"I can love you because I want to feel less alone, or I can love you because I want you to feel less alone. But only the latter requires me to imagine a consciousness independent of my own, and equally real."
-Garth Risk Hallberg, NYT Magazine Jan. 15, 2012
Showing posts with label Existence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Existence. Show all posts
Monday, January 16, 2012
Friday, August 12, 2011
I am Verilazic
Who am I? I am the son of two parents. I am an employee with the company I work for. I am related to innumerable other people in the world. I also am known by several names. There's the name on my birth certificate, but there's also the name I go by when I interact and play with other people online. That name can be a few things, but most of the time it is Verilazic. If you google "Verilazic", you get 1920 results, most (if not all) of them are things I've written or said or done. It's a humble list, but it's still me and mine.
Today, I read a blog post by a person I greatly respect. The name I know him by is Tobold. He wrote that Google was threatening to delete his online identity because it does not match his identity in real life. I'm sure this is the result of Google trying to remove various false identities out there that exist for nefarious reasons, such as spam. However, if it's at the cost of destroying identities that have positive purposes, then it's not worth it.
I don't know Tobold in real life. But I've read his blog for several years now, and I respect his opinions, even when I disagree with them. My knowledge and understanding has been enriched by the existence of that identity. Moreover, if "Tobold" is at risk, then "Verilazic" is at risk as well. If I don't have the option of keeping the various spheres I exist and interact within separate, then I do not want to use Google's services.
Today, I read a blog post by a person I greatly respect. The name I know him by is Tobold. He wrote that Google was threatening to delete his online identity because it does not match his identity in real life. I'm sure this is the result of Google trying to remove various false identities out there that exist for nefarious reasons, such as spam. However, if it's at the cost of destroying identities that have positive purposes, then it's not worth it.
I don't know Tobold in real life. But I've read his blog for several years now, and I respect his opinions, even when I disagree with them. My knowledge and understanding has been enriched by the existence of that identity. Moreover, if "Tobold" is at risk, then "Verilazic" is at risk as well. If I don't have the option of keeping the various spheres I exist and interact within separate, then I do not want to use Google's services.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Reward vs. Punishment and Success vs. Failure
I'm going to start out with a lot of generalities here, and then work my way down to a more manageable level. By the end, I'm going to make some points about the games industry, especially MMO games.
First off, most of life is about success and failure. For most animals, and for early humans, it was survival vs extinction. Now for a lot of humanity, success and failure are defined more by profit and loss than life and death. As a side note, I'd say that's a basic and logical argument for us being at least slightly more civilized on an absolute scale than we used to be.
Obviously, we all want to succeed, and we don't want to fail. Ever. However, success and failure can not exist without each other. Our society - in a way - uses failure and loss to inform people that they are making bad decisions. And in order to get people to change their behavior, we punish them for failure, and reward them for success. However, when you take these methods to an extreme, or simply use them a lot, people react differently.
Some may stop trying anything, forgoing rewards in order to avoid punishments. In terms of games, this has shown up in recent years by players only wanting to play games where they are rewarded more and punished less, until you get some games that feel like one long sugar high; constant rewards, no punishments. Unfortunately for the players demanding for and playing those games, they feel less of a reward the more of it they get.
And that is the problem: players want only success and reward, and don't want failure and punishment.
The second topic I'd like to tie in is the little thing called a Skinner Box. Basically, it's a container housing a rat, that has various ways of rewarding and punishing said rat. Using it, Skinner could train various behaviors in rats.
Various parts of the world we live in can be described in ways linked to the Skinner Box. We all respond to stimuli, and when we learn that a certain behavior is linked to a certain reward or punishment, we either do that behavior more or less depending on the stimulus.
MMOs have been described as Skinner Boxes as well. In fact, they're probably a little better at that function than most people realized initially. To the point that a large portion of the player base has now been trained to have certain behaviors in games. For instance, most players are extremely risk-averse. If they don't have an obvious advantage, there's a good chance they won't do anything. They also tend to quit if they lose.
However, I think there's an opportunity here. We have these players who only want to succeed and be rewarded, and don't ever want to fail and be punished, and we have them playing in a Skinner Box that has been doing just that. Then we have a few people who came up with games that were Skinner Boxes that had more chances to fail and be punished. Obviously, that's not going to work if we want some more interesting action.
So how about disconnecting reward from success and punishment from failure? Expose players to a game that specifically rewards risk-taking, does have failure as a potential outcome, but doesn't simply punish that failure. I'm not saying "give a big new sword to anyone who dies". I'm saying "If someone just lost a battle, don't have them die, give them multiple interesting ways out."
Planescape: Torment is my idol here. Another game I've heard about that might go the more interesting route is Heavy Rain, though I don't know a lot about it beyond the standard description. In 90+% of games, MMO or otherwise, if you fail at a task, you die. Game over. Insert coin. Try again. Punishment. Many games over the years have worked to dilute this outcome, by making the game easier, or failure less costly. Some RPGs have some way of respawning with minimal penalty so that you don't have to reload from a saved game. But aside from the two titles above, they haven't made failure and death into a part of the narrative of the game itself.
When you fail at something in real life, what do you do? You might complain a little bit, say it wasn't your fault, blame somebody or something else, but at some point you have to do something different. Sometimes you can try again, other times you can't. When you can't, you simply move on. The story of life continues.
Say that forces are fighting for control of a town. One currently controls it while the other invades. If the invader is repulsed, he tries again. If he fails to much, he has to try something different, or retreat for a time to lick his wounds before trying again. Then, he succeeds, and captures the town. What about the defenders? Well, once it was clear they were losing, they made their own retreat. Where do they go? Into the countryside, where the invaders had previously been. The former defenders now become a guerrilla force, striking from a hideout, and gathering their strength and waiting for the opportunity to take back the town.
Basically, what we need is to start creating games that act as Skinner Boxes, but not to reinforce the obvious formulas. Instead, we need to teach players new behaviors, and new values. We need to teach them to value risk taking, not by removing punishments, but by making the standard failure-state lead to new and unseen opportunities.
Imagine fighting a monster in a cave, and if you beat it, you get some treasure, but if you fail to beat it, while fleeing for your lives, it knocks down a wall leading to a never-before-seen cavern leading to perhaps different creatures and treasure.
If you treat the player to enough unusual and inconsistent outcomes instead of "game over", you will begin to teach them to value risk and the potential for failure.
First off, most of life is about success and failure. For most animals, and for early humans, it was survival vs extinction. Now for a lot of humanity, success and failure are defined more by profit and loss than life and death. As a side note, I'd say that's a basic and logical argument for us being at least slightly more civilized on an absolute scale than we used to be.
Obviously, we all want to succeed, and we don't want to fail. Ever. However, success and failure can not exist without each other. Our society - in a way - uses failure and loss to inform people that they are making bad decisions. And in order to get people to change their behavior, we punish them for failure, and reward them for success. However, when you take these methods to an extreme, or simply use them a lot, people react differently.
Some may stop trying anything, forgoing rewards in order to avoid punishments. In terms of games, this has shown up in recent years by players only wanting to play games where they are rewarded more and punished less, until you get some games that feel like one long sugar high; constant rewards, no punishments. Unfortunately for the players demanding for and playing those games, they feel less of a reward the more of it they get.
And that is the problem: players want only success and reward, and don't want failure and punishment.
The second topic I'd like to tie in is the little thing called a Skinner Box. Basically, it's a container housing a rat, that has various ways of rewarding and punishing said rat. Using it, Skinner could train various behaviors in rats.
Various parts of the world we live in can be described in ways linked to the Skinner Box. We all respond to stimuli, and when we learn that a certain behavior is linked to a certain reward or punishment, we either do that behavior more or less depending on the stimulus.
MMOs have been described as Skinner Boxes as well. In fact, they're probably a little better at that function than most people realized initially. To the point that a large portion of the player base has now been trained to have certain behaviors in games. For instance, most players are extremely risk-averse. If they don't have an obvious advantage, there's a good chance they won't do anything. They also tend to quit if they lose.
However, I think there's an opportunity here. We have these players who only want to succeed and be rewarded, and don't ever want to fail and be punished, and we have them playing in a Skinner Box that has been doing just that. Then we have a few people who came up with games that were Skinner Boxes that had more chances to fail and be punished. Obviously, that's not going to work if we want some more interesting action.
So how about disconnecting reward from success and punishment from failure? Expose players to a game that specifically rewards risk-taking, does have failure as a potential outcome, but doesn't simply punish that failure. I'm not saying "give a big new sword to anyone who dies". I'm saying "If someone just lost a battle, don't have them die, give them multiple interesting ways out."
Planescape: Torment is my idol here. Another game I've heard about that might go the more interesting route is Heavy Rain, though I don't know a lot about it beyond the standard description. In 90+% of games, MMO or otherwise, if you fail at a task, you die. Game over. Insert coin. Try again. Punishment. Many games over the years have worked to dilute this outcome, by making the game easier, or failure less costly. Some RPGs have some way of respawning with minimal penalty so that you don't have to reload from a saved game. But aside from the two titles above, they haven't made failure and death into a part of the narrative of the game itself.
When you fail at something in real life, what do you do? You might complain a little bit, say it wasn't your fault, blame somebody or something else, but at some point you have to do something different. Sometimes you can try again, other times you can't. When you can't, you simply move on. The story of life continues.
Say that forces are fighting for control of a town. One currently controls it while the other invades. If the invader is repulsed, he tries again. If he fails to much, he has to try something different, or retreat for a time to lick his wounds before trying again. Then, he succeeds, and captures the town. What about the defenders? Well, once it was clear they were losing, they made their own retreat. Where do they go? Into the countryside, where the invaders had previously been. The former defenders now become a guerrilla force, striking from a hideout, and gathering their strength and waiting for the opportunity to take back the town.
Basically, what we need is to start creating games that act as Skinner Boxes, but not to reinforce the obvious formulas. Instead, we need to teach players new behaviors, and new values. We need to teach them to value risk taking, not by removing punishments, but by making the standard failure-state lead to new and unseen opportunities.
Imagine fighting a monster in a cave, and if you beat it, you get some treasure, but if you fail to beat it, while fleeing for your lives, it knocks down a wall leading to a never-before-seen cavern leading to perhaps different creatures and treasure.
If you treat the player to enough unusual and inconsistent outcomes instead of "game over", you will begin to teach them to value risk and the potential for failure.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Procedure, Representation and Extendability
I realized something a couple days ago: the computer industry is built on "extendability". This is an oversimplification, but I find those are useful for talking about stuff. =)
First off, a commenter on Nils' blog posted a very interesting link to The Escapist about the future of gaming being procedural. The article also had a link to an interesting youtube video of a "pixel city" the author created using procedural algorithms. This got me started thinking, on a couple of fronts. Today, I figured I'd just stick to the philosophical part of it.
Computers are based on transistors; basically digital switches, though they can also be used for amplification purposes. Engineers started out linking those transistors together with other components to create various electrical devices, most of them analog. Then they used them to come up with logic gates, the basic unit used for building digital devices. They then linked those logic gates together to create various simple logic units; an example might be a simple circuit for adding two binary digits together. Then they linked those units together to create larger units, like a circuit that adds two large binary numbers together. Then they linked those together with other units to create basic processing units. Then they worked on making those processing units bigger (figuratively speaking), by putting more of those subunits together, and allowing them to make more calculations and more quickly, resulting in today's CPUs.
Putting CPUs into computers lead to it being the programmers' turn. Starting out with simple instructions, they created a machine language that was standardized for working with the computer devices and CPU at the lowest level. Then using that language, they created more complex languages, such as Basic. Then using some of the simple units of those languages, and machine language, they created more complex languages, eventually reaching today's level of compexity, which C++ is a good representative of. Then programmers used the basic units of C++, things like ints, floats, chars, and arrays, to create classes, such as strings, lists, stacks, queues, and trees. Using these various data types, they created more complex data types and functions. Now, using all those subroutines and data structures, programmers create complex programs that fulfill all sorts of functions. And they set up ways for different programs to communicate with each other, with their operating system, and with other computers across networks.
Every step along this entire description is a case of people taking smaller pieces and making something of them. Not only that, but then making it so that their creation can then be used as a piece in still larger creations. This is called extendability.
Ultimately, everything in computers is a representation of reality. And everything is extendable. No single person understands all the details of every step listed above. That's like knowing the job and duties of every single individual in the US. However, that segues nicely into a common function of computers: representing the real world. Everything from simple arithmetic, on up to simulations, info search (read: Google), and virtual worlds; they're all representations of the world in various forms.
However, the world itself is "extendable". Collections of atoms form molecules, which then form proteins, which then form organic cells. Those cells group together to form organs, which then work together to make our bodies. Individuals form friendships and families. They also form companies, and teams and organizations, and institutions. Institutions form the basis of state and provincial governments which combined make up countries and nations. Finally, those nations (try to) work together as the United Nations, while also trading across boundaries and forming extra-national institutions, and dealing with multi-national corporations.
No one understands all of this, and there's no way to represent it all. That's why any discipline that focuses on understanding the world around us works at focusing on only parts of the whole in order to simplify and make things understandable for an individual. However, we should always keep in mind that no matter what our understanding is, it is always partial, incomplete, and imperfect. In other words, the world is BIG, and there's no way to get it all - but we'll keep trying.
First off, a commenter on Nils' blog posted a very interesting link to The Escapist about the future of gaming being procedural. The article also had a link to an interesting youtube video of a "pixel city" the author created using procedural algorithms. This got me started thinking, on a couple of fronts. Today, I figured I'd just stick to the philosophical part of it.
Computers are based on transistors; basically digital switches, though they can also be used for amplification purposes. Engineers started out linking those transistors together with other components to create various electrical devices, most of them analog. Then they used them to come up with logic gates, the basic unit used for building digital devices. They then linked those logic gates together to create various simple logic units; an example might be a simple circuit for adding two binary digits together. Then they linked those units together to create larger units, like a circuit that adds two large binary numbers together. Then they linked those together with other units to create basic processing units. Then they worked on making those processing units bigger (figuratively speaking), by putting more of those subunits together, and allowing them to make more calculations and more quickly, resulting in today's CPUs.
Putting CPUs into computers lead to it being the programmers' turn. Starting out with simple instructions, they created a machine language that was standardized for working with the computer devices and CPU at the lowest level. Then using that language, they created more complex languages, such as Basic. Then using some of the simple units of those languages, and machine language, they created more complex languages, eventually reaching today's level of compexity, which C++ is a good representative of. Then programmers used the basic units of C++, things like ints, floats, chars, and arrays, to create classes, such as strings, lists, stacks, queues, and trees. Using these various data types, they created more complex data types and functions. Now, using all those subroutines and data structures, programmers create complex programs that fulfill all sorts of functions. And they set up ways for different programs to communicate with each other, with their operating system, and with other computers across networks.
Every step along this entire description is a case of people taking smaller pieces and making something of them. Not only that, but then making it so that their creation can then be used as a piece in still larger creations. This is called extendability.
Ultimately, everything in computers is a representation of reality. And everything is extendable. No single person understands all the details of every step listed above. That's like knowing the job and duties of every single individual in the US. However, that segues nicely into a common function of computers: representing the real world. Everything from simple arithmetic, on up to simulations, info search (read: Google), and virtual worlds; they're all representations of the world in various forms.
However, the world itself is "extendable". Collections of atoms form molecules, which then form proteins, which then form organic cells. Those cells group together to form organs, which then work together to make our bodies. Individuals form friendships and families. They also form companies, and teams and organizations, and institutions. Institutions form the basis of state and provincial governments which combined make up countries and nations. Finally, those nations (try to) work together as the United Nations, while also trading across boundaries and forming extra-national institutions, and dealing with multi-national corporations.
No one understands all of this, and there's no way to represent it all. That's why any discipline that focuses on understanding the world around us works at focusing on only parts of the whole in order to simplify and make things understandable for an individual. However, we should always keep in mind that no matter what our understanding is, it is always partial, incomplete, and imperfect. In other words, the world is BIG, and there's no way to get it all - but we'll keep trying.
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