Emotions, Feelings, and Experiences
What They Mean, How They Differ, the Complexity of Understanding Them, Why Controlling Them is Impossible, but Navigation is Vital, and How They Relate to Games
To understand something, you often start with learning its definition. The words “emotions” and “feelings” are often used interchangeably, but they strongly differ as I discovered. Here is a great quote which provides a succinct definition for both:
“[E]motions are the upwellings that we can’t really think about. Like hunger, an emotion happens; it can’t really be described or conveyed. Feelings are how we attempt to represent those emotions in words or art.” — Tom Drummond in “Emotion/Feeling Vocabulary”, Tom Drummond: Resources and Writings
So, you can’t really plan an emotion, even if the choices you made until the moment you experience it might have led to it. And feelings are the expressions of the emotions you are experiencing. Those expressions might be very emotional, too, and they might lead to other emotions, sometimes even the opposites of those you experienced in the first place.
And since we will talk a lot about experiences in this book, it makes sense to look at the definition of this word, too. Here it is:
Experience is a “direct observation of or participation in events as a basis of knowledge.” — Merriam-Webster
You have probably heard of the expression “learning by doing.” Experiences make a compelling and fantastic way to learn. Whether you do something or not, learning by experiencing it is the best and most memorable way to enrich your life.
Writing this book is a unique and special experience for me. As I do it, I realize how strongly emotions, feelings, experiences, actions, choices, attitudes, practices, qualities, behaviors, habits, impressions, thoughts, and so many more are intertwined and color and also influence each other.
Sometimes, you can’t clearly see or say whether what you experience is an emotion, a feeling, an experience, something else, or a combination of some or all. Here is an example:
“Interestingly, there is debate among researchers about whether love is an emotion. However, among everyone else, love is clearly thought of as an emotion.” — Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart
All these terms and concepts, including the emotions themselves, contribute to our emotional response to life and the constantly changing worlds we encounter, including those within us.
That is why I think it is impossible to control emotions. You experience them, and certain choices might lead to one or another emotion. Still, so many factors play into each emotion that, in some cases, the same choices might lead to entirely different emotions and how you experience them.
The only thing we could and should do is to navigate emotions. Observe them, let ourselves experience them, express what we feel as the result of those experiences, and then choose our subsequent actions and steps, however agile (e.g., active) or calm (e.g., rather passive) they might be.
If you think about it, the above paragraph could also describe how we experience games. In a way, we navigate the sea of games, too, as we learn about them and try them out, stick with some and leave the other to discover more, and possibly come back again to some to rediscover them. This fact adds to the reasons for exploring emotions like games, given in the following article:
About this article:
This is a slightly modified excerpt from Navigate Your Emotions by Exploring Them Like Games: How to Feel with Curiosity Rather Than Suffering. To find out more about the book, check out the description below.
In this book, Victoria Ichizli-Bartels offers simple tools to explore your emotions, resulting feelings, and connected experiences as if they were games.
Ichizli-Bartels argues that you may not be able to control your emotions, but you can navigate them; often without having to act through them, but allowing yourself to feel with curiosity and without suffering, pressure, or guilt. All you have to do is know your tools and use them well during your navigation adventure.
Navigate Your Emotions by Exploring Them Like Games is a surprising, revolutionary, and never-before-undertaken approach to exploring emotions, feelings, and experiences by dissecting them into the main and well-known game components: goals, rules, feedback systems, and voluntary participation.
The three parts of the book present a detailed introduction to the approach, many examples of gameful explorations of emotions, feelings, and related concepts considered in pairs, and true stories from the author’s life illustrating sometimes surprising but always illuminating experiences of emotions.
The concluding two chapters will introduce you to the start of an infinite list of emotions, feelings, and related concepts and give you some ideas and a template for your gameful explorations of emotions.
Letting yourself feel an emotion does not need to be stressful or scary. Take the gameful challenge this book offers. Learn how to navigate your emotions by exploring them like games, the tools you will need for that, and what you can do to control these tools and become the best designer and player of the fantastic game collection that is your life.
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