A Video Game You MUST Play With Your Family

My teenage daughter is a bit of a Luddite. It was never forced upon her to be an anti-technology radical when she was only 10 years old. No one told her to curse screen time, video games, email, or the whole enterprise of online life, which she still resists today at age 13. She’s just wired that way. 

I, on the other hand, do love video games. Every so often, I’ll spend some time on the Xbox Store looking for something to play, and I make an effort to find something that I can invite my daughter to play with me. That’s how I found Superliminal. 

It’s a puzzle game that pushes the player to see beyond what is in front of them in some of the most mind-bending scenarios I’ve seen in a game. You walk around and try to unlock doors and reveal hidden passages to escape rooms, but not everything you see before you is what it appears to be. 

With the use of in-game optical illusions, angles, and distortions of depth perception, you’ll find yourself thinking there’s a door in front of you, only to find it’s a painting or shadow being cast by another object. 

The prisoners of Plato’s Cave would understand the struggle. 

My daughter took an interest in what I was doing and came over to sit down with me. I was stuck on this one level trying to open a door and had spent at least 45 minutes trying to implement all manner of extreme strategies to force that door open. 

A Fresh Perspective Changes Everything

In the game, you can grab and move around objects such as pots, pans, couches, doors, and chess pieces. You never know what they could be used for. I was stuck and had run out of ideas. 

This kid, uninitiated in gaming of any kind, says to me, “Have you tried grabbing the moon out of the sky and seeing if there’s a door there?”

I literally laughed out loud. What a ridiculous idea. 

“THE DOOR WE NEEDED WAS RIGHT THERE IN FRONT OF US,” I mutter just loud enough so she can hear me in my maximum state of adult arrogance. 

But then I turned my gaze upward in the game, toward the moon in the sky, just hanging out there… suspiciously. 

Then I remembered. This is Superliminal. There are no real rules in this game.

So I move my cursor up to the moon… and holy sh%$… it’s clickable. I select the moon and pull it down from the sky. Now I can inspect the moon more closely. My daughter grins. There is a tiny door on the other side of the moon. 

The Luddite child wins. If you wanna see this gameplay in action, check it out here. 

“Truly wonderful, the mind of a child is” - Yoda

One more story and then I’ll get to my point.

Expertise Can Be an Illusion

One week after the Superliminal incident, my daughter and I are on a Scout day trip to camp for a joint event with other troops. This is a big event where different Scout troops compete in a relay race of physical and skill-based games. Her troop gets their turn at an obstacle course where the objective is to work together to lift a heavy wooden sled over a series of wooden hurdles, and then go underneath another set of hurdles. 

It’s like playing limbo, but you’re carrying a very heavy object at the same time.

It gets worse! Some of the kids are given disabilities, such as blindness, having one leg immobilized, or not being able to use their hands. 

The timer begins and the kids start their epic struggle to complete this complex task of going over and under hurdles while hauling the sled. I’m standing a ways off with the other adults, watching the Scouts fumble through the challenge. 

Then one of the Scout leaders whispered to me, “None of the Scouts have realized that the rules didn’t prohibit them from knocking the hurdles over.”

“Seriously?” I responded.

“Yep! They were only given a single objective and a few handicaps, but there were no rules on how they get it done. They could win by just knocking the barriers over.”

I don’t mean to brag, but during the game I overheard my daughter propose this very idea to the group. It was roundly dismissed. She was one of the youngest at the time. The kids instead followed the oldest Scout’s lead, all the way to their defeat in the race.

You’ve been here before. We all have. You’ve been ignored or shot down because of a perceived limitation in your expertise, age, or qualifications. The so-called experts get a free pass on providing leadership based on nothing but a piece of paper or a title. 

Maybe this has been your boss, your colleague, or even a parent. Remember how I dismissed my daughter’s moon-moving idea because “I’ve been playing video games for 20+ years”? What rubbish that was!

Expertise is an illusion. It’s a mantle that exists for prescribed problems and familiar circumstances. Expert status helps to facilitate hierarchies in situations where people crave singular leadership. It can be helpful. I’m certainly not suggesting you shouldn’t get a college degree in X, Y, or Z subject or go secure a trade certificate for a new career path. These things matter, but only in the contexts we prepared for. 

That’s why people say you can be book-smart or street-smart. The latter implies that you can adapt and know unspoken rules just as well as a chemist knows which materials to never mix in a laboratory setting.

Embrace the Beginner’s Mind

There’s a saying in Zen Buddhism that goes, “Not knowing is most intimate.” 

When we don’t know something and sit in that state of not knowing, the idea is that we feel more connected to what’s around us. 

Shunryu Suzuki of the San Francisco Zen Center talks about “the beginner's mind” as a state of being in which possibility is endless. In the expert’s mind, possibilities are often too few. In the state of not knowing, curiosity and engagement with the world come alive. Discovery is unlocked. 

You become capable of holding a box in your own hands which once had you trapped inside. 

This approach to living is easiest for infants, toddlers, and young children. You know how they soak up language, motor skills, and concepts like cute little sponges. Take language for example. The most opportune time to learn a second language is in elementary school. Why? Because when you screw up a word or a simple phrase like “I love pizza,” you feel no shame.

Why would a 5-year-old care about getting something wrong?

They live in a perpetual state of not knowing and will happily turn to adults with question after question. “Why why why why why why why why,” they say. It’s their favorite word. It gives them an almost superhuman power to flourish intellectually. 

When you’ve entered proper adulthood, this gets harder for many reasons, chief among them–shame.

It’s embarrassing to not be able to communicate with another human being. You go from being a fully functional adult with a strong vocabulary and understanding of grammar to a toddler-like state where you can’t form the words to match what you feel inside. 

It sucks!

Fear Is the Mind-Killer

In 2021, I was hired to coach a Chinese man on his English. He’d lived in the U.S. since the ‘80s, but his native accent was still incredibly thick. As a result, certain words came out of his mouth all wrong. This Chinese-American man also happened to be a powerful person… he was the chief advisor to the U.S. Secretary of State. 

This man was brilliant, high-performing, cunning… and also completely vulnerable when it came to speaking a second language. He described in detail his feelings of shame when doing media interviews and watching the clips the next day.

We don’t want to see ourselves struggle like that in the third person. It stings the ego, but ego is the enemy. It must be overcome. Ego tells us to avoid situations of discomfort and vulnerability because it makes us feel small, like a toddler.

What I’m telling you is to let go of your love for always knowing. Certainty is overrated. In most cases, it is an illusion crafted deep inside our consciousness to mimic the feeling of safety. It’s nice to feel safe, but this illusion can be most dangerous when the time comes to solve novel problems.

At the end of Superliminal, there’s a profoundly beautiful monologue delivered by the game’s creator about problem-solving and the reason for the game. At one point, the voice says, “The problem is not that the problems we face cannot be solved… the problem is that we become so afraid of failure that we refuse to see our problem from a new perspective.”

Stephen Kent is the author of How The Force Can Fix The World: Lessons on Life, Liberty and Happiness from a Galaxy Far, Far Away and writes for the Geeky Stoics newsletter about pop culture and philosophy. He also is a podcast host and frequent contributor for cable and local news, talk radio, conference panels, and more.