Here's another tangent away from games, from a discussion I had with a couple of friends. The science isn't spot-on, but it's close enough for what I want to do.
Love acts on the same part of your brain as heroin, so you're going to see a lot of the same issues of craving and painful loss. Even more, an addiction is never cured, just managed. The same goes for love. You can resist it, but you can't overcome it.
I like to treat love as almost an object, but one that is also an emotion. It usually isn't connected to anything external to it, though without some support it's going to get messy. But the feelings of "like" and "love" are independent emotions. Having the first makes the second much more manageable, but you don't need one in order to have the other.
The human brain didn't spring fully formed from the head of Zeus. It's the result of millions of years of tweaks and patches, with new elements usually added on top of the old ones, and very few things getting thrown out. You can actually break down the brain and say where in evolutionary history every part was added on, and what function it originally served.
Rationality is an artifact of the cerebrum, the top layer and the youngest layer. It can influence and regulate the actions of the other parts of your brain, but only to a very limited degree.
Almost everything you do or feel is a reflex.
When you see a fertile woman, you don't think about her at all. Your limbic system just releases dopamine in response to the stimulus, which you perceive as desire.
If that desire is fulfilled, your brain releases endorphin, which is the heroin-like substance, and more dopamine.
When you consummate, you also release vasopressin and oxytocin, which is basically the molecular embodiment of monogamy. In some animals this is a make-or-break chemical, if they have it they will never leave their partner's side, and if they don't, they have no connection whatsoever.
When you desire something, anything, dopamine is the primary agent responsible. There are varying degrees of desire, and love is on the stronger end of the spectrum. You can view it as a desire for the approval of another person. The thing is, the release of dopamine is not regulated by the cerebrum at all. Desire doesn't just transcend rationality, it short-circuits it.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Arcade Culture
I don't really like linking to this site: the author is mean, and usually wrong. Nevertheless, his article about arcade culture is very much worth reading.
http://insomnia.ac/commentary/arcade_culture/
http://insomnia.ac/commentary/arcade_culture/
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Who Cares if you Play?
Milton Babbitt's 1958 article "Who Cares if you Listen" is still an interesting perspective fifty-two years later. It has some important implications in the aesthetics of games as well, since games by their very nature invite a certain amount of specialization.
In games with a low or moderate execution barrier, pretty much every game except StarCraft, exhibition runs into the problem of low-level players crying "But I can do that!" Unless you have a certain amount of knowledge of the game, it's very difficult to see why the expert consistently beats the novice who can do all the moves. Gaining the knowledge to appreciate the design decisions that went into a well balanced game can take hundreds of hours.
Sometimes relying on flash is a perfectly valid option. Street Fighter 4 has decent, if not great, design and balance, but a large part of what made it successful was its flash, of which it has oodles. There's nothing wrong with that, but it draws attention to the visual spectacle and away from the abstract design.
So if you want to explore the aesthetic possibilities of game design, if you want to present your world-view in the form of rules and mechanics, you will be singing to a very small audience. The kind of person who can appreciate games-as-art must be familiar with the kinds of decisions that go into game design, and the kinds of emergent behaviors that arise in high level play. In short, a specialist.
We're more like Babbitt than we might want to think. Much as the common symphony goer despises the aesthetic decisions that go into an atonal work, the common scrub despises many balancing and design decisions, and is ignorant of many more. The division here is less extreme, but it is rare for a game to appeal to both specialists and scrubs.
Note well: by "scrub" I mean no insult. It simply means anyone who does not know what it is like to play a game at a high level. That's most of the world's population, and a lot of them are really swell folks.
Everyday Shooter is a very good bridge. It is first and foremost a fun game, if difficult. Of flash it has plenty, with its bright colors and unlockable filters, and also the energetic sound-track. These surface elements do not even conceal a beautifully designed game, they are an integral part of it. Many of the parts of the game are drawn from common tropes: the two stick controls, chain systems, continue scores, and even the way that music and sound interact. In every case the trope is polished to its most elegant, and this is complimented even by the graphics, which are drawn at runtime and adapt to play. Across levels, there is enough variation to maintain interest while also maintaining coherence throughout the whole. This ideal is also reflected in the graphics and music.
This game is one that demonstrates perfectly an overarching aesthetic ideal that binds together a varied group of individual elements. This arch does not extend only in one dimension, level-to-level, but also across all aspects of the game. The graphics, music, and rules all conform to a model of whimsical elegance. In every case there is no more than what is needed to give pleasure.
But how much of this would a scrub notice? Not much, and why should he? The game is fun, and that is all that really needs to matter. The layers of conceptual elegance are superfluous in the face of a fun game, except to the specialist who demands them.
When game design is aimed at other game designers, the aesthetic conversation becomes unencumbered, and more complex ideas can be expressed. Will the context-sensitive controls in Perpetual Dawn, the art-game I'm designing, make it more fun than using four separate buttons would? Probably not. But it expresses an idea in the appropriate context, in the only context where that idea can be considered and judged.
The audience is small, but that's ok. Art does not need universal appeal to be valuable. For those who dislike it, we have a responsibility not to foist it upon them, (as modernist music often is) but we do not have a responsibility to please them. At this level, art becomes an expressive communication of ideas, and if someone understands and appreciates those ideas, then the work has succeeded in its modest goals.
The interactivity of games gives us an opportunity to turn that statement into a dialog. Though I might not hear much of the questions and counters provided by the players, the work should be able to speak for me, enough so that the player who invests the effort and understanding necessary to have that dialog can make an informed decision based on my ideas.
The purpose of such a dialog is not primarily to persuade. Persuasion is rather a poor art, for its success or failure depends more on psychology and charisma than on the validity of the argument. Instead, the idea is to offer a statement that demands neither acceptance nor rejection, but instead invites consideration. It's possible to change a person without changing their mind.
The highest goal for me is to create a work of art that can stand in society as my surrogate. When I am unavailable for comment, my particular views and values can be expressed in my place. Essentially, a work that encompasses the whole of myself. But such a work would demand such an expressive language that only a specialist could fully understand it.
It's only immortality if people think I'm worth keeping around.
In games with a low or moderate execution barrier, pretty much every game except StarCraft, exhibition runs into the problem of low-level players crying "But I can do that!" Unless you have a certain amount of knowledge of the game, it's very difficult to see why the expert consistently beats the novice who can do all the moves. Gaining the knowledge to appreciate the design decisions that went into a well balanced game can take hundreds of hours.
Sometimes relying on flash is a perfectly valid option. Street Fighter 4 has decent, if not great, design and balance, but a large part of what made it successful was its flash, of which it has oodles. There's nothing wrong with that, but it draws attention to the visual spectacle and away from the abstract design.
So if you want to explore the aesthetic possibilities of game design, if you want to present your world-view in the form of rules and mechanics, you will be singing to a very small audience. The kind of person who can appreciate games-as-art must be familiar with the kinds of decisions that go into game design, and the kinds of emergent behaviors that arise in high level play. In short, a specialist.
We're more like Babbitt than we might want to think. Much as the common symphony goer despises the aesthetic decisions that go into an atonal work, the common scrub despises many balancing and design decisions, and is ignorant of many more. The division here is less extreme, but it is rare for a game to appeal to both specialists and scrubs.
Note well: by "scrub" I mean no insult. It simply means anyone who does not know what it is like to play a game at a high level. That's most of the world's population, and a lot of them are really swell folks.
Everyday Shooter is a very good bridge. It is first and foremost a fun game, if difficult. Of flash it has plenty, with its bright colors and unlockable filters, and also the energetic sound-track. These surface elements do not even conceal a beautifully designed game, they are an integral part of it. Many of the parts of the game are drawn from common tropes: the two stick controls, chain systems, continue scores, and even the way that music and sound interact. In every case the trope is polished to its most elegant, and this is complimented even by the graphics, which are drawn at runtime and adapt to play. Across levels, there is enough variation to maintain interest while also maintaining coherence throughout the whole. This ideal is also reflected in the graphics and music.
This game is one that demonstrates perfectly an overarching aesthetic ideal that binds together a varied group of individual elements. This arch does not extend only in one dimension, level-to-level, but also across all aspects of the game. The graphics, music, and rules all conform to a model of whimsical elegance. In every case there is no more than what is needed to give pleasure.
But how much of this would a scrub notice? Not much, and why should he? The game is fun, and that is all that really needs to matter. The layers of conceptual elegance are superfluous in the face of a fun game, except to the specialist who demands them.
When game design is aimed at other game designers, the aesthetic conversation becomes unencumbered, and more complex ideas can be expressed. Will the context-sensitive controls in Perpetual Dawn, the art-game I'm designing, make it more fun than using four separate buttons would? Probably not. But it expresses an idea in the appropriate context, in the only context where that idea can be considered and judged.
The audience is small, but that's ok. Art does not need universal appeal to be valuable. For those who dislike it, we have a responsibility not to foist it upon them, (as modernist music often is) but we do not have a responsibility to please them. At this level, art becomes an expressive communication of ideas, and if someone understands and appreciates those ideas, then the work has succeeded in its modest goals.
The interactivity of games gives us an opportunity to turn that statement into a dialog. Though I might not hear much of the questions and counters provided by the players, the work should be able to speak for me, enough so that the player who invests the effort and understanding necessary to have that dialog can make an informed decision based on my ideas.
The purpose of such a dialog is not primarily to persuade. Persuasion is rather a poor art, for its success or failure depends more on psychology and charisma than on the validity of the argument. Instead, the idea is to offer a statement that demands neither acceptance nor rejection, but instead invites consideration. It's possible to change a person without changing their mind.
The highest goal for me is to create a work of art that can stand in society as my surrogate. When I am unavailable for comment, my particular views and values can be expressed in my place. Essentially, a work that encompasses the whole of myself. But such a work would demand such an expressive language that only a specialist could fully understand it.
It's only immortality if people think I'm worth keeping around.
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