I played some Counter-Strike: Source with a bunch of nice people last night. It was a real tale of two halves as far as I’m concerned.

At the start of play, I was on a random team and essentially played without much interaction with my teammates. As such, I spent a fair bit of time running around the map (de_dust2, for what it’s worth) and getting shot. I tended to die because I just stood it awkward and probably stupid positions. In a nutshell, I just didn’t know where to put my virtual feet so that I’d have a chance.

Eventually, we formed into teams such that I was physically co-located with two people from my team, with the third on Skype. As such, we were able to communicate about what we were seeing, where we were, and what we were planning to do next. This is all fairly obviously the stuff of good old team-work, but I was most interested by how the core effect, for me, was to change the space I felt I existed in. Specifically, because I had the knowledge of the other players’ locations, status, and plans fed to me, the space of the map changed fundamentally into something comprehensible.

This is the aspect of playing with other humans that I find so valuable. I could really care less if I’m shooting a terrorist played by my friend or an AI, but the radically different “socio-spatial” nature of playing on the same team as people I know is a fascinating and liberating experience.

We finished season one of Dead Like Me this evening. As ever, it was a weird and bumpy ride through the final episode. One of the things that makes the show both so likable and so crap is that you’re never clear on what’s going on emotionally or how the show ‘wants you to feel.’ It seems to change pitch all the time, sometimes doing some excruciatingly bad comedy, sometimes managing to be touching, sometimes being genuinely funny, sometimes illustrating well how genuinely nice people can be. All of which is very confusing, because TV (and art forms generally) usually strike a particular tone and stick with it…

Anyway, the result is that I’m not even sure if I actually like the show, but the experience of watching it is so weird (not the events in the show, mind, but the nature and structure of the show itself), that I feel like we’ll have to look at season two, too. Go figure.

Played a fair amount of empty-headed Crimson Skies this evening, prompting me to snap my fingers in that “drat!” way and recall I’m meant to play with a notebook at hand to record my deep and worthy impressions. The notebook is more of a talisman, though, for the idea of having a particular intention when I sit down to play – in this case the intention to think as well as interact.

The whole intention thing is big. The other particularly large example for me is to do with meditation. Specifically, I try to set my intention clearly about my meditation session – to just be aware and so on. But still it sometimes slips through my fingers, probably because I don’t take the intention itself seriously.

All of this reminds me most of all of the idea involved in Mulsim prayer (salat) where you form the intention to pray, and then that intention can’t be broken in the interim between its formation and the praying itself. In a sense, this is about taking things seriously. You don’t mess around with prayer.

And, in theory, I don’t want to mess around with meditation or playing games thoughtfully either so… let’s set those intentions firmly. Like a really good filling.