Ladies… If you really want to learn about your man’s personality, hang around him when he’s playing video games.

All of y’all that are dating gamers know I’m telling the truth.

The way he plays his games is the exact same way he’s going to interact with YOU….. um… assuming that he cares as much about YOU as he does his VIDEO GAMES….. which isn’t likely.

What game are we playing, anyway?

I don’t know much about dudes that play Mario Bash Bash or Dance Dance Revolution or whatever cutesy, corny games they make these days. I know about FPS. First Person Shooters. War Simulations. They’re still called “games” because Atari was a game. You had a little cutesy tank and would shoot a little square at the other cutesy tank and try to hit it more times than it hit you.

Technology has improved to the point that these so-called “games” are now being utilized as preparations for actual war.

I found this out from watching my friend Baratunde Thurston‘s show Popular Science’s “Future Of…”.

One of the episodes is about the future of Combat, and it’s rather enlightening…

Popular Science: The Future of the Military — Perhaps

Drones have become common battlefield tools in the past decade but are typically controlled at the company or battalion level, which respectively have about 135 and 650 soldiers apiece. FCS wants tools like the UAV at the platoon (approximately 40 soldiers) and even squad (10 members) level. The vision is also to expand the range of applications. The Massachusetts-based company iRobot manufactures a PackBot currently deployed overseas, which the military uses primarily to scout for improvised explosive devices, while the SUGV, also made by iRobot, may one day lead infantry assaults like the one I witnessed. A single soldier can comfortably tote a SUGV, and the controller, copied almost directly from that of an Xbox game console, was designed to be intuitively easy for a young recruit to use.

Look Familiar?: The controls for FCS unmanned
vehicles are modeled after those used for video
game consoles
Photo Credit: Brent Humphreys

One of the soldiers handed me the controller; I donned the head-up display and started driving. The robot crashed into a wall. After practicing for a few minutes, I was able to steer into one of the buildings and scan for insurgents. There was something exciting — and faintly disturbing — about the notion that I could help battle insurgents with technology that felt only slightly elevated from the R/C cars of my childhood. But I wasn’t totally sold. Removing the display, I asked what would prevent an enemy from shooting the SUGV as soon as he spotted it. “Nothing,” replied one of the soldiers nearby, Lt.-Col. Ed House. “But if he does, we know he’s there, so the SUGV has accomplished its mission. Better to shoot a robot than a soldier.”

So.. Laugh all you want while people call our war simulations “games”, but that’s not what’s actually going on.

Dominance

One of the things that a lot of women can’t grasp is why guys do the confrontational things we do. We fight. We go to war. We remain in the rat race when we’re already rich and have more money than we’re ever going to spend during whatever’s left of our lives…..

This is because we’re built to prove that we’re better than the next man.

This is why we cheer for our home team.

New York is better than Philadelphia on this day in Football. Montreal is better than California on this day in Baseball. Our country beat the living **** out of your country in a war, so we get to tell you what to do and/or steal all of your oil.

This is our lives. This is what matters. This is what moves us. This is what we’re passionate about.

THIS is what’s going on when we’re online playing video “games”. YOU stepped to ME on an equal battlefield where you had the same opportunity to select guns and power-ups as I did and I *WAXED* you!… SIT. THE. ****. DOWN! :D That’s what it’s all about. Proving minute after minute that you’re better than someone else. If you don’t understand how good that feels, you’ll never understand hardcore gamers.

I’ve personally (thanks to my teammates and other people I’ve made alliances with via gaming) been #1 in the world in a game that took two months to play. When the smoke cleared and the dust settled, I was BY FAR the #1 base capturer, planet-wide. There were players from the USA, Japan, England, France and a few other scattered countries that were represented in the game. Also, the guy I left in the dust at #2, I happen to know he was cheating, because I know him and played with AND against him.

That’s the flag I planted. I planted it for myself. I planted it for my team. I planted it for my country. It’s in the books. It’s a done deal. You can NOT take that away from me, EV*A*R. This is what we do. We represent ourselves. We represent our friends. People talk about us in languages we don’t even understand, because they respect our skills and the dignity with which we carry ourselves whether we win or lose. If you’ve never felt this, I can’t explain to you how important it is or how good it feels. If you’ve never gone into matches where people wrote you off because they’ve never heard of you and then you defeat a team that everyone agrees is one of the tightest squads playing the game today and then people STILL don’t want to give you your propers.. I can’t explain how that feels to you. If you’ve never beaten up A SECOND HERALDED TEAM in the same tournament and the peons don’t want to give you your props, but both of the teams you beat have respect for you (and you for them) that’s lasted to this very day… I can’t explain to you how that feels. :)

Dating

What does this have to do with dating? :D Well… Before that day we got drunk and went out to the club and you were looking good and we decided to kick it to you because you were HAWT and turning us on… We were gaming with our homeboys.

Before you got added to the roster, we already had a bunch of IRL friends and online friends. You’re going to have to make your way up the ladder. You don’t get instant props because you’re the “girlfriend”. Going to your moms’s house for Sunday dinner isn’t high up on our list of things to do.

Sitting around on a bench with the other henpecked boyfriends at the mall while you shop for duplicate pairs of black shoes that you don’t even need to waste your money on isn’t high up on our list of things to do. That chick-flick you rented on DVD might never see the inside of our XBOX or Playstation3, ya dig? :D

At the same time that you’re at a decided disadvantage if you date a gamer, you also have an unique opportunity to be around him when he’s being REAL. You’d be surprised that some of the most calm, intelligent, cerebral dudes will be screaming and cursing at the top of their lungs when people mess up and do the wrong thing or the game jerks them. huh Some friends of mine didn’t know who I am and challenged me to one-on-one games of HALO. I hadn’t even PLAYED HALO in months, but thank God my skillz came online after about 10 minutes and I pistoled and sniper-rifled them to death so many times that both of the top dogs at the party quit and didn’t want to play anymore. I would have been severely embarrassed and depressed, had I lost to them, considering that my boy Mak and I used to whip ass on the guy that won the first HALO tournament and his crew DAILY before he won and received his MLG contract (meaning we never saw him again, or else we’d STILL be whipping his ass to this day). I tried to lighten the party’s atmosphere by informing the guys I beat that there was no way they should have beaten me anyway, because I’m a World-Class FPS gamer, but they were still shell-shocked haha :D

It’s easy for a guy to be cool, friendly & gentlemanly around you when you’re out on a date because nothing important’s happening. Yeah, he’s trying to convince you to give him some, but that’s really a reflection on YOU. When he’s gaming, it’s a reflection on HIM and his self-esteem and self-perception. Dating is basically wasting time waiting for the chick to give it up. It’s a bunch of downtime until you get to the nitty-gritty. When you’re the last guy (as usual) left on your team and it’s up to you to defeat three or four other players and accomplish your objective, that’s when every split second counts and life gets REAL.

If you have the opportunity to be around your SO when he’s in this zone, you’ll see who he really is. You’ll see what matters to him.. what makes his heart pump faster. Ask him to take out the trash now, and you might get a response you didn’t expect. Ask him if he loves you now, and he might ignore you completely. He probably didn’t actually even HEAR YOU because he’s so immersed in the game. Tell him you’re ready to go to church, and maybe he’ll quit the game to drive you there… maybe he’ll put the controller down so he can see you to the door and lock you out… maybe he’ll ignore you completely… maybe he’ll split the difference and without looking up from his game, say “PAYCE!!!… Don’t let the door HIT’cha where the Good Lord SPLIT’cha! :D”

~ Bill Cammack | @BillCammack/@DatingGenius

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So, I’m talking to this fun and attractive young lady the other day while I’m hanging out with some friends. I’m not going to mention her name (not that I ever do, haha) because she actively hides from Social Media, but let’s say she’s “an accountant”.

So, off the bat, we don’t seem very similar as far as dating goes, but she’s a pleasant person and nice to look at, so I don’t mind chatting her up for a while…

At some point, the party moves to another location, at which point she was heading home and the rest of us were heading out to party some more. I was already WAAAAAAY over my time limit to determine whether I was gonna kick it with her or not, so I had decided that I wasn’t going to request contact information from her and if she wanted to get in touch with me, she knew to Google me or she knew we had mutual acquaintances and could find me through them.

Now that I’m writing this, I realize that this was actually a VERY important component of the bad decision I ended up making. I had gone over this scenario lots of times between when it happened and today and had neglected to rewind far enough back to the point where I had already written her off as far as tonight. That doesn’t mean my decision was any less poor, haha.. Just that I understand now why I went the route I did. :D

So… hmm… ok.. In thinking about the rewind some more, and considering my mindset about her by the time we left that party, I now realize how I got in the situation I got in. Before just now, I had been asking myself “How in the HELL did you end up walking with her AND some other guys instead of just HER?”

So when we were leaving place #1, I was going to be heading to place #2 and she was going to be heading to the subway to go home. This is where I made error #1 and told her I’d be right outside while I went to see if these other chicks wanted to come with.

Technically, that wasn’t an error, because I thought she was going home, which would have meant I would have been showing up at place #2 without entertainment in-hand, which is never a good idea. :D However, in being efficient about keeping my night going as far as entertainment, I wrote her off as past tense even though she was actually physically still right there where I was. I was seeing her as if she had already gotten on the subway, so I started interacting with her as if she were already gone. I was in some kind of “Nice to meet you, see you around the scene” endgame mode, when I should have been in a “This person that you’ve already had fun with is still here with you until she actually leaves” mode.

So the other chicks aren’t ready to leave yet, so I tell them where they’re going and then go upstairs to tell the accountant good-bye. She’s ready to leave on the spot, and if she had, I wouldn’t have thought about ANY of this stuff. :) She decides to walk to a subway station that’s in the same direction I’m heading to the next party, so we’re walking and talking…

However, due to blunder #1, my not leaving the place WITH her, we’ve now achieved two more people that are walking with us. Two guys. This is where oversight/error #2 comes in. Since I had already considered her as having left, it wasn’t a big deal that these guys were walking with us. One of them, I knew already, and the other, I was just meeting for the first time right there. The problem is that when you add other people into the mix, you can’t really talk about what you SHOULD be talking about with a gal. You talk about watered-down stuff or entirely different topics so as not to have your and her business “in the street”. I wasn’t worried about this, though, because she was already gone as far as I was concerned, and I was just escorting her to the subway.

The turning point in the situation was that she decided NOT to go to the subway and disappear from my life forever, but instead to continue on with the three of us to the party that we were going to. I was glad that she was going to keep hanging out with us, but I hadn’t considered what I was thinking of her in order to reverse it. In other words, I was still treating her like she was immediately leaving.

So my lack of paying attention to the present and instead focusing on an envisioned future (without her in it) led to this rolling mistake. I should have left the place with her. I should have walked with her by myself. If Woody had gone straight to the police, this would never have happened…

So error #3 was not recognizing the changeover and not mentally adjusting to the new situation… Error #4 was letting this guy I’ve never seen before control the conversation.

So now, I’m basically an innocent bystander to my own rap. Granted, it wasn’t much of a rap, because I wasn’t rapping TO her and, in fact had already written her off as soon as she had said she was going home. But what happened was that the new guy was talking to her about something, blah blah blah and then, somehow, he started talking about “picking up women”. I don’t know how this happened, because I didn’t care what he was saying, so I wasn’t listening in on his conversation with her. It just so happened to be loud enough for me to hear “picking up” or “picked up” or something like that.

I doubt their conversation had anything to do with me, because when women ask me what I do, I just say “I’m a video editor”. I can’t afford to say “I write a dating blog”, because that immediately puts women on guard for what I’m attempting to do to them. :D So, as far as I know, the accountant didn’t think I knew anything about dating at all.

In general, you don’t want to discuss picking up women….. AROUND WOMEN, unless they’re already in your inner circle. If these are your homegirls, and they know you do what you do… Yeah! Talk about picking up women all day. Also, you don’t want to talk about picking up women in front of women with guys who you don’t know what level they’re on as far as kickin’ it with chicks. This is a MAJOR BLUNDER and counts as #5 in this rolling mistake. If a guy doesn’t know what he’s doing, he’s liable to make some sort of egregious error and subsequently drag YOU down with the sinking ship he just blasted a hole in. Also, if he DOES know what he’s doing, he could decide to intentionally sabotage your rap by saying the wrong thing(s) and jacking up her mood.

So, all of these errors led to the one I actually want to talk about… This guy says “blah blah blah picking up women”, and somehow now has incorporated me into their conversation. I replied something to him, to which he replies something to the effect of:

“That’s How You Picked *HER* Up?”

……………

So now, time slows down as all three people are looking at me. As soon as he said what he said, I had looked at her face, and her mind was suddenly kicking into gear, thinking about things she hadn’t thought of before. She looked like she had seen something shocking, snapped out of it in a few seconds and then looked in my direction, to hear what my response was going to be…

I guess time didn’t really slow down, but I was suddenly thinking at hyper-speed, running permutations and potential outcomes. On the one hand, I wanted to say nothing at all, silently pleading The 5th. The problem with a non-commital response is that it allows her to think anything and everything about the situation. You’re giving up control by not attempting to define the situation through words or actions. On top of that, it looks suspicious that you can’t answer a simple question.

Except.. It’s NOT a simple question, because answering a question about HOW I picked her up stipulates to my picking her up in the first place. I don’t “pick women up”. I hang out with them. If they happen to get lucky, good for them. ;) Therefore, at no point in time had I said anything to the accountant as far as dating her, messing with her or even liking the color or her eyes or how pleasant her personality is. This is why she had this “What’s he talking about, picked her up?” look on her face right after he said it. So, I don’t pick women up in the traditional “You come here often?”, “Did it hurt… When you fell out of Heaven?” sense, but at the same time, the fact that I was hanging out with her WAS the pickup.

So I wasn’t inclined to answer the question about HOW I picked her up, because I would have been admitting to her that I DID pick her up, which defeats the purpose of the style.

OTOH… I didn’t want to flat-out deny picking her up either. That would have given her the impression that I wasn’t interested. It also would have been completely disingenuous, because I had been hanging out with at least six other women at party #1 and I left with *her*. Clearly, by the fact of the circumstances we were currently in at the time of the conversation, I was in the process of some format of a pickup on her.

Tactically, denying the pickup was the way to go.. “Pick-up? I didn’t pick her up! We’re just walking down the street together in the middle of the night, even though we never laid eyes on each other before about an hour ago. A heh.. A heh heh *grin*”. I could have recovered from that easily, and it would have been a good excuse to pull her to the side later and explain how I really DID like her and WANTED to pick her up, except I denied it so as to keep our business ‘out the street’, yadda yadda.

Unfortunately, while I was running scenarios and permutations in the seconds I had between his question and my inevitable answer, I failed to account for my past-tense view of her and decided that I was bored with the situation and was going to try something off the wall. Ladies, let this be a lesson to you hahaha.. If a guy does something completely odd, it might not be that he’s crazy, but that he just doesn’t care about the outcome and he’s experimenting. :)

So, without skipping too many beats, I start some BS explanation of “How I picked her up”. Error #6.. Following someone else’s lead when you’re kickin’ it with a chick. It was a HORRIBLE idea. It was completely ill-advised. I totally had no idea what was going to happen as I was explaining to a guy I had never met before the process that I used to pick up a girl that I had never met before who was standing right next to me and that I had never picked up in the first place (so far as she knew at the time). Fellaz… Do NOT try this at home! :D

Well.. It wasn’t worth it. Not to me. It was worth it as an experiment and to be able to tell y’all about it, but in real-time, I just felt kind of empty after I finished saying whatever I said, and I have no idea what I said, because I was just making it up on the fly and I was more paying attention to her reactions to what I was saying than whatever words I selected. Basically, I had burned whatever rap I had been working on to the ground and was going to have to bail altogether or start something completely new with her after my phony pickup confession.

Really, I felt pretty drained. I immediately started contemplating how this happened to me in the first place. Actually, some of my processing cycles before I spoke up were taken up by thoughts of “um… How the hell did this happen to me?” :D But I had to suppress that to decide what route I was going with the answer. As soon as I finished, I devoted all energies to assessing the situation, because it was a MAJOR blunder on my part. Now, through writing it out, I see how it happened.

And I supposed that concludes this story with Error #7. Instead of getting back in the game, I was just disgusted with myself and preoccupied with taking mental notes about the surrounding circumstances which led to my grand soliloquy about nothing of import. I basically grounded myself, which might have seemed to her that I didn’t want to talk to her anymore. I hope I didn’t come off like that, but I’m pretty sure I did. Actually, I had put myself on punishment and was just disgusted and didn’t feel like working around the issue. I owed her more than that, but didn’t give it to her.

So, gentlemen… The moral of the story is to keep your eyes on the prize, control your situations and environments and make sure you retain the lead role when you’re rapping to a chick. If you’re gonna fumble, make sure you do it on your own terms… Not because you got lazy and let someone else kick the ball out of your hands while you were standing there watching it all go down.

I guess as a bonus, I’ll add in Error #8, which is the fact that since I knew there were plenty of women that I knew at the next party, I was totally unconcerned with fumbling ONE, and that contributed to my experimental nature. So, not only shouldn’t I have considered her past tense until she actually LEFT, but I should have maintained my level of concentration on her and attention to her until the situation played itself all the way out.

I think that’s what disgusted me the most about this situation. I got bored, I got lazy, I started slackin’… and then I GOT CAUGHT SLIPPIN’!!! :D

Ah well. C’est la vie. Easy come, Easy go! :D

~Bill

Twitter: BillCammack
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Continued from “Time”, Parts 01, 02, 03 & 04:

Life is easy when you 9-5 it. All you have to do is go where they told you, do what they told you and leave when they told you. Two weeks from now, you get a check and then the cycle starts all over again.

As a freelancer, your time has to be divided amongst several things every day, and it’s up to you to get proficient with selecting what to focus on and how much time to devote to it.

Efficiency

The selection process is actually critically important. I already discussed micromanagement of time, but it’s just as important, if not more so, to minimize the time that you waste DECIDING what to focus on. For instance, it might take you one minute to read someone’s email, but it took you 30 seconds to DECIDE whether you were going to read that email. Perhaps a more efficient style would be to jump right in, start reading and if you realize it’s something you don’t care about, bail.

I know that 10 seconds or 30 seconds doesn’t sound like much, and a year or two ago, it wasn’t much to me either. When you get to the point of receiving 100 emails every day of varying levels of importance, those seconds can add up to a major time sink. Consider the process to respond to a “new Twitter follower” notification (assuming you don’t use a program to auto-follow people who follow you):

1. Hear the background notification
2. Take your mind off your current project
3. “Feel” whether this is a “check the email” moment or not
4. Type the shortcut to toggle to mail
5. Read the title
6. Click on the email
7. Find and click on the link
8. Wait for the browser window to open
9. Check their friend/follower ratio
10. Check what they’re talking about on Twitter
11. Decide whether to follow them back or not
12. Close the window
13. Toggle back to the program you were originally using
14. Get your mind wrapped around your project again

So now, because you chose to have your mail client open and polling for mail, however much time was just extracted from your focus on your current project. Sometimes, it’s necessary, like if a client emails you that there’s a change in plans or an unique opportunity comes up that requires your immediate attention. Other times, it can be put off until later (or never), so making that decision quickly is in the best interest of your time, productivity and focus.

Focus

Mainly what I do is edit video. If I’m just assembling something, I’ll probably have mail and instant messaging open because I’m really just organizing items and doing quality control. If I’m doing a “real” edit, all of that’s shut off, because I need to live inside my project and be immersed in it in order to provide the eventual viewer with the same level of immersion when they watch the show. I can’t afford these micro-interruptions affecting my focus, flow, disposition, mood…

This is why I can’t understand how some people have literally all day to be on Twitter. They supposedly have jobs and responsibilities, yet you see them on Twitter 24/7. Now, I understand that there’s work that doesn’t require your full attention, like I said about when I’m assembling something… But how much time that you’re supposedly working for a company are you spending passing notes in class? What do those notes have to do with your actual BUSINESS? If your employer checks your Twitter or Friendfeed accounts, are they going to see you engaging in water-cooler drivel banter? How do you reconcile this time? Is it like smoke breaks? Are you addicted to Twitter like other people are addicted to cigarettes and need to be let out of the building for 15 minutes every hour to get their addiction on?

Focus is extremely important, because you can either move forward a little on several projects in a day or you can move forward A LOT in one or two. It might be a good idea to shut it all down and have designated periods where you enjoy “Social Media Time”. Similarly, it might be a good idea to have “email time” and “telephone time” and “respond to inquiries” time. That way, you could have specific segments of your day devoted to ‘distractions’ and the rest of it spent on knocking out the projects you’ve decided are most important or whose deadlines are approaching the soonest.

Motion

The days of meetings are OVER. Period. Over. Done. I noticed this back in my experimental year, 2008, because what people knew me for changed. When I was known for editing, I would get contacted by people who needed editing. Once I became known for Social Media projects, all of a sudden, I had information that lots of people could use for their businesses, and they began contacting me, wanting some of my time.

That’s all well & good, but when I would run through the obvious video chatting options, it was always “well… I don’t have this set up…”, regardless of how large or successful the company was. This was when I realized how far behind most companies really are.

So I went to a few IRL f2f meetings. My take-away was that A LOT OF TIME was being wasted in transit. Granted, this was before I bought my g1, but I’m way faster on my Macbook Pro than I am on my gPhone, so even today, the time is essentially wasted, or at least slowed to a crawl.

The problem with moving is that as soon as you stop thinking about your current project, it’s completely stalled. It’s stalled while you THINK about going to the meeting. It’s stalled while you get dressed. It’s stalled while you head for mass transit. It’s stalled while you wait for mass transit. It’s stalled while you’re ON mass transit (at least in NYC, because you’re not going to have your laptop out on the subway and if you did, you wouldn’t have wifi anyway). If you took the bus or a cab, traffic’s ridiculous and you either wouldn’t get there on time, or you’d spend $20 to slowly get downtown. It’s stalled while you walk to the restaurant. It’s stalled while you meet with your client or potential client. THEN, it’s stalled all the way back in reverse.

So, not only do you ‘lose’ the time that you’re physically meeting with someone, you lose literally hours surrounding that meeting. This is entirely unacceptable, when all you have to do is set a time, remain efficient until you get the chat notification on your computer and click “accept”. When the meeting’s over, you click “end” and go back to what you were doing. During that time, you have the exact same functionality as a face-to-face meeting, except you can’t shake hands when you’re signing off. I’ve had more efficient meetings with people in GREECE and ISRAEL than I’ve had with people in Manhattan, NYC, USA. :/

Obviously, these issues are multiplied in situations where travel’s required. Entire DAYS can be wasted getting from one state to another. Most of the day can be wasted moving from location to location when filming something.

This is something that needs to be worked into your budgeting. It’s not just the number of hours that you work on the project, but the number of hours that traveling to and from that project remove your ability to focus on OTHER projects.

Solutions

Maximize focus by increasing efficiency and decreasing motion. Accept projects that fit into your flow and reject projects that don’t. Make exceptions for situations that compensate you properly for the entire amount of time that they take away your ability to clear your desk of other projects.

Pay attention to and note all the time that’s devoted to a particular project… Phone time, IM time, email time, video chat time, IRL meeting time, travel time and time that you actually worked on the project. Make sure people know they’re “on the clock” and will be billed for your time before interacting with them. Get your payment up front if you don’t trust them to honor your invoice. If they don’t have your money now, they probably won’t have it later either, so don’t allow people like this to owe you money so you have to waste even MORE of your time trying to get paid.

~Bill Cammack

Twitter: BillCammack
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Time Category: billcammack.com/category/other/time/

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