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 8.2