Navigate Your Emotions by Exploring Them Like Games

By Victoria Ichizli-Bartels

In this book, Victoria Ichizli-Bartels offers simple tools to explore your emotions, resulting feelings, and connected experiences as if they were games.

Ichizli-Bartels argues that you may not be able to control your emotions, but you can navigate them; often without having to act through them, but allowing yourself to feel with curiosity and without suffering, pressure, or guilt. All you have to do is know your tools and use them well during your navigation adventure.
Navigate Your Emotions by Exploring Them Like Games is a surprising, revolutionary, and never-before-undertaken approach to exploring emotions, feelings, and experiences by dissecting them into the main and well-known game components: goals, rules, feedback systems, and voluntary participation.
The three parts of the book present a detailed introduction to the approach, many examples of gameful explorations of emotions, feelings, and related concepts considered in pairs, and true stories from the author's life illustrating sometimes surprising but always illuminating experiences of emotions.
The concluding two chapters will introduce you to the start of an infinite list of emotions, feelings, and related concepts and give you some ideas and a template for your gameful explorations of emotions.
Letting yourself feel an emotion does not need to be stressful or scary. Take the gameful challenge this book offers. Learn how to navigate your emotions by exploring them like games, the tools you will need for that, and what you can do to control these tools and become the best designer and player of the fantastic game collection that is your life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Victoria Ichizli-Bartels
• Release date: Oct 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9798227485960

Book preview

Part I: Why and How to Explore Emotions Like Games

2. Reasons

I don’t know when I first thought of exploring emotions like games. It must have been more than two years before completing the first draft of this book in the summer of 2024. I was writing another book on approaching life gamefully when the idea came and grew stronger every day.

When I share the possibility of approaching life gamefully, which I used to and sometimes still call turning life into fun games, I am met with smiles or nods of recognition and often also curiosity.

But this kind of immediate recognition was missing when I started sharing that I was writing a book about exploring and seeing emotions like games. Instead, my conversation partners used to have a momentary blank and confused look, followed by a frown.

People who didn’t know me well nodded and changed the subject. But those closer to me often asked the following question about exploring emotions like games: Why would you want to do that?

These reactions and the question helped me become more aware of what I intended with this book and its message. They helped me forge and polish its mission and ultimately shape this book.

The light of recognition came into my conversation partners’ eyes when I drew and shared parallels with games.

That is what this book is about, and here is one of the reasons for its existence.

We don’t enjoy playing all the games that can be found. We choose not to play some games when we learn more about them, their rules, what they are about, and how they are built.

The same is true with emotions and feelings. We can’t help experiencing them when they happen, but we can choose what we do next. Do we do something that enhances the feeling we experience due to any specific emotion, or do we turn our attention to something else that might generate other emotions and feelings?

You probably know the saying or a version of it, Give me one good reason to do it, and I’ll try it out. In the text above, I hope you have seen one of those good reasons to try exploring emotions like games.

But to be honest, if you asked me to give you only one good reason, it would be hard for me to do so. When somebody asks me to name reasons for approaching anything in life gamefully, the ten fingers on my hands quickly become insufficient. In my book Gameful Project Management, a standalone book but also Book 1 in the Gameful Life series, I have listed twenty-one reasons for approaching project and time management gamefully. Twenty-one is a large number, and too many reasons would only keep you too long from the explorations I promised in this book.

Thus, here are ten good reasons to see, explore, and approach emotions, feelings, and anything related to them gamefully:

Emotions constantly wash over us. Sometimes, one at a time, but more often than not, a couple and even crowds of them simultaneously. That can be confusing and overwhelming. And dramatic! Drama falls away in games. If we explore emotions like games, they might appear much more digestible than when we try to control or manipulate them.

We are less reluctant to start playing a game than facing something in real life, especially something inside us, like emotions. But if they were just like games, how much fun would it be to learn their gameplay?

We are less critical of ourselves in games. In a computer game, we don’t dwell on the fact that we just bumped our car into a wall. Instead, we notice what happened, reverse, turn the car around if necessary, and move on. So, we can stop experiencing emotions as hitting us and instead consider what that bump on our road was, move the car of our life in the direction we want to take, and do it.

In games, we are less concerned with what we perceive as negative. Take failures, for example. In fact, failures in games are often not considered as such but as steps on the way to winning, which is especially true for game design. Discarded game designs are rarely regarded as failures. They are scarcely analyzed for why they failed at all. They are just steps in the natural progression towards a successful design. The same can be seen about any supposedly negative emotion. It might not be as negative as we think and be full of useful information in the development of our lives games.

Coping with and trying to understand emotions and resulting feelings can cause scary and unsettling feelings and emotions. When you see and treat whatever you are up to as a game, you can better deal with fear and anxiety. The gameful approach described in this book can help you address and bypass these emotions without fighting them. The more you want to succeed in navigating your emotions or even controlling them, the bigger the fear of failing and also what might follow if you succeed. But if you explore emotions like games, then the fear diminishes considerably, and you will find yourself being more willing to try again or try something new.

In games, you don’t stay upset for too long. If you do, then you stop playing the game. To continue playing, you need to put your upset aside and focus on the game's next move. Or, if this doesn’t work, you could move to another game altogether. Imagine how much easier dealing with emotions can become if you explore them like games. In any real-life situation, you can do the same: acknowledge the upset and move on.

Game designers are utterly resourceful. And you can be that, too, in an instant, if you become aware that you are both the designer (or at least co-designer) and player (co-player) of your life’s and emotion games. This awareness can give you a long-sought feeling of control over your emotions. That comes from the fact that even if emotions appear to happen to you seemingly out of the blue, your choices and actions precede them, mixed with your previous experiences and how the worlds around and inside you unfold. All that affects your emotions. Suppose you consider anything you do, encounter, experience, or feel as a game, of which you are the designer and the player. In that case, you immediately become resourceful on how to adjust the flow of your, if not life as a whole, then the next actions so that all those things you do, encounter, experience, and feel become fun and joyful for you and those who cross ways with you. With gameful practice, resourcefulness becomes effortless and extremely fun.

Empathy is more natural in games, and we judge our partners in games less than those we interact with in situations outside of games. Other nurturing emotions like compassion, self-compassion, patience, resilience, and others are more often demonstrated by the players, even if they might not always as often show them in situations outside of games in their traditional sense. When you approach your emotions and feelings gamefully, you can tap into those nurturing emotions more easily than you otherwise would. So, switching from upsetting and even damaging emotion games to those that strengthen, uplift, and empower you will become much easier. In addition to that, approaching your life and emotions gamefully allows you to treat yourself as your most wanted customer, i.e., player, and at the same time, your favorite game designer, to whom you gladly give your feedback as a player to make your favorite games — which include rewarding emotions — even better. And when you treat yourself like that, you will also treat others with kindness more consistently, and vice versa, since people tend to mirror our behavior toward them.

Since games are fun and contain elements that contribute to our happiness, why not approach all areas of our lives — including dealing with our emotions and feelings — so that they become fun, engaging, and entertaining for us in the same way that games do? If we use fun as the goal, compass, and measuring tool in our real-life games, along with awareness and progress in small steps, then all those nurturing, soothing, strengthening, empowering emotions and feelings will come naturally as by-products without us trying to manipulate or control them in any way.

Anything in life is already a game; we just don’t always see it that way. More on this in Chapter 4, Life and Games.

I started this book with three quotes. The following three quotes seem like a great bridge between this chapter about the whys and those about the hows that follow:

Self-discovery isn’t meant to be painful. If it is, then you’re working on yourself, lost in the story of your life, or simply resisting what is. — Ariel & Shya Kane, Practical Enlightenment⁹

[Y]our vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Without, everything seems discordant; only within does it coalesce into unity. Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakes. — Carl Jung¹⁰

It could work. Not only could it work, it could be fun. An adventure. — Nora Roberts, Daring to Dream¹¹

3. Meaning and Definitions

To understand something, you often start with learning its definition. The words emotions and feelings are often used interchangeably, but they strongly differ as I discovered. Here is a great quote which provides a succinct definition for both:

[E]motions are the upwellings that we can’t really think about. Like hunger, an emotion happens; it can’t really be described or conveyed. Feelings are how we attempt to represent those emotions in words or art. — Tom Drummond¹²

So, you can’t really plan an emotion, even if the choices you made until the moment you experience it might have led to it. And feelings are the expressions of the emotions you are experiencing. Those expressions might be very emotional, too, and they might lead to other emotions, sometimes even the opposites of those you experienced in the first place.

And since we will talk a lot about experiences in this book, it makes sense to look at the definition of this word, too. Here it is:

Experience is a direct observation of or participation in events as a basis of knowledge. — Merriam-Webster¹³

You have probably heard of the expression learning by doing. Experiences make a compelling and fantastic way to learn. Whether you do something or not, learning by experiencing it is the best and most memorable way to enrich your life.

Writing this book is a unique and special experience for me. As I do it, I realize how strongly emotions, feelings, experiences, actions, choices, attitudes, practices, qualities, behaviors, habits, impressions, thoughts, and so many more are intertwined and color and also influence each other.

Sometimes, you can’t clearly see or say whether what you experience is an emotion, a feeling, an experience, something else, or a combination of some or all. Here is an example:

Interestingly, there is debate among researchers about whether love is an emotion. However, among everyone else, love is clearly thought of as an emotion. — Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart¹⁴

All these terms and concepts, including the emotions themselves, contribute to our emotional response to life and the constantly changing worlds we encounter, including those within us.

That is why I think it is impossible to control emotions. You experience them, and certain choices might lead to one or another emotion. Still, so many factors play into each emotion that, in some cases, the same choices might lead to entirely different emotions and how you experience them.

The only thing we could and should do is to navigate emotions. Observe them, let ourselves experience them, express what we feel as the result of those experiences, and then choose our subsequent actions and steps, however agile (e.g., active) or calm (e.g., rather passive) they might be.

If you think about it, the above paragraph could also describe how we experience games. In a way, we navigate the sea of games, too, as we learn about them and try them out, stick with some and leave the other to discover more, and possibly come back again to some to rediscover them. This fact adds to the reasons for exploring emotions like games, given in the previous chapter, Chapter 2,