Category: Game Design

The Human Equation

As a species, there is no question that we have made considerable gains.  The metrics behind reality go beyond our perceptions and we are cognizant of this fact.  We got here because our pattern recognition abilities made it easy to make connections between events and their outcomes in a seemingly rational manner.  But are our observations truly based on rational thoughts? Do things correlate as we see them with the science that measures the phenomena?  If they did, a whole host of entertainment fields would not exist.  Imagine that you do not have the ability to recognize these differences developed yet.

Not only would this be a terrifying position to be in, it would also leave one unsure of his place in the world.  While we may not be aware of this situation, we have experienced it as infants and through our formative years.  Everything begins as a mysterious and/or mystical experience.  When enough evidence is gathered, people begin to codify what they encounter into a picture of how the world functions.  It is essentially the same process as language acquisition.  And, just like with language, those views remain until disabused by others.

To illustrate this point, consider a young child’s lack of object permanence.  Freud noted this phenomenon in relation to the Fort/Da game (peek-a-boo for English speakers).  Why does this entertain infants so much?  Part of the pleasure stems from how scientists believe babies process the world.  In this case, if the baby cannot see your eyes, they cannot see you and believe you cannot see them.  Babies know they are present, but as the lack of object permanence and reliance on eye contact diminishes, so does the sense of wonder.  The infant begins to understand what has been going on and no longer enjoys the game.

Building a knowledge base without an analogous structure is difficult; having no references of any kind is infinitely harder.  The default method is trial-and-error, but that requires some a priori knowledge in some field or another.  Why, you may wonder?  In larger part, this stems from our pattern recognition abilities.  Since infants have no experiences from which to draw, they encounter each new event as a wondrous occasion.  With no other reference point than one’s own body, there is nothing to help the baby understand that neither it nor the person playing peek-a-boo with it has disappeared despite the blocking of the person’s vision.

This is not the only occurrence of a child’s worldview not matching up with reality.  To the child, his parents have always been.  In fact, all adults have always been grown-ups.  Inevitably the child is shocked to learn the parents were also once children.  “You mean you were littler?” is a common response.  With no pattern recognition to fall back on, a child does not have any awareness of life cycles.  Unless a loved one dies or a pet passes on, everything has always been as it is and there is no a priori knowledge to let the child know that there is a natural progression to existence.  Such a world is static and accounts for part of the reason why time seems to drag for a child.  Imagine then what terror comes from having that stability shattered.

The issue is not limited to the infant or adolescent.  If it were, new developments in technology and science would not be met with continued skepticism.  When it comes to cuisine, the same resistance occurs.  Fried scorpions, crispy tarantulas, grasshoppers, and even water buffalo penis are consumed by various cultures and would be unthinkable by many Americans alongside more familiar meats eaten: horse, frog, dog, and escargot.  All are edible, yet the thought of consuming the unfamiliar is fear-inducing.  This abuse of one’s sense of normalcy is known as the omnivore’s dilemma.  There is a sense of paralysis when such a level of variety exists.  To that end we reduce the number of choices and thus make the number of combinations manageable.  By doing so, we can default to familiar patterns which make the combinations seem even fewer.

When infants are introduced to new foods they go through the omnivore’s dilemma and try to fight being fed until they acquire a taste for the foods.  In effect, they internalize the violation of their shattered world until it no longer feels like the familiar is being abused.  This should sound just like the process for catachresis for language.  That is because the unfamiliar is met with resistance and for good reason.

When you strip away modern notions and all the technology that has lead to such views, you are left with a territorial predator who survives with the help of a small group in relative isolation in a limited space.  The question, then, is what keeps the individuals from remaining in constant competition for resources.  In truth, nothing as our species is still engaged in resource competition with members of our own community, let alone outsiders.  What we have developed, however, is a way to mitigate the stress such competition has placed on us: communication.  The Latin root “communicare” means “to share.”  For that is what language allows us to do: share thoughts, sensations of taste and smell, ideas, and emotions that are confined to our minds, not to mention what we see, all of which make their way into art.

Like children, it took our ancestors time to learn how to use language effectively.  That matters because it plays a significant role in how we understand words. The shaping of language is not only in its rules, but also in the evolution of sounds used to shape words.  Languages have a tendency to soften over time.  For one reason, we are a bit lazy and often slur our speech.  Another has to do with tonality of words.  Why do these matter here, because the harder a pronunciation is, the slower the delivery of information provided verbally is.  Look at the word “boatswain.”  It is pronounced as “bow-sun” despite its spelling.  Over time and due to the harshness of its syllables as spelled, it became the tongue-friendly sound it now possesses without changing its meaning.

As we learned to quicken our speech, we found we could share more information with a minimum of loss.  We also added musicality, which meant we were able to use language as music and expanded the medium of language beyond raw information and storytelling.  Here is where words transcend the limits of what we observe into a way we can examine and explore inner and outer spaces.  Hence, we were able to condense the world into words.  However to encapsulate the nigh-infinite possibilities languages needed to be limited with words acquiring multiple, yet related, meanings.  In this way, all of reality could (theoretically) be contained within a few hundred or thousand words.  The same boredom that makes the brain condense tasks into subconscious routines so it can avoid work it knows is repetitive is in use here as well.  It understands the patterns of usage and sounds enough that when words are slurred, mispronounced, misused, or omitted what was meant by the speaker comes across.  Sound bad this sentence does, not good words used to express sentiments in correct way which you find harmonious to hear, but knows what are conveyed in context what flaws and badness of sound to aural receptors you know what say I.  That is because your brain quickly spotted patterns in structure and usage to know which meanings to apply to each word as well as to fill in the missing information in the preceding sentence.  While it may grate on the ears and annoy because of its cumbersome weight, the point still comes across; however it is impeded by the unfamiliar and unwieldy construction.

When children encounter new situations they use the words they know to describe what it was they experienced.  Ever watch a child struggle with trying to encapsulate what they are trying to share?  In addition to a lack of words, they are often frustrated and find it difficult to construct something intelligible.  Rather than fall back on catachresis, they try to conjugate verbs in the patterns they know, string words together into awkward constructions that try to sum up what they are trying to share.  While metaphor, simile, and analogy allow us to create images to compensate when words fail, there are few options for the inexperienced.  In English, it is the hyphenated string that sees the most use.  It is the grammatical device that lets-you-describe-something-when-you-do-not-know-what-to-call-it-but-have-a-good-idea-of-what-it-was-like-and-how-it-is-supposed-to-be-a-single-object-in-a-sentence-and-still-make-perfect-sense.  The amount of information that has to be parsed just to understand what the construct conveys is too high to be effective.  Children fall back on this more than adults until they learn words that let them communicate faster by using fewer words.

Where do these words come from?  Again, catachresis plays a huge role in this.  In addition to constructing new words to carry the meaning (e.g. ginormous, bazillion, communication, etc.), there are idioms, metaphors, similies, and wholesale raiding of another language (e.g. burrito, school, sirocco, haboob, tor, etc.).  Children learn these words from others who have learned to reduce the signal-to-noise ratio in their own speech.  Thus, they gain mastery of language through experiencing what others have already mastered, benefitting from someone else’s knowledge as a surrogate a priori base they have yet to gain.

This is all well and good, but where does the knowledge originally get encoded?  Much of it appears to be happenstance.  Should the “if X, then Y” pattern occur with regularity, the pattern and chance events become linked.  The sun appears to rise and set as we cannot feel the rotation of the Earth, as reflected in our language.  Our position facilitates the illusion, so it must be so until tested, which requires a method to validate observations.  But, when language was first developing and knowledge lasted only as long as the individual who possessed it, there was no way to do science.  The main concern of our species has been survival.  Such a preoccupation forces a person to look at his position within the world.  How you relate to your surroundings lets you know where you stand and that often requires an outside perspective.

Here, then, is where culture and society walk onto the stage.  Survival may be a solitary occupation, but sustained growth is a group effort.  This requires specialized roles, and this entails order.  To get there, one needs rules and a way to share those rules so that tensions are reduced and work is not duplicated while other critical areas languish.  Until technology dictates otherwise, these rules are determined by one’s surroundings.  Thus, our ancestors had to live in accordance with nature to ensure their survival.

The rule of “if X, then Y” is paramount because it explains how our species developed the myriad of diverse societies and cultures.  “If our resources are tied to the herd, then we have to follow it” is the chief rule that governs migratory groups who relied on game animals for food and shelter.  These types of rules conditions dictate the social rules needed for the group’s long-term survival.  As time goes on, the patterns develop into codified laws and these eventually require explanations for the generations that come after.

Herein lays the problem with unwritten rules: their reasoning is subject to interpretation of the listener in a game that can only be classified as a generations-long game of telephone.  The time between transmissions here is on the order of years, meaning the likelihood of permutations in the retelling are almost guaranteed.  Throw in the pattern recognition ability along with our innate need for explanations that make sense and you have all the makings of cultural seeds.  After all, cultures are the shared traditions of a group of people.  Environment thus plays a crucial role in shaping the rules that coalesce into cultural patterns.  But cultural patterns are not the entirety of a group of people.  They may help organize and focus the group’s activities, but they do not explain the hows or whys.

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Anatomy of Game Design: An Unbridgeable Divide, Part 7

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Anatomy of Game Design: An Unbridgeable Divide, Part 8.2

Arcing Through the Void

Math and language seem to possess a common origin point as their methods for communication move in opposite directions.  Yet, they share analogous structures.  There are clear patterns which could be attributed to the fingerprint of humanity’s collective approach to producing meaning of a complex and overwhelming world that does not make sense.  So, why is there a divide that stands between math and language?  The gap is a result of a liminal realm we have yet to mine to its depths and feel certain of any answers: humanity itself.

How do you explore what you cannot see?  This question explains why it is difficult to understand exactly where math and language originate, or if they even have a common source.  We cannot even fully explain what we feel or why someone reacts the way they do with enough certainty to do so consistently.  We are still trying to learn the hows and whys of human consciousness. How do we think and what value do emotions play in intelligence are questions scientists are trying to answer.  As sciences go, those that look inward are woefully young in the face of other, “harder” sciences despite our preoccupation with them over the course of our species’ history.

Consider the advances in physics with the tell-tale discoveries of the Higgs-Boson particle and the subsequent claim by physicists that we have found the entire observable physical universe.  Short of dark matter and dark energy, it seems science has allowed us to learn all there is to the behavior of the observable physical universe, barring the chaotic nature of the quantum. Biologists are decoding the human genome and closing in on what triggers various ailments or makes them likely to occur.  And, as a science, biology is younger than astronomy.  It is only a matter of time before we master biology to the extent we have physics.  Psychology arose at the end of the Victorian Age as a codified field, meaning we have a long way to go towards understanding how the mind works in light of how long it has taken us to progress in other fields.

Think about this for a moment.  Science is based on observations.  The way the scientific method works is by recording results that can be measured and verified.  So, how does one go about observing the unobservable?  We do not try to.  Instead, we measure as many of the results as possible.  Depending on the trait being examined, this could be a reactions test, using an MRI, word associations, isolating the eyes, etc.  In short, we measure how the mind works by measuring what it causes in relation to what can be observed.

Astronomers do the same with black holes.  There is nothing to see, but we know the black is a real object by what it does.  One of the effects is gravitational lensing, meaning that the light from objects behind the black hole is bent and thus they appear in a location other than where they truly are, namely to one side (or both) of the black hole.  Accretion discs with superluminous jets of particles thrown out of a feeding black hole are also signs of the black hole’s existence.  These visible signs help confirm the predictions that come out of the math that explains how such phenomena occur.  In fact, it is the same math of gravitics that predicts where objects are, even if the object cannot be viewed.  We can track things to the point that, barring some unknown interactions, we will find them at our leisure in the places we expect.

Think of the above being applied to the human psyche.  We know that we all have an instinctual component that governs some of our responses, but why is that the case?  That is one of the areas psychologists study; and like earlier pioneers in other fields of science, they have quite a bit of trial-and-error to go through before their theories begin to pan out.  Two things to mention here: psychologists have an extensive body of analogous structures to draw upon in the shape of well established bodies of knowledge and people generally do not like being the subject of experiments.  Ethics serves as a roadblock as well in light of some truly sensitive areas of our psychological makeup, making the black hole analogy not too far removed from the challenge.

The gulf between math and language might as well be from the Earth to Mars although it looks like a bridgeable gap.  We cannot just create a bridge across a river without knowing its depth.  For the metaphoric river that represents human consciousness, it is river wide, ocean deep.  Know of any bridges anchored in water that deep?  Until we can find a bottom we have to arc our way across the void, like a ship sent to rendezvous with another world.

The problem with an arc to reach our destination is that, for all its use, an arc goes around the core issue while passing through its space.  Look at how we have managed to explore our neighbors in the solar system.  We did not fully understand how space worked but we knew enough to work out how to get from here to there.  The same held true for navigation of the ocean.  We knew very little about what was beneath the surface of the ocean, but we knew how to cross it.  This is in many ways similar to what remains for psychology.

What we can say for certain is that math and language work the way they do because we need them to.  On some level we know that they have a similar structure and an origin rooted in how we process the universe.  On another, we cannot seem to come to terms with that.  Yet, there are languages where the mathematical values of combinations of certain words are equal to a related word that can symbolize a relationship of those words together.

The catachrestic dichotomy arises when we separate the role of language and math.  In part, this is a result of how we perceive the world and share that information with others.  Language may help us exchange concepts but not the same images used to form or receive the concepts. The function of language is purely conceptual.  This is why what I saw when I envisioned the boy hitting a ball is different than your image.  Think of the weirdness of idioms.  They do not make literal sense and sometimes violate grammatical structure, but the concepts are well understood by members of the culture.  Note that most people never question what the concept looks like, however.  Math has similar elements, but where things begin to break down is in visualizing the equations.  Why though?  Language expresses while math evaluates.  Language does not determine value, it describes it.  Yet, we expect people to understand this on more than an unconscious level.  This means we are expecting them to know the divide is there without qualifying they are aware of this.  Most of the time, we do not recognize it for our own needs for some of the same reasons.

Language is used to describe how the world works.  Math measures why it does.  This distinction is important because it speaks to many of the reasons why the catachrestic dichotomy divide exists.  Language is the attempt to share events and experiences as an individual perceives them whereas math evaluates processes as they are and shows how those values come to be through formulae that measure such changes.  In essence, subjective v. objective observations.

As explained earlier in this series, math and language work together because we make them, but only inasmuch as we make one trigger the other.  This is a cyclic process.  We experience reality and then ask why.  Just spend time around a small child.  They keep asking why various things work the way they do.  They are sorting out what they see and experience as a way to lessen the overwhelming sensation that they have no control.  As children, we see more than we can ever put into words.  There is a certain aspect of description that language cannot capture, hence the need to stretch words beyond their original meanings.  Math can assist the process of catachresis by providing the tools for understanding why the concept is possible.  The more the process can be replicated, the easier it becomes to describe it, which solidifies the concept.

So how do we get from childhood to math?  The process of understanding begins with the infancy of our species.  Recall the section of this series on specialization and techniques passed from one skill to another.  Our body of knowledge develops on an individual basis in a manner not unlike the knowledge base we operate from as a species.  We apply the knowledge from one experience to another with the assumption that the events are mechanically the same.  And for many items, the analogies are close enough with few modifications to the base idea.  Thus, words acquire new meanings in relation to our greater understanding of a concept.

The senses we possess and our mastery over them helps to explain a part of this phenomenon.  Of all the senses we posses, the only one we can claim to have any control over is touch.  Everything else is a stimulus done to us whether we want to experience it or not.  Out of the remaining four senses, the strongest is hearing.  Babies may have a sense of what tastes good to them, but they do not have a storehouse of experiences to know what types of flavors interest them the most.  The same goes for smell.  Our eyes are so complex that it takes a long time for them to develop in comparison of the others senses.  What, then, do babies rely upon to make sense of the cacophony of the world they must learn to adapt to?  Sound.  From the soothing sounds of our mothers’ voices to the wailing sirens that fill the modern world, the familial voices provide an anchor.

As a baby gains greater control of its bodily functions, sound begins to take a secondary role.  The eyes begin to develop the acuity necessary for a predatory species.  (Yes, we are predators, it is why our eyes face to the front and not to the sides; sorry if this upsets you.)  Why does sound take an evolutionary step backwards?  A likely reason is that we replace the need to rely upon pure sound with language.  A baby’s cry indicates some sort of stress, but not necessarily why or from what.  Yet when the child gets older, he can express what the matter is.  Pure sound is not as nuanced as speech.  So, we sacrifice sections of the hearing range to focus on what conveys an even greater density of information.

As apex predators, sight becomes our primary sense because we inhabit a spatial world.  This is a realm governed by pure math.  Everything is measured.  The eye is designed to determine the size of objects; when paired, eyes provide depth perception that makes such observations of mass and color much more informative instantly and with less guesswork.  Whether it is estimating where a ball will be after it is thrown to hitting a deer with a spear, we are in a world of math.  In these cases, it is trigonometry.  Think of it as geometry in motion if you are not familiar with the math.  When playing tag, you do not run to where the person currently is, you go where you think they will be.  This is how children begin to recognize analogous structures in action through experimentation and observation.

The brain loves patterns.  While rote activities bother us to no end because of their repetitive nature, the ability to recognize patterns lets us navigate through unfamiliar territory with greater confidence.  While not perfect, this mechanism makes the inundation of sensory input manageable.  The nuanced elements of the territory’s permutations of the pattern means mistakes are inevitable.  In adults, this is often expressed as frustration.  Children, however, are more likely to show their lack of understanding without feeling a sense of shame.  One area where this is seen is in language acquisition.  Look at irregular verbs and their conjugation.  A child might say “I swimmed in the pool” before learning that not all verbs end in “ed” when speaking of the past.  Likewise is the false analogy in games where the child says “I win you” rather than “I beat you.”  These are attempts to span the divide between what is known and what is perceived, just like when kids are trying to master the coordination needed to catch a ball or throw one at a moving target.

Now, to return to the earlier thought about the complementary relationship between language and math, let us look at the continued development of all acquired knowledge.  Language allows ideas to be shared; math proves the validity of many of them (arts and humanities being such fields).  Generally, this is the concept behind technological developments.  Think of it like this: “If we know X, then Y;” “If we know that a cannonball travels a certain distance before gravity pulls it down, then one that travels fast enough will never hit the ground.”  This is what Isaac Newton proposed.  In turn, it became known as the gravitational constant.  While it may not hold in light of the quantum realm, this basic truth about gravity’s influence on Earth is part and parcel of the foundation of aeronautics that led to escaping Earth’s pull.

How much of an impact did Newton’s observation have on the world of language?  Jules Verne’s “From the Earth to the Moon” is based on the work Newton and his followers built upon.  Verne had figured out the math and discerned the best location from where to launch his vehicle: Florida.  He even conceived of an oceanic splashdown for the return vehicle.  His math was not accurate, but he extrapolated details based on existing concepts and then used the math to prove the validity of his concepts.

Conceive and measure, measure and conceive.  This is the process we use to formulate ideas and have them evaluated.  Trial-and-error applied to our pattern recognition abilities; if X, then Y.  X is the catachresis used to fill in a linguistic gap for a logical process.  In some cases the logic is sound; in others it fails miserably.  The dichotomy between math and language is no different than that between introverts and extroverts.  It is difficult to understand a desire for deep thought if you are interested in light conversation with as many people as possible and vice versa.  So it is with math and language.

How can I make you see or feel what I do?  I can only express the concept.  The metrics are up to you unless we are observing the event together.  Even then, our perspective is shaped by our vantage points.  So, how do we agree on what we have actually seen?  Experimentation and collaboration.  Trial-and-error leads to catachresis when new experiences are observed.  Why that occurs is in part the expectations of the rules (or laws of nature) not meeting known patterns.  When what I believe should occur in a game based upon my understanding and experiences differs from yours, argument ensues.  That is how important nomenclature in rules matters.  It is also why, after arcing through the void, NASA lost the Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999 when one team used metric measures and another used English.  Their frames of reference expressed different concepts and led to disastrous results, like most forms of miscommunication do.

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Anatomy of Game Design: An Unbridgeable Divide, Part 6

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Anatomy of Game Design: An Unbridgeable Divide, Part 8.1

An Alchemist’s Quest

We stand at the precipice across which is the span of mathematics, perceptible but untouchable.  Try as we might, there is no foundation below us that will let us make the divide smaller than it is at the moment.  A question we might not be able to answer is whether we are engaged in a search for our own philosopher’s stone.  By “we,” I do not just mean game designers; I mean all of us who play games since we are a part of an ongoing process. Games are designed to help us become more skilful, which helps us be more successful in our daily routines.  We play to get better, to learn, as best exemplified in Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken.

Improvement and refinement are part of the processes in design and honing skills.  They are also part of the idea behind the alchemist’s rarified element known as the philosopher’s stone.  Just like alchemists, we have not found a way to obtain the very thing we seek.  We have learned how to name previously unknown aspects of the world as we have created ways to duplicate the conditions letting us observe and experience such previously unknowable phenomena.  Or, to put it bluntly, it is a form of mastery that we are able to identify and manipulate some aspect of nature.

For all our efforts, though, we are unable to lessen the distance between language and math despite the observable gains we make with each new discovery.  We know what our goal is on some level, but we do not know how to get there.  Our best guesses are done with the hope that it will be a while before players find the holes in our systems that break the illusion.  In the meantime, there is a chance something will emerge from the experiences people have that will move us forward.  I will grant you that this seems nobler than what any one designer can achieve.  It is, however, the general trend through history for humanity’s endeavors in general.

The magic circle is our crucible in which we isolate some (often intangible) aspect of the world and explore the implications within the rules imposed.  This is what any good simulation or model is meant to do.  Take for instance climate science models that try to measure the effects of climate change based on human actions.  If you structure it like a game so that periodic input by a person is required, the system will provide feedback that affects the conditions for choices at the next point where human input is needed.  The user sees what his actions have on the complex processes of weather and seasons and what that can do to the inherent variability of that system.  Since climate is such a complex system, the results are close approximations based on observable data.  Technically, such simulations are not a game, but they use the same principles and tools as games to hone a skill.  In this example, it is knowledge of climate science and awareness of consequences.

And herein is where games and simulations bring us to greater levels of understanding: the skills and knowledge gained are heightened as one begins to learn how the consequences of actions function and thus how to turn those consequences to one’s advantage.  What point is there to teach someone a skill or piece of knowledge if the individual sees no advantage in acquiring what is imparted?  The incentive to master a challenge must come from competition.  This could be external or internal, but the recipient of the skills has to have something to compete against in order to establish a metric for comparison.  Once you have experienced something, there is no desire to repeat it unless enjoyment can be found, and what greater sense of enjoyment is there to know you are amongst the ranks of the best practitioners of the skills or knowledge in question?

Simulations are often boring for this reason.  If there is no way to improve your results, why would you repeat it time and again unless you had to as part of a daily routine?  We end up with diminishing returns resulting in repetition leading to stagnation.  Consider the one activity that is probably the pinnacle of physical pleasure: sex.  Now, if a couple never varies their routine, when does this go from the most fun an adult can have to a boring, mechanical process?  Routine sucks the joy out of everything because of something Raph Koster points out in A Theory of Fun for Game Design: the brain hates thinking about the same thing repeatedly.  When is the last time you had to think about all the complex motions needed to hold utensils so you can eat?  The brain stops us from being conscious of actions we have mastered because that creates more work than the brain needs or wants to do and can render the most pleasurable experiences into arduous tasks.

What does any of this have to do with the divide between language and math?  Everything.  The desire to gather new data is encoded into the structure of our brain.  Given that we know a divide exists between out principle mediums of information transfer, we are always looking for new data to explain how the world works, why, and how to adapt to these new perceptions.  All predators are driven to be more aware of their environment.  It is a survival instinct that is also required by prey to avoid being eaten.  The difference for humans, to our knowledge, is that we have learned to move beyond basic survival skills.  We are aware enough that we realized we could manipulate or mitigate circumstances; it is why we farm and hunt rather than specialize in one technique for food acquisition.  That is one of our chief evolutionary adaptations.

This leads us to another breakthrough we had to survive this long: there is too much data for any one person to master in such a short time.  Games allow us to see where we rank amongst our peers in any given skill.  In a long-term survival worldview, this is an effective means to determine divisions of labor.  Without tools, solitary survival is difficult at best.  Making fire, shelter, clothing, and other objects that make life easier requires a lot of energy and time.  Such time consumed in these kinds of labor take away from the energy needed to find food.  By specializing, we make our survival chances go up – we also stop trying to learn everything and, subsequently, we free ourselves to learn more.

Where our freedom to narrow our scope from all topics to a few becomes manifest is in the realm of specialization.  The focus on one task provides deeper insight into the techniques used to produce the desired results.  Recall earlier in this series that the Greek root of technique refers to not just art, skill, and technique, but also means “to reveal.”  Specialization allows people to reveal the ways in which the end results of a skill, art, or technique can be improved.  After all, when the task becomes rote, the brain looks for new ways to entertain itself.  This leads to innovations as the person’s proficiency identifies patterns and alterations that can be improved upon or performed faster.  The same pursuit is what the alchemists engaged in on their search for the philosopher’s stone, albeit in a more spiritual context.

Our brains are designed to seek stimulation because it makes us better predators by shunting off rote tasks into regions that require less energy and less cognitive effort.  That allows the hunter to take in more information in order to stay active and alert for the signs of prey.  So when that need to keep stimulated encounters tasks intelligence has deemed necessary to ensure survival, the brain finds ways to turn the cognitive functions towards ways to reimagine a task.  Innovation comes from the mastery of the basic elements of a task.  The rest of the revelation in specialization comes from practical experience and other knowledge or skills garnered outside the task.  A good stitch that proves its resiliency gets reused and likely passes from one clothing article to another.  This can even jump from one skill set to another, such as lashings used to keep shelters together, stone points affixed to spear shafts, and vice versa.

The jump from one medium to another is part of the artistry that results from specialization.  Beyond that, however, is the manner in which we look for a new edge.  It not only allows us to survive as an individual, but it also gives rise to art.  Art is the way in which a person sets himself apart and serves as an attempt to survive culturally long after the rest of the group has been forgotten.  Thus, we learn to compete in ways that are intended to diffuse tension and promote group cohesion while satisfying our instinctual need.  Here is where structured competition comes into play.

Games work as the crucible that allows us to learn who is best at a particular skill set and introduces outside knowledge one individual may have that another lacks.  Hence, the game becomes the conduit that brings a stitching pattern to the attention of the hunter, bowyer, and so forth.  Innovation comes from seeing the technique and the desire to incorporate it into one’s own repertoire.  That very change is what alchemists sought in their experiments.  When we think we have made it our own, we try using the technique to reveal our own prowess – and perhaps superiority over our competition.  When we have nothing new to gain, we change the game (see Driven Towards Extinction).  This drives us to make new games that take the new knowledge base into consideration, which in turn leads to new forms of mastery and knowledge.  The cycle repeats as the refinement goes on and shows us that there is something just beyond our reach, just like the philosopher’s stone.

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Anatomy of Game Design: An Unbridgeable Divide, Part 5

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Anatomy of Game Design: An Unbridgeable Divide, Part 7

Minding the Gap

Math and language work in reverse fashion from one another, resulting in a gap.  Try as we might, we cannot fully span the chasm that separates the two.  For many, this is a nonissue as the two work well enough as is that there is no need to examine the issue.  Then again, they rarely need to mix the two.  For simulationists and game designers, this gap cannot be ignored.  It informs the decisions we need to make when developing a new project.

While some people may see using math and language hand-in-hand as a marriage in hell, it is the stock-in-trade for designers of simulations, models, and games.  Our goal is to make an attempt to span the gap so there are no discrepancies between the intent of the procedural elements defining the rules and the equations that accept the variables from the rules.  This might seem easy, but it is not.  The worst part is the audacity we have in believing or leading our clients and consumers to believe we have succeeded.  If this were true, there would be few to no arguments over our efforts.  We do our best to cover our tracks, but we leave you holding the bag and hope you never notice.

How do we do this and get away with it for as long as we can?  Show me an experience.  Go ahead, point out one to me.  Not someone’s expression, I mean an outright experience.  Through the use of language, I get you to buy into a contract to suspend the social order at minimum and most of reality at maximum.  While you enact the rules supplanting part of reality, I tell the rules how to process your inputs through the structures I created beforehand.  What you get back from those rules causes a state of change.  You experience and react to this change, but the math and language never interact.  You do.  In effect, I turn you into an organic computer.

You experience the gap.  Nothing happens without a player’s involvement and it has to be thus if you want the experience to be termed as a game.  Herein lays one of the secrets of game design: you as the player have to enact the rules and follow the results the rules stipulate.  How do you do this without arguing what specifically is being asked of you?  Therein lays the mystery of the gap.  Rules do not inform you how to read the equations, they only tell you what to input and what to do with the results.  Somehow you bridged the gap long enough to extract some data.

The procedures to get the outcome mean nothing to the math.  Likewise, the value returned means nothing to the language.  The results are either applied to a game piece, meaning it moves, or it is compared to a table that then tells you which procedure is executed.  “Oh, you got an 8, see Rule X.  Next.”  Unlike meters and yards, there is no unit of measure here.  The values have already been accounted for and sorted for you.  This seems a bit clinical, so how do we extrapolate fun out of this?

The general qualities of the experience are conceptually encoded in the rules and supported by the math.  The trip around a Monopoly board takes 44 spaces.  You roll two dice and are as likely to roll a total of 7 as you are doubles.  This averages out to roughly six throws of the dice to make a complete circuit around the board.  The experience is not measured in throws of the dice, it is measured in turns, and the actions of those turns are subject to cash flow and conditions imposed by the square landed upon.  While you are juggling the bookkeeping math, the game is using its slightly-greater-than-six-turns value to govern cash infusions that feed into the acquisition process to tip the game even further into an imbalance that favors one player over another.  Your only way to mitigate these processes is by leveraging the procedures that call upon you to negotiate with your fellow players.

So, while you are engaged deeply in the experiential elements of the procedural side of the game, the dice mechanic is the clock that works against any attempts to shore up equilibrium.  Prices of property, regardless of development, do not change in relationship to your cash total.  They are proportional to distance around the board, however.  Thus, the prices work in tandem with the dice mechanic to drain players of money before passing Go.  The rules are unconcerned with how much money you have at any point and the potential dilemmas they may place you in.  The two elements that compose the game force you to make choices to interact with the math or not, or even to choose how you will respond to it (pay to get out of jail or try rolling doubles; or buy or pass on a property; sell assets, mortgage properties, or pay cash for rent costs; etc.).  Each action triggers a different mathematical function that interacts with others in the game.

Notice that while the rules provide options for handling transactions, there are no procedures interacting with actual computations.  That is the result of the gap.  You can also see this in games like Risk.  Now, there is a rule that has you earn a card if you conquer at least one territory during a turn, but that is also a state you changed to trigger that procedure.  Another rule governing the cards states you cannot hold onto those cards once you have at least five.  You must turn in sets of three until you have fewer than five cards.  Each set consists of three-of-a-kind or one each of infantry, cavalry, or artillery icons on a card.  The rules cannot (and do not) explain that it is statistically impossible to not meet the conditions to make a set of three with five cards, neither do they explain the progression for the number of reinforcements earned or that the procedure triggered by gaining cards as the game progresses are all designed to create an imbalance mathematically, just like in Monopoly, but none of that is reflected in the language because it is outside the scope of language’s role in games and its function in general.

One of the choices we have to make as designers is how much of an explanation is needed for players to enjoy an experience, something language and math can describe but cannot communicate.  Neither medium can point to one, but they can observe and prepare the space for an experience to occur.  Hence, we lie about how well we can make language and math link up and span the gap.  See, by having rules that trigger mathematical functions and vice versa, we give the illusion weight.  Think of it as so much smoke in mirrors.  What is really going on in tabletop games is that designers tell you when to do math.  The rules do not speak to the math and the math likewise with language.  That is where tables and lists come into play.  In Risk, it is a simple greater-than/less-than function to see who wins with ties going to the defender.  The rules tell you to roll dice to attack.  The math is completely inherent in the random function of the dice, just like the cards in the draw pile.  There is no math in the rules of Risk.  To be sure, there are numbers listed, but no actual math despite how it appears (See “Modifiers” for a more detailed look at Risk’s mechanics).

As designers, we start with one of three things: a premise, a rule, or a mechanic and then start adding the other two.  This early prototype lets us experience the game and gives a sense of what needs to be adjusted in order to fine tune the experience as we have envisioned it.  We are aware of the math and the rules needed to replicate the experience for others.  When we fail to make the two sides appear seamless, we expose the gap.  This is what playtesting is supposed to catch.  Unfortunately nobody can account for every condition, one of the things covered under “House Rules.”  There is supposed to be a slight gap between the written rules to allow for creativity in skill usage, which makes players better with those skills the game is designed around.  When the language and math do not match up according to the way the rules claim the game is supposed to work, the players are led to several options: exploit the gap, try to interpret the rules to make them work, patch the game’s broken span, or abandon it.  Some may try to ignore it, but such a breach often creates too much friction to be ignored for long.

What happens when people begin to abandon a game after such breaks are exposed well after the fact?  The designers often work on a new edition or errata that work to fix the issue or they make a new game if they feel the problem is too deeply rooted in the system to be changed.  After all, the exposure of the gap is the disruption of the suspension of belief that sustains the magic circle.  If the game was playable up until that point when the exposure occurred, the cause is often a result of the skills the game hones exceeding the framework of the game’s challenge.  That is less a failure of the game as it is a result of the phenomenon covered in “Driven Towards Extinction.”

Once you learn how an illusion works you are no longer entertained by it as you once were.  That is all a game is: an illusion that allows you to improve real-world skills in a safe manner.  You have several options available at that point: find a new game, abandon the genre of games honing those skills, develop your own game, or to even admire the artistry used to hide the gap.  There is something to be said about the admiration of technique as a form of entertainment.  After all, illusion is an art form, and it is how we mind the gap between language and math by stepping around it, just like you would when stepping from the platform onto a train.

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Anatomy of Game Design: An Unbridgeable Divide, Part 4

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Anatomy of Game Design: An Unbridgeable Divide, Part 6

Quantifiably Enigmatic Operations

Math’s precision is so exacting that it does not leave any room to explain what it is telling you.  The measurements that come out of an equation are abstract to such a high degree that without any objects attached to the value, there is no telling what has been said.  For some, this makes math a chore best avoided.  There is no denying that the operations are meaningless without objects present, but there is something at the basic level that bears examination in order to best view how the abstraction makes math unable to engage language in a meaningful dialogue.

Unlike language, math has several properties that make it universal and fungible.  This does not mean the values or quantities can be moved around with willful disregard.  Rater, it means that eight apples and eight oranges are quantifiably equal even if the two fruits are not.  Even if one uses different symbols to represent numbers (e.g. Roman and Arabic numerals), their value remains unaffected.  Thus, the measures of each value remain consistent and immutable even while their representation or objects vary.  The power of math is tied to its ability to transmit information past linguistic or symbolic barriers.  This is evinced in mathematical patterns.

Certain sequences are found everywhere in nature.  The Golden Ratio is one such sequence.  It appears in nautiloid structures like snail and sea shells.  It also appears in weather patterns and ocean waves.  Even plants make use of this pattern.  Sunflowers are an example of this along with the placement of leaves along the stalks of plants as well as the placement of limbs on trees.  And these are just examples from the natural world we can observe.  Physics does the same in such notations as the gravitation constant of 9.8m/s² for falling objects on Earth.

Math follows syntactical rules like language, but the rules are driven towards outcome.  Language works towards an outcome as well, but it is not driven; it meanders compared to math.  With math it is all about operations more so than it is nuance.  To be sure, the complex higher orders of math are nuanced, but not to the degree of language.  That is because even then the subtleties are in the employment of the operating symbols.  Math lacks the ability to create metaphors; which, having a part of catachresis to some extent, defy nature.  We can equate a trait of an animal to a human and have the point be understood with no issues for the validity of the quality.  If you tried to make 2 + 2 = 5 in math without invoking complex rules or synergy, you will be challenged and found at fault for violating the laws of nature.

The basic structural grammar of math uses the acronym of PEMDAS to describe the order of importance for the main operations in any equation.  Languages also have a strict word order for understanding to be achieved.  In English, the basic structure is SVX (subject, verb, and everything else).  For math, the operations are parentheses, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction.  Notice that there are no rules governing where the information subjected to the operands go, save that they must balance out when an equal sign appears.  This lack of “word order” is what makes math operationally-driven.

Consider the following statements: 16 ÷ 2, 2 x 4, 2³, and 12 – 4.  All of them have the same resolution.  They are all expressions of the value of 8.  None of these expressions are conceptual.  Given enough objects to see this, you can physically see the answer.  In fact, with most mathematical equations, you can directly observe the results.  Some might require very specific knowledge sets, but observers with said knowledge can see the math in action.  Language does not work this way.  As described in the previous section, words generally have multiple meanings, leaving the sentence open to interpretation based on the concepts bound in the word and the mental image needed to construct the sentence’s intended meaning.

But, one might point out, I have left out mathematical formulae and variables.  They are not basic math, for one.  The use of variables as stand-ins for math problems represents the values that will eventually go into an equation, but they are not concepts in math.  Variables and equations are concepts of language of how the world works based on experience and then rendered as equations.  The equation F = ma does not measure force; it tells the observer how to measure force.  Force equals mass times acceleration.  What about the formula d = rt?  This tells us how to measure distance by multiplying the rate of speed by the time of movement.  Let us replace the variables with numbers: 8 = 4 x 2.  Without the equation, is that a measure of distance or force?  Both formulae use the same mathematical operations.  The famous E = mc² equation is not much different once you reduce c² to the speed of light squared.  This means once you plug in the number for mass, you can carry out the multiplication just like with F = ma and d = rt.  The concept is not in the operation, it is in what values you select for and the measurement you are making.

The last point bears focus as it is operational in nature.  The act of data selection to parse through an equation’s operands is not a concept, it is information objectively observed.  We assign meaning to measurements so that they have conceptual weight.  To prove this point, let us refer back to the numeric symbol of 8.  Outside of the expressions used thus far, what does it mean?  What does it quantify on its own?  Outside the concepts informing the equations, the result of 8 has no attachments.  For our purposes of understanding the syntax and outcomes of math, the symbol of 8 represents a quantified unknown.  I can express the symbol as the word “eight” and still be no closer to the truth of what is being signified.  The meaning is missing.  In fact, it cannot be found in the word’s definition.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “eight” is an adjective, and thus, by grammatical rules of the language, requires something substantive (a noun) to follow its use.  The OED also defines the word as a substantive and goes on to define it as “the abstract number eight.”  Other definitions are listed for the adjectival form of the word, but the root of many of the problems in gaming can be seen in the definition of the number as an abstract.  Language does not do abstracts well.  Why?  Because we rely on our eyes to gather the greatest amount of information.  Abstract ideas lack physicality and sensory details we can readily experience or imagine experiencing.  Math cannot tell us what is happening, only the mechanics underlying why it is.  Thus, math can give an exacting answer, but it cannot contextualize it.

And here we find what language does well: contextualizing raw data we observe and experience.  Here is an example: five apples plus three oranges equals eight fruit.  I mixed objects, but I still have a mathematical function that occurs despite categorical changes (actual objects in apples and oranges to abstract concepts: fruit).  But wait, you say, you just said language does not do abstracts well.  Yes, which is true, but what is a fruit?  Tomatoes and avocados are fruit, but most people do not consider anything not sweet a fruit even if that is its scientific category.  But while I am arguing with myself rhetorically, 5 + 3 still equals 8 and the math did not care one whit that words got appended to the equation.  That is because the values parsed are universal; the rest was a linguistic argument.

What about the symbols used in higher levels of math?  They appear conceptual at first glance, but they are not.  A capital sigma (Σ) is used for summations.  Now that symbol may have annotations subscripted, superscripted, and to either side, but the sigma is shorthand for the procedures behind the summation function.  The same applies to the lower case sigma (σ) used to denote the math that governs the standard deviation function of a bell curve distribution.  What we have to do is unpack the math behind the symbols to understand what they mean.  I might have to think of the concept that describes the math, but it does not impact the shortcut the symbol represents, only your understanding of how it works.  The concept is within your linguistic capabilities of describing what the math is used for and why you are doing it.

Even those who feel more comfortable doing math than describing the world through words hang their calculations on observable concepts.  We cannot see gravity, for instance, but we can measure its effects.  So, when a physicist uses 9.8m/s², he knows it is a constant referring to the rate of speed of falling objects on Earth.  If a chemist needs to measure molecular mass for a mixture, she knows that 1 mol of water has 18.02 grams of weight.  A mol, like a meter or a second, is a concept that has had a specific meaning attached to it so the math can be understood as something concrete.  Remove the units of measure and it looks like the chemist is saying 1 = 18.02.

Units of measure are one of the linguistic concepts that underpin the way we interact with math to make use of it.  It is through our assigned units that the numbers acquire meaning.  Otherwise, complex math has no meaning beyond numbers that cannot tell us much.  It makes the difference between 2″ x 4″ x 8′ and 2″ x 4″ x 8′ as the marks tell a carpenter one thing and others that these marks are exponents.  That is how math is so exacting as to be vague.  Just like language, it is the context of the observer’s frame of reference that defines the content.

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Anatomy of Game Design: An Unbridgeable Divide, Part 3

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Anatomy of Game Design: An Unbridgeable Divide, Part 5

The Art of Ideation

What is our most powerful sense as a species?  Note that the question is not which sense we rely on the most.  They are not all equal, which should not come as a surprise. What might be is that the answer is touch.  Our skin as largest organ aside, no other sense can kill you if it is denied.  Touch is our strongest sense because it binds us to a community, brings us pleasure, pain, comfort, and healing.  Denying the sensation of touch can kill infants, it can also be lethal for adults who are suffering from illness.  Being denied the sensation of touch means our bodies do not produce some of the healing agents our bodies produce, like oxytocin.  The lack of physical contact can trigger psychological ailments as well.  Yet with all that power and brain matter devoted to the sense of touch and the skin, it is not a sense we depend upon to make sense of the world at large beyond tactile sensations and ambient temperature.  Even smell, which triggers potent memories, feelings, and alerts us to potentially harmful food sources, gives way to the primacy of sight.

There are some highly complex aspects to how our senses operate, but for purposes of this topic, only one type of stimulus matters: oscillations.  They come in numerous types, but the two that affect perception are pressure and electromagnetic.  Depending on the sense, the wavelength and the medium of transmission, the senses of sight, touch, and hearing are alerted to a stimulus within range of our sense organs.  Our eyes perceive electromagnetic, our ears pressure, and our skin both (heat is a form of electromagnetic radiation).  To be clear, none of these elements are the same or should be seen as such as the oscillations in a floor do not equate with those from sound.  Both are forms of pressure, but one does not normally hear the gentle sway of a building or feel the pressure of the upper registers of sound (though you might be able to observe an object vibrate in resonance of a sound).  The same can be said of visible light and heat.  Without venturing into territory often reserved for metaphysical studies, the sensations are measured using the same measurement: the number of vibrations per second, known as hertz (Hz).  Something that vibrates twice every second is annotated as 2 Hz, for example.

Here is where I completely collapse unrelated systems into their mathematical equivalents with full knowledge that none of these should be construed as forming the same continuum (sound and light are not part of the same spectrum).  Each octave has double the oscillations as the one below it.  That range denotes all of the sounds (e.g. notes) in the octave.  It also helps to explain why the pitch of a note is recognizable despite being from a higher/lower register.  The sounds have wave peaks that sync up with a 2:1 ratio per octave shift.  From that, we recognize the notes as the same, just different pitch.  You might not be aware on a conscious level that your brain is doing this, but you do recognize the harmony of sounds.

Four paragraphs in and I am afraid I may have lost part of my audience or that it may seem that I have gone far afield of my original point of catachrestic dichotomy.  This is because the issue of conflated oscillations for three of our senses might not seem related (similar to how this paragraph has been calling attention to itself as an apology).  If all frequencies of vibration occupied the same scale, we would have less need to talk about this issue and the artifice of communication from one medium to another.  According to Kimberly Myles and Mary S. Binseel, amongst other researchers, the range of our greatest sensitivity to vibrations by touch is .4 Hz and may very well exceed 100 kHz.  Our range of sensitivity to sound is 20-20,000 Hz.  For light it is 430,000-750,000 GHz, or 430-750 trillion oscillations per second.  Translated into “octaves,” touch astoundingly yields an approximate seventeen, hearing has ten (though as we age, most adults can only hear eight), and visible sight is limited to one.  The sense we rely upon the most has the smallest range on this conflated scale of octaves.

Stereoscopic vision aside, it seems a weakness that we should, as a predatory species, put so much stock in the most restrictive of our three external world processing senses.  Then again, the ramifications for the importance could not be made more manifest.  Perhaps it is a consequence of modernity that auditory sensitivity is not given so much weight in our dependence on stimulus receptors.  The narrowness of sight does help to explain some of our problems in translating from one medium to another.  Namely, how do we pass on knowledge from one person to another?

Try this thought experiment if you do not have the means to do it actively: teach someone a skill without using words.  You may use sounds, but no actual language.  Odds are quite high that you would demonstrate the skill and use a series of gestures inviting your student to attempt the skill.  This would be reinforced with touch and visuals cues (possibly facial expressions) with verbal sounds that convey emotional tones, but no language to transfer the concept to the person being thus instructed.  Imagine the tools being created mean life or death.  This is likely how our hominid ancestors first began to share knowledge.  Primates have exhibited the same behavior when using tools to acquire food, such as chimps using twigs to root out termites.  We take in a lot of information without resorting to language.

Neither you nor I need to speak the same language to share knowledge with one another.  I could teach you how to do a simple sewing job to return clothing back to operational use.  It will not look pretty, but it will get more utility out of the item mended.  If you watch how I thread a needle and make my stitches, you will eventually learn how to do it yourself without ever having practiced the skill yourself.  That is how I learned to sew.  There was plenty of trial-and-error as I learned to make my stitches smaller, and thus increasing the strength of the mend, but no one conveyed the skill to me through language.  I internalized the process and improved over time through my observations of others.  Should you know how to affix a stone point to a stick so that it creates a serviceable spear that will last longer than a thrust or two and I can watch you make it, I will learn to make a crude version of your copy.  There is nothing special in this.  Children learn by observing a lot of activities performed by parents.  The mimicry is enough to begin the learning process.

Throughout my schooling, I was told that ninety percent of all communication is nonverbal.  So, to speed up the learning process, we learn to read the body language and tone of our mentors’ voices while they instruct us.  By seeking information through the expressions of a teacher, we learn how much approval, and thus success in replicating the skill, we have in progressing towards mastery of the construction of whatever we are being taught through such means.  After all, there is not much in the way of theoretical constructs that can be communicated through nonlinguistic means or is required for basic survival skills.  Not even the power of touch allows the transfer of information.  We use it to secure the attention of the student or teacher.

Think about the ramifications of this: the sense with the greatest octave range is reserved for the task at hand and for getting our attention while the ten octaves of sound seek out notes of approval or disapproval, and the one with less than a single octave receives the lion’s share in learning what has been communicated.  Yet, our eyes do not transfer information from one mind to another in a direct manner the way touch and sound do.  Other than some emotional content, eyes cannot share knowledge.  What is a predator with a good idea supposed to do when a new idea occurs to him and he wants to share it to increase the group’s survival chances?  Then again, how do predators form lasting social bonds to diffuse tension and prevent misunderstandings?  Art.

Wait, why art?  Aesthetics are pleasing and comforting.  A well crafted tool, a pattern worked into fabric, a dyed piece of cloth, worked stones, a joke that makes fun of you instead of others, exaggerated gestures, and a good story are all examples of art.  Art also allows for the transcendence and the translation of information from one medium to another.  The trouble with most art is that it is semiotic.  This makes the meaning of the art transitory, leading to interpretations that are subjective and highly mutable.  What, then, is more concrete and yet retains the plasticity necessary to translate information from one medium to another?  Language.

Language is symbolic enough to allow words to embody ideas without being inflexible in their meaning.  After all the word “tree” does not look like what it symbolizes any more than “arbor,” “Baum,” and “derevo” or “drevo” do in Latin, German, and Russian, respectively.  None of these words resembles a tree or each other, yet they all carry the same basic information.  In The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, Steven Pinker invokes Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man by saying “Darwin concluded that language ability is ‘an instinctive tendency to acquire an art’ a design that is not peculiar to humans but seen in other species such as song-learning birds.”  This harkens back to previous examples of the conveyance of information through tonality as that is what music is: harmonious tones that produce a pleasing aesthetic.  We do not need words to show people we care about them or wish them ill.  Gifts, labor on the behalf of others, and a hug communicate the former as much as a glare or a punch to the face expresses the latter.  What possible art does a verbal exchange facilitate beyond emotional states?  Eleven paragraphs into this section have shown just that.

Language is an art that translates concepts, actions, and objects from one medium to another for the express purpose of transferring information from one person to another.  How do we accomplish this goal?  Predominantly through sensory descriptions.  Chief amongst these are, to no surprise, visual details.  Given our propensity to rely on vision, it should not be much of a shock that this is the case.  Consider some of our expressions: “hand of god,” “fickle finger of fate,” “scales of justice,” “long arm of the law,” and “quantum foam.”  I would like to see these concepts as objects if anyone knows where they can be found outside of linguistic constructs and artworks.

Each word has a specific idea (a semi-concrete definition), but the words are combined here to create an idea that builds an image of ideas that have no concrete form.  There are no literal scales of justice or an arm of unusual length for the legal system.  Rather, they describe visually the extent to which the legal system can reach to enforce laws and the inherent belief in a fairness in the system.  No instruments exist to prove that there is a foamy structure to a zero-point energy field, but the math suggests the shape and consistency of something akin to sea foam.  This emphasis on the visual colors our perspective but by no means is the whole of sensory input used to transfer ideas from one brain to another.  Sounds, touch, smell, and taste also find representation in language.  Sounds often describe tonality, emphasis, noise, confusion, and volume of quality.  Touch sees use in myriad ways as is fitting of a sense that has multiple sources from which to draw (texture, temperature, solidity, pain, pleasure, etc.).  Smell and taste are used the least because of their subjectivity (especially amongst novice writers).  They are highly subjective and are employed to trigger memory responses or feelings of revulsion or enjoyment.  Scents do not nail themselves to your nose or otherwise block the nasal passages, but we describe them as being cloying (“cloy” means to nail, spike, clog, or claw something) when they are inescapable.

Notice how we use sensory descriptions to express an idea that we wish to share but have no physical object to present.  However, how does language do this?  By assigning fixed meanings to the words so that when an idea is given form, it does so by those meanings contribution to the overall concept.  Hence, we understand that the “hand of god” is a description of divine influence or touch on a situation; or for the nonbeliever, an act of nature beyond mortal ken to understand in its full context.  But, there is play in the definitions so that words have multiple yet subtle shifts in meaning.  Thus, I can like someone or relate the similarity of two items which share a similar quality because the word “like” expresses some sort of affinity between two or more objects.  On their own, the words retain their ambiguity for which specific meaning should be applied.  That gives way to specificity when the context becomes clear.

Why so much emphasis on sight and mental pictures?  This goes back to the primacy of vision in predatory species.  This also explains why ninety percent of communication is nonverbal as how a message is delivered is as important as or more so than the message itself.  You are more likely to retain knowledge with a mental picture than without it.  What evidence is there for this?  Plenty as studies have shown that we remember about ten percent of what we hear and double that for what we read on average.  With the exception of music and language, art is overwhelmingly rooted in visual sensory experiences.  Hence the abundance of imagery in the translations across media that language employs.

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Anatomy of Game Design: An Unbridgeable Divide, Part 1

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Anatomy of Game Design: An Unbridgeable Divide, Part 3

My writings often take me far longer to compose than you might expect.  I have a tendency to agonize over not only the subject at hand, but whether I am capable of writing in such a way that I do not lose the audience or my way in reaching a conclusion.  More often, I rarely find myself doing more than edits beyond spelling, grammar, flow, and staying on topic.  This is one of the rare instances where I had to completely rewrite the piece because I felt inadequate in being both concise and on topic.  In the case of this entry, it is not only warranted, but also necessary as the subject itself is vaster than I originally imagined.  This, then, is my third rewrite and the indulgence for this introduction will soon be clear.

Some point in 2012 Monte Cook posted somewhere (sadly I cannot recall if it was his blog, Google+, etc.) on the issue of math and language in games.  There was an unanswered question on the arguments in gaming that occur with these two components.  I answered with a phrase attempting to explain the phenomenon.  In effect, the point was that language and math do not communicate with each other.  The previous handwritten draft of this piece ran eight pages with no end in sight.  The phenomenon I tried to explain in brevity to Monte’s original posting and expand upon here I have termed as catachrestic dichotomy only to find at least another instance of it along the way.

Throughout this Anatomy of Game Design series, I have tried to approach games as an academic examining various aspects of games to hone in on the need for a disciplined and cerebral application of knowledge in favor over an intuitive method for game design.  Both are needed, but the former allows for a greater understanding and appreciation of design as science and art.  My reason for doing so is that games are both artifacts of science and art.  I hope this introduction helps with the perspective needed to describe why arguments over rules occur in games.  We are dealing not just with a complex topic, but one that transcends boundaries of academic study and our own ability to describe what we see and experience.  This examination will begin by attempting to untangle the issues that contribute to the confusion before getting at the heart of the breakdown between various methods of communication.

Of Liminal States and Amalgams

As discussed for the nature of games previously in this series, games tend to blur the lines between states.  They also follow the rules of logic and are thus digital constructs.  The logic in games is not fuzzy even if the player’s is.  In fact, only the randomness in the tumbling of the dice or the shuffling of cards creates a fuzzy state in the game.  Everything else remains orderly.  From the perspective of the player, all of this is blended together in an illusion of dynamism.  Games create a strange amalgam of multiple states regardless of the components used to design the play space.  The liminal threshold that the magic circle represents is just the most noticeable feature that marks the slippage between boundaries and definitions.

To refresh those who have read the previous installments in this series, the threshold of the magic circle is meant to divide the play space from the rest of reality.  The game therefore is at once a part of and apart from the world at large.  This confusion of space (as in to “con-fuse,” meaning “to join together,” and to make unclear) creates a duality with no clear boundaries within the play space other than the rules of the game used to overlay reality.  The pieces in a board game are like other aspects of models and simulations.  They are representations of something else.  For example, the cannon in a Risk game is used to simulate ten armies and no players mistake it for an actual cannon used on the battlefield.  Symbolic figures may not be the actual objects, but that does not stop people from making the connection and thus seeing the pieces for what they are in play and are not in reality.

Games also relax cultural norms while also relaxing the restrictions for categories of information.  We are free to transgress in myriad ways so long as we do not violate the rules of the game and thus destroy the play space.  In fact, some games purposefully encourage the distortion of information.  Charades and Pictionary are two such games where the lower the signal-to-noise ratio is the more fun the game becomes.  This is another way in which games confuse the components and information that make up the game. By doing so, we are hard-pressed to dig out and isolate the elements without having understood the principles behind game design.  This does not mean the average person cannot find the individual threads, only it is more difficult to recognize and name what one sees.  Game designers and theorists have yet to agree on a single vocabulary to describe what we do, though one is beginning to emerge.  As I am no better equipped than anyone else in this endeavor, I will leave the description of confusion at that and pick the one thread I wish to follow and untangle in this structured chaos we call games.

The issue here is one that may be very familiar to most people: the tension between math and language; or, why many people find one easier than the other.  The issue is an important one for gamers as the structure of all games are governed by math in some capacity or another.  Though not all games use probability, there are formulae underpinning the structure of the game, even a game like tag.  On the surface tag is purely physical.  The result is a complex system of trigonometry and physics in action as well as the digital state of “it”/”not it” and in/out of bounds.  Though on some level we are able to process and keep these complex relationships and formulae in mind, we are not fully conscious of how these states inform us about the game in mathematical terms.  In fact, we may not think of them as math problems or binary states.

Here lays the dilemma: if games are performative pieces (see “Kitchen Table Theater”), then why is the medium of the play space governed by so much math (and, by default, logic)?  Games are artistic endeavors from their architecture to execution.  As designers we have to inform players in the rules what their boundaries are while informing the game what it does with all of the mathematical input the players give it.  Thus, we have to communicate using two different methods to inform our intended respective audiences.  Now, this might not seem like a huge issue, but it is a lot more of one than a causal observation suggests.  Some of the problems stem from the different ways we communicate through language and math.  This necessitates a formal look at how and why math and language are so different and the dilemma left in the wake of these differences.  Something is occurring in the liminal realms created by play spaces that grants us an ability to create alchemical reactions between seemingly unrelated fields of knowledge.  While I cannot define it with any certainty, I believe shedding light on the phenomena of catachrestic dichotomy will give us a glimpse of what it may be.

Games, unlike any other form of human activity, allow us to experience the Greek word techné in all of its variegated meanings. The space within the liminal boundary of games lets us observe the revelation of technique, skill, craft, and art all at once. The catachrestic dichotomy and the interstice it inhabits within the play space is not just the art of play, but a lens that reveals the essence of the art (and technique) of art.

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Anatomy of Game Design: A Digital State

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Anatomy of Game Design: An Unbridgeable Divide, Part 2