment.

Awareness occurs when you observe yourself non-judgmentally. Award-winning authors, Ariel and Shya Kane, whose work I quote many times in my books and articles, define awareness as follows:

A nonjudgmental, non-preferential seeing. It’s an objective, noncritical witnessing of the nature or what we call the ‘isness’ of any particular circumstance or situation. It can be described as an ongoing process in which you are bringing yourself back to the moment, rather than complaining silently about how you would prefer this moment to be. — Ariel and Shya Kane, Practical Enlightenment

So to be aware, you don’t have to do anything complex or difficult. All you need to do is to look around and observe. This observation includes seeing and listening without validating what you see or hear. It is about discovering anew without comparing to what you already know. Such seeing and listening bring to any moment a newly experienced crispness and freshness.

Let’s see how you can enable such non-judgmental seeing for yourself, the world around you, and your thought processes when you respond to what life brings your way.

Be your own anthropologist

Ariel and Shya Kane suggest something quite brilliant in their award-winning books, radio show Being Here, and live seminars. They invite the readers, listeners, and participants of their workshops to study themselves, those around them, and the circumstances they are in as anthropologists would do, non-judgmentally.

This suggestion is utterly simple and at the same time extremely profound.

Here is what they say in their award-winning book How to Have A Match Made in Heaven: A Transformational Approach to Dating, Relating, and Marriage,

Practice your anthropological approach. Pretend you’re a scientist observing a culture of one — yourself. The trick is not to judge what you see, but to neutrally observe how you function, including your thought processes. Awareness and kindness are key. — Ariel and Shya Kane

Before we discuss this in more detail, let’s see what anthropology is.

Anthropology is

“the scientific study of the origin, the behavior, and the physical, social, and cultural development of humans.” — The Free Dictionary

When anthropologists study and talk about a culture they mean

the whole set of information a human mind uses to describe what the world is like and what’s appropriate behavior for living in that world. Cultural differences are basically different conceptions of what is appropriate in a given situation. — Cameron M. Smith, Anthropology For Dummies

I believe that the best game and gamification designers must also be anthropologists. Because as I suggested above, they don’t judge what they see. They learn as much as they can about the players of their games because they are utterly invested in the interests and needs of their players.

Here is what I discovered about anthropology:

One foundation of anthropology is the comparative approach, in which cultures aren’t compared to one another in terms of which is better than the other but rather in an attempt to understand how and why they differ as well as share commonalities. This method is also known as cultural relativism, an approach that rejects making moral judgments about different kinds of humanity and simply examines each relative to its own unique origins and history. — Cameron M. Smith, Anthropology For Dummies

Maybe that is why anthropologists are:

• Non-judgmental,
• Utterly curious about what’s in front of them,
• Often diving into and actively engaging with the culture they are studying,
• Immensely interested in understanding the culture they are studying, as well as its motivations, without judging or labeling them.

Now imagine being like that towards yourself!

It is possible.

The recipe for this is again a little pause and non-judgmental observation. It can help and works wonders.

As I learn more about gamification in general, I have the growing feeling that the field could tremendously profit from the anthropological, which is non-judgmental observation and study of those who play a particular game or use a specific gamified system. Independent of age, gender, or any other social group. Each generation, each group of people, is a “culture” of its own.

And each age group could learn from another. So, even games for the smallest children could inspire creative mechanisms for gamification design for adults, making various activities as effortless and enjoyable as possible.

In fact, Mitchel Resnick, the LEGO Papert Professor of Learning Research, Director of the Okawa Center, and Director of the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab insists in his acclaimed book Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity through Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play that traditional kindergarten play should be introduced into the “adult” and corporate world to make it more productive, efficient, welcoming, and creative.

However, not only are there differences between groups of people and every person in general, but each of us also differs depending on circumstances, situations, and states of mind. Therefore, observe and learn from what you see about yourself. You might discover something you never expected.

For example, I discovered at some point that when doing arithmetic calculations in my head, I wasn’t using the languages I expected. I applied neither my mother tongue, Romanian (still used with my mother, sister, and niece), nor Russian (the language I spoke during my school, kindergarten and university years), nor English (which I predominantly used to communicate with my colleagues at work).

Instead, I was using German, the language I was only just starting to learn (being just one or two years after I’d moved to Germany, and while I was still attending language lessons). I can’t recall now which language I had used previously for such mental sums, but it must have been either Romanian, Russian, or English, the languages I spoke fluently at the time.

I couldn’t believe it when I became aware of it, and tried to guess the reason. I think it is because the German system of putting the units before the tens when naming the numbers was so unusual to me that I practiced it over and over, and in so doing it then became automatic for me to use German when making simple calculations.

Even today when I speak to my mother, and we both need to add or subtract in our heads, each of us does it in a different language, she in Romanian and I in German, even if we use Romanian for the rest of the conversation. This discovery was a big shock both for me and those who observed me calculating quickly out loud in German for the first time.

At this point, I would like to ask you to take a couple of moments and reflect on whether you have had a similar “self-revelation.”

Use a notebook and a pen or your computer to write down these “surprises” when you try to observe yourself non-judgmentally. Record the first revelations that come to your mind.

I invite you to do this exercise now and again. You might discover abilities and potential that you didn’t think you possessed, by just being here and being interested in what is happening inside and outside yourself.

So when you turn your life into games, don’t be “only” the designer and the player — first and foremost you should start by being your own anthropologist.

From Self-Gamification Happiness Formula: How to Turn Your Life into Fun Games.

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P.S. Feel free to share the surprises about yourself you discover when you study yourself anthropologically. I’d love to read them in the comments. To keep in touch, subscribe to my newsletter, Optimist Writer.

About the author:

Victoria is a writer, instructor, and consultant with a background in semiconductor physics, electronic engineering (with a Ph.D.), information technology, and business development. While being a non-gamer, Victoria came up with the term Self-Gamification, a gameful and playful self-help approach bringing anthropology, kaizen, and gamification-based methods together to increase the quality of life. She approaches all areas of her life this way. Due to the fun she has, while turning everything in her life into games, she intends never to stop designing and playing them.