I Created A Game That Could Boost Your Creativity, Your Empathy, Your Ability to Understand Others, and Your Problem-Solving Skills
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I came up with a new idea for a mind puzzle game we can play in the comments section. I hope that this game will help us get better at grasping unfamiliar thought processes, which can allow you and I to gain empathy for people who think differently than us. We can then use the empathy to make others feel understood and welcome, which can result in them returning the empathy back to us, leading to stable social interactions in Nonmonetized Together.
It starts by someone asking what I call a “pathless question.” By this, I mean a question that has two components that are completely unrelated, making the question so nonsensical that one can’t even begin to answer it using typical forms of logic and reasoning. For example, “what is the most Wednesday city on earth?” Days of the week and cities have almost no relation to each other. Another example is “which type of cheese is most similar to fencing?” You could also ask, “where’s the best baseball stadium to think of gorillas?”
When you’re playing the game, it’s not just enough for the questions to be about two unrelated things. The questions must also be completely illogical. Shakespeare and KFC may be unrelated but if you asked if Shakespeare would like KFC, you might be able to guess the answer by studying the diets of wealthy artists in Elizabethan England. So that would not count as a pathless question in this game.
Once somebody asks the pathless question, the other players would have to come up with the answer that comes closest to making sense. Each of the other players must also come up with an explanation as to why they chose their answer. There may not be anything inherently fencing-related about cheese, but by finding a convoluted way to link types of cheese to fencing, the players might be able to find which one is most similar to fencing. The winner is the person who provides the least convoluted, most accurate, most logical answer.
Basically, the point of the game is to link two concepts that are usually comprehended differently from each other. The game can help you link concepts together in new ways, which can strengthen your skills in problem-solving and creativity. It also gives you experience with thinking about things in a different way than you normally would, which can help you grasp unfamiliar concepts more easily. Plus, the game may improve your ability to understand a wider range of perspectives.
This game can be played anytime anywhere. Why not give it a try in the comments section? Commenting with a pathless question is probably the rare opportunity to make a Medium or write.as comment when you aren’t in the mood to get into a complex discussion!
