Jan
10
Competitiveness
Filed Under Sport
Virtually every day, I play the Oriental game of Go on the Internet. Truly wonderful that I can find an opponent at any time of the day or night. And I also get to play different styles from around the World. All for free.
On the Go Server I use, you can opt to play a ‘rated’ game, or a ‘free’ one. The result of only the former has an effect on your player rating.
Having protected an artificially high rating for a number of months, I decided to play all games as rated, and to focus on my game play, not on my ranking. This allowed me to develop aspects of my game without worrying unduly about losing. My ranking settled to a more realsitic level, where it has stayed since. But try as I might, I cannot shake free from a concern about my ranking. My ego hangs onto this status symbol with concerted dilligance, opposing my long term desires.
The more I watched this status obsession, the more I realised how stubborn it is. A deep rooted need to find a good or elavated level compared to others. Or at least not to slip so as to lose credibility regardless of the quality of my actual games. (It is easy in Go to play a solid game that you lead for most of the game only to slip up at the very end and see a position collapse and the gameslip away from your grasp).
So far, I cannot play without at least some concern for my ranking. My status. Maybe this indicates that I need to liberate the grip of my ego, and can use this simple status scenario as a gauge. I’ll update here if the situation changes.
On the matter of mental and emotional training, the excellent ‘The Plastic mind’ book covers this matter. They investigated the effect of decades of meditation on then non-meditative state of the meditator brains. They found that the influence of the right frontal cortex was small. During compassionate meditation, the left frontal cortex was the highest they had ever seen. Left means compassio, loce, harmony and the right ishome to jealousy, hatred, anger etc.
When questioned on hatred, it appears that the Dalai Lama not so much deeply suppresses this very negative emotion, but simple never feels it. His day to day life is free from the grip of a status obsessed ego, with all that entails.
Of course, these meditators are also liberated from the daily grind that afflicts the rest of us. They would barely have any time to themselves if parenting a bunch of children, let alone daily time to meditate for hours. But a small amount of mental and emotional training for the rest of us would probably be of parallel good as physical exercise is for us. It is just that we have not been edcuated in any way to see the value of such training. Or even how to go about it.
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3 Responses to “Competitiveness”
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Hi,
It is quite clear from your words that you think you want to focus on your own game play regardless the ranking.
May I ask why you pay so much attention to the game ranking thing?
The attraction of the games like this kind required multiple players, I believe, does come from the competition.
If we are playing a single role game( no other human player involved), I think the competition is also existing - we play many times and complete with ourselves for the better score or rank.
Without the competition, the athletes may not break the record for so many times.
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