The Pursuit of Legendary
Intro: Setting up Self Actualization and Legendary
“A Hero needs a Climbing skill in order to climb up trees, cliffs, certain ropes, and over gates…”
- Quest for Glory Omnipedia
In the early ’90s, Sierra Entertainment, a video game company based in California, made legendary Quest games including King’s Quest, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, and Quest for Glory. The core loop of these Quest titles relied on gamers typing gameplay demands into a text parser and waiting for action. Back in those days while playing Quest for Glory, early on in the game, I ended up stuck in front of a tree typing the phrase “climb tree” on repeat until finally at some point I actually could climb. This was a rather frustrating experience. The game was designed in such a way that as a player, you needed to type a certain command endless times to gain experience points, and there was no indication that you were actually getting any experience. At some point unbeknownst to you, you somehow earned enough points to actually climb the tree.
The characteristics of repetition and surprise of outcome made up the core loop of the in-game grind. Playing quests games helped me grow in real life in four (somewhat unexpected) ways:
- Verbally. As a kid and as a non-native English speaker it provided a platform to learn and expand my knowledge of the English language.
- Physically. I became a fast typer, eventually learning how to touch type English in my teens.
- Emotionally. I learned how to deal with frustration with joy and curious anticipation.
- Perseverance-wise. It taught me grit, how to develop my grind ‘muscles’ while pursuing a goal.
At first, these benefits seemed like a natural occurrence, with no substantial real-life impact. But looking back at some of the hard choices I’ve had to make in life, I can now say these quest games played a role in my initial steps of personal growth, and ultimately played a supporting role in my path towards self-actualization.
Similarities Between Self-Actualization and Legendary Status
Conscious self-actualization is the path one takes to reach their full potential. It’s a process in which one expands and tries to figure out how to achieve or grow into the best configuration for their own unique human expression. Pursuing the path touches every area of our lives; how we show up, how we view a situation, how we perceive and manage our relationships, what career paths we choose, and even how we game. If we look at self-actualization through the lens of a gamer, it is fair to compare the rare state of fully realized self-actualization to achieving a legendary rank or status within a game.
Each gamer at their core pursues legendary from their first minute of play. The well-designed game induces constant states of flow which optimize the gamer’s path towards reaching what might seem at the beginning as an impossible accomplishment. The pursuit of legendary, in that sense, is an ongoing minute-by-minute process in which a player constantly upgrades and sculpts their character, items, and team members towards a unique expression meant to peak and actualize as a legendary state/level/reputation at some point.
In many ways, games mirror a real-life self-actualization process as they teach within a contained and relatively safe environment the core tenants of pursuing this state. The human soul, which organically wants to manifest its potential to its fullest, gets an immediate call to action within almost any game environment. It’s a visceral undeniable experience.
The core feature of legendary gameplay:
“Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.”
― James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games
Legendary can manifest in 3 tiers:
- Solo
- Team
- Creations
As a general example: a musician can master an instrument and become a legendary player (Jimi Hendrix), and/or they can choose to join a band or an orchestra and that entity as whole can become legendary (Pink Floyd), and/or they can start creating music at a legendary level for solo players or orchestras (Beethoven). And, they can also do it all (Jacob Collier).
The defining feature of a legendary gamer is their ability to reinvent or reimagine how to play with the rules of a game per the perspective tiers. The legendary state is something that can manifest only after a player has mastered several aspects of the game, and has deep knowledge and expertise in at least one of the three tiers.
Solo: Solo gameplay begins with the initial training of awareness and perception within a particular game arena. Choosing a character, getting to know it, and leveling it up are the core loop dynamics. She eventually ends up choosing the characters with the best personal fit to navigate and master the game world according to her perception and awareness of what suits her best. This process is a very personal and solitary experience by nature. The pursuit of legendary can be manifested by a gamer’s level of character and gear but it’s her particular and unique solo gameplay, her signature moves, and way of being that make her legendary (think in League of Legends, a Challenger-ranked player playing a Silver game).
In real life, expanding and navigating our knowledge of our values, strengths, blind spots and aspirations is our first step as we engage in the game of life. This process by design is painful, and more often than not — includes one or more forms of real-life suffering (see Plato’s allegory of the cave). This experience is much easier and fun to do within a game, where you can sublimate your suffering for an imaginary arena and character that sustains no real-life consequences. The entire process is risk-free, which makes games such a great gym for personal growth and resilience.
For more on how gaming can contribute to four types of resilience, don’t miss game designer Jane McGonigal’s legendary TED Talk, The Game That Can Give You 10 Extra Years of Life.
Team: This tier is about aligning and upgrading your solo play and value system with like-minded players. At the core of each game is a community built from small groups who game together. In many aspects, this community is the heart of the game.
Building up these in-game relationships is necessary to level up your solo gameplay and perception of the game arena, and design-wise, it’s the only mechanism that can get you to places and game experiences that otherwise are not accessible. In MMORPG’s in particular, teamwork comes into play at scale in games such as World of Warcraft, where original raids could require the coordination of up to 40 gamers to successfully overcome challenges, and newer raids require perfect synergy between a team of 20. This is a process that can often produce group flow, a state in which all players are in a combined state of flow, working together in perfect harmony to win over a level or a boss. Here, legendary gameplay manifests via the strengths and accomplishments of an alliance/party over time.
One of the core features of legendary is that it often doesn’t manifest in the way we think it does: Leeroy Jenkins showed how legendary reputation can be built when one breaks the rules of social gameplay in an act of spontaneity and free expression. He became popular in 2005 from his role in a viral video of game footage where, having been absent during his group’s discussion of a meticulous plan, Leeroy returns and ruins it by charging straight into combat shouting his own name in a stylized battle cry. His companions rush to help, but Leeroy’s actions ruin the detailed plan and all the members of the group are killed. The video was of course staged by the guild, but Leeroy’s unexpected and seemingly foolish charge earned him legendary status, resulting in Blizzard introducing Leeroy as a character in other games.
In real life, decades of research show that friendships and deep social connections are the key to our feeling happy and our sense of purpose in real life. The core mechanism of sense-making life’s game arena is done via our interaction with the community. Our closest relationships and individuals are our core tools to navigate and better understand our own lives. Once we gain agency and improve our “solo life gameplay” we can better choose and shape these social connections as well.
For some of us, games are a great tool to help us learn how to navigate and expand our social connections, they offer endless social bonding experiences, giving us a mutually agreed upon and trustworthy reason to commune and elevate our relationships.
Real-life legendary team play comes in the form of deep meaningful relationships and our ability to generate and sculpt our social circles. Building a skill set to go deep and intimate, navigating our own dark sides, and giving preference and focus to strengths is what eventually manifests a legendary friendship.
Creations are the third and ultimate stage in the process to reach legendary status.
Once a gamer can navigate alone and collaboratively, they have the ability to dive fully into the game and contemplate the deeper game dynamics. The next step is to see, and then build experiences that do not exist in the game, by creating mods or in-game apps, and sometimes even new games in the process. To do so is the ultimate legendary level. Not only have you mastered the game in the solo and team play but now you’re creating something that, if done successfully, will carry an impact on the entire community around the game.
Modders can be credited with creating some of the world’s most popular games. Both League of Legends and Dota 2 can trace their origins back to the same Warcraft III mod, Defense of the Ancients, where players continued to make their own versions of the game until they eventually took off and became the popular title that we are so familiar with.
These creators have shaped — and will continue to shape — the industry for the better. If you are interested in learning more about the future of modding, I encourage you to check out Abhimanyu’s thoughts in Master The Meta.
In real life, as we allow ourselves to be passionately curious and sharpen our awareness and strengths, we can at some point choose to create something that has never existed before, or some way of being that is a unique manifestation of the sum of our particular whole. When we “play” life long enough, we can then proactively and consciously actualize our passions by making active choices and bending the rules of the game in a way that’s unique to the core of who we are.
The irony is that in real life no matter what god-given talents you’ve been gifted, you are going to find a unique set of traps to keep you locked in your own personal prison. Seeing yourself and these traps for what they are and maintaining a positive disposition while solving life’s easter eggs is key to enduring the rigorous process of self-actualization.
“What is better? To be born good or to overcome your evil nature through great effort?”
- Paarthurnax, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Games serve as the ultimate playground for experimentation and “muscle” building for real life. First and foremost, games teach us to have a positive attitude and stance we should take when confronting challenges, and amplify a curiosity that inspires us to go about exploring and tinkering with the world and rules of the game. If you can pursue and reach legendary status in games, you’re well on your way to do so in real life.
Or as one line from a legendary game goes:
“It’s dangerous to go alone, take this!”
- Legend of Zelda
