The Simpsons Do Video Games, Pt.1

The Tetris effect has to be the clearest possible indication that computer games are naturally optimal Flow-inducing activities. As to why, well it has a lot to do with cognitive information processing. For more, look to the last link here.

Am I ethical?

Fig.1 Laughing at people in wheelchairs (and the Stephen Hawking voice) - ethical?

On foot of the ethics campaign over at onlyagame let me bare my soul, or at least post my moral values on the web like automobile accident statistics.

Am I ethical? You know, to be honest I would say the simple answer is "only when I feel it would benefit me". Which some might say, is completely unethical. But more meaningfully, I think that I have such trouble defining ethics, and imagining principled positions that would apply in practical situations, that addressing the subject of my own ethics is to address the whole sum of my existence, and my relation to an objective reality. This is all broadening the scope a bit much for the question asked, so instead let me take a bottom-up approach and answer a few (apparently) key instruments on personal morals (a word I assume to be interchangeable with 'ethics'). The hope is that these should provide a basis for an inference on what, in general, my ethics might be.

For anyone else currently feeling inconsistent or vague in their ethical position, there is a website (when is there not) which proffers these simple self-report tools that might help to focus thinking.
http://www.yourmorals.org is the work of psy­chol­o­gist Jon­a­than Haidt of the Un­i­ver­si­ty of Vir­gin­ia in Char­lottes­ville, Va. Found out about him from here.
Most surprising thing I found out about myself - I have a slightly higher sense of disgust than average. Students these days - what are we coming to?!


So without further ado, allow me to unveil...me!
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The scale you completed was the "Moral Foundations Questionnaire," developed by Jesse Graham and Jonathan Haidt at the University of Virginia.

The scale is a measure of your reliance on and endorsement of each of five psychological foundations of morality that seem to be found across cultures. Each of the two parts of the scale contained four questions related to each foundation: 1) harm/care, 2) fairness/reciprocity (including issues of rights), 3) ingroup/loyalty, 4) authority/respect, and 5) purity/sanctity.

The idea behind the scale is that human morality is the result of biological and cultural evolutionary processes that made human beings very sensitive to many different (and often competing) issues. Some of these issues are about treating other individuals well (the first two foundations - harm and fairness). Other issues are about how to be a good member of a group or supporter of social order and tradition (the last three foundations). Haidt and Graham have found that political liberals generally place higher value on the first two foundations; they are very concerned about issues of harm and fairness (including issues of inequality and exploitation). Political conservatives care about harm and fairness too, but they generally score slightly lower on those scale items. The big difference between liberals and conservatives seems to be that conservatives score slightly higher on the ingroup/loyalty foundation, and much higher on the authority/respect and purity/sanctity foundations. This difference seems to explain many of the most contentious issues in the culture war. For example, liberals support legalizing gay marriage (to be fair and compassionate), whereas many conservatives are reluctant to change the nature of marriage and the family, basic building blocks of society. Conservatives are more likely to favor practices that increase order and respect (e.g., spanking, mandatory pledge of allegiance), whereas liberals often oppose these practices as being violent or coercive.

Your Score:
Average Score:
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The scale you completed was the The Disgust Scale, developed by Jonathan Haidt, Clark McCauley, and Paul Rozin.

The scale is a measure of your proclivity to feel disgust. People vary quite a bit in how strongly and how often they feel disgust, and in the kinds of things they find disgusting. Earlier research using the disgust scale showed that there are three sub-types of disgust:

1) Core disgust: the "core" of the emotion, which is about defending the mouth from contamination by dirty or inappropriate things like body excretions, certain animals like rats and cockroaches, and certain foods, like ice cream with ketchup.

2) Animal-reminder disgust: things involving death, corpses, and violations of the external boundaries of the body, such as amputations. These things remind us that we, like animals, are mortal.

3) Contamination disgust: this kind of disgust is a defense of the whole body, not just the mouth, from contact with dirty or sleazy people

The idea behind the scale is that disgust is an important and understudied moral emotion, as well as being an emotion about physically dirty and gross things. Disgust is involved in many moral codes, for example it appears to be part of the psychological foundation of widespread ideas of purity and pollution. Many religions (e.g., Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism) have extensive rules for regulating human bodily processes and keeping them separated from sacred objects and practices. Disgust appears to provide part of the structure of these rules and practices. Disgust also has clinical ramifications, for it seems to be involved in obsessive-compulsive disorder and in a variety of phobias.

Your Score:
Average Score:

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The scale you completed was the "Schwartz Value Survey," created by Shalom Schwartz at Hebrew University, Israel.

The scale measures the degree to which you value each of ten domains that Schwartz has found across many cultures. Values are defined as "desirable, trans-situational goals, varying in importance, that serve as guiding principles in people's lives."

The idea behind the scale is that there is an internal order and structure to values. Using various statistical techniques, Schwartz has found that the ten basic human values show a pattern of relationships that can be graphed as a circle (see below). Values that are next to each other are closely related; values that are across from each other tend to be opposed, or tend not to be strongly endorsed by the same person. Political liberals have been found to endorse the "openness to change" values, while conservatives are more likely to endorse the "conservation" values. We have put this scale up on Yourmorals.org because we are interested in learning how Schwartz's ten values (which include moral and non-moral values) relate to the "five foundations of morality" theory from Haidt and Graham, as measured by the "Moral Foundations Questionnaire."
The values are described by Schwartz as follows:

POWER: Social status and prestige, control or dominance over people and resources
ACHIEVEMENT: Personal success through demonstrating competence according to social standards
HEDONISM: Pleasure or sensuous gratification for oneself
STIMULATION: Excitement, novelty, and challenge in life
SELF-DIRECTION: Independent thought and action - choosing, creating, exploring
UNIVERSALISM: Understanding, appreciation, tolerance, and protection for the welfare of all people and for nature
BENEVOLENCE: Preservation and enhancement of the welfare of people with whom one is in frequent personal contact
TRADITION: Respect, commitment, and acceptance of the customs and ideas that traditional culture or religion provide
CONFORMITY: Restraint of actions, inclinations, and impulses likely to upset or harm others and violate social expectations or norms
SECURITY: Safety, harmony, and stability of society, of relationships, and of self
Your Score:
Average Score:
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The scale you completed was the Social Dominance Orientation Scale, by Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto (2001).

The scale is a measure of how you feel about hierarchy vs. equality among groups in society.

The idea behind the scale is a theory called Social Dominance Theory, by the same authors. The theory says that societies tend to be stratified by age, sex, race, and other group differences. People vary in how legitimate they think such stratification is. Males (and other groups with more power) tend to be more in favor of such differences, and to enforce them more actively. Sex hormones may also play a role: Men with high testosterone levels tend to have higher SDO scores. Political conservatives generally score higher on SDO than do liberals, but SDO and conservatism are not the same thing.

Your Score:
Average Score:
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Well, just posting those has been an exhausting and time-wasting wrestling match with blooger.com (typo intended!), so no post-match analysis will be forthcoming...for now. Still, like those (undoubtedly wildly inaccurate) online IQ tests that always seem to rate everyone as a genius, its a worthwhile little diversion if you've never done it before - who knows, you might even learn something!

Man Bytes Blog: May Roundtable P.II

So, it took a little while to get back to it, but...
Well I thought a little more about how goals can bleed backwards into the process that achieves them, in the domain of gameplay. I think that anyone who has studied the relationship between means and ends in production systems would have a lot to say here. Essentially, the path along which one approaches the goal of an activity can begin to dominate one's perspective within the activity. A metaphor which just popped into my head is the hill-climbing false horizon. Most hills have concave sides, thus when climbing to the top one's shortened line of sight results in seeing a horizon that isn't actually the peak.
As with large, >1 man, software projects (which I'm sure we've all been involved in), playing a game is a matter of achieving many short term objectives along a definite path towards a given goal. But fortunately for game players, they almost never have to plot the path themselves, nor update it in a change control process, nor adapt to reductions in their agency*. I suspect if they did, the number of game completions would drop through the floor.

The point being, management of goals isn't a prioritised skill-set of game playing, which is one reason narrative is so important to games. The natural human tendency is to deal with what's in front of us and put the rest off. Too much complexity can completely shut a person down, render them incapable of action. I think there is a hierarchy of player goals, atomic actions forming the easy-to-process bottom layer, above that situated actions/reactions, then tactical, strategic and finally narrative layers.
So I contend that the gameplay process is actually a process of transference in this hierarchy, the player's attention forming a wave moving through the medium of the possible foci for her attention - that is, the medium of goals. And the transference occurs continuously, as players complete atomic actions, that lead them through situations, each of these requiring tactics that serve a strategy. Since narratives are mostly linear and pre-designed (so far: even GTA just allows you to ignore the narrative at will), these are out of the player's control and thus form the anchor points of the wave, keeping it from becoming too chaotic and unraveling. Not that game devs could provide that much content anyway!
The goals in each layer are aggregates of those in the layer below. From this perspective, we see that players embark on an activity for which they know there is a goal, though they don't quite know what it is, and they follow a process in order to get there, although they haven't specified the process since they don't know where it's supposed to lead them. Instead, they work toward the nearest specifiable achievement, using the means given to them by the game mechanics, seeing it as a reliable method of finding new achievements to aim toward. You climb the hill in order to climb the hill. And (hopefully) finding this experience to be an optimal one (i.e. they enjoy themselves), the player memorises the pattern of cognition and/or kinesthesia involved in the activity. This reinforces the pleasure derived by the brain from experiencing it again, so long as enough variety remains to permit a level of novelty that matches the individual's taste (correlating to their capacity for processing complexity).

A game doesn't end when you produce something, it ends when there's none of it left to do. Maybe, there are no goals to games! *(I wonder what kind of game that would make - where progress is measured by power-downs, kind of like aging backwards. If you start off as the Destroyer of Worlds and progress down to Imp#5276, would you be bothered playing?)

Man Bytes Blog: May Roundtable

I think an unreconstructed ramble on the specification bleed between goals and processes in gameplay will serve as my round-table entry. So I will pick up straight from onlyagame's contention that "to make the process the goal, [is] to undermine the meaningfulness of the term goal".

Surely by divorcing the term goal from the process which achieves it is to distance it from the commonly accepted idea of the nature of game playing. Games are undertaken primarily for reasons other than production, in that achieving any end outside the game is necessarily defined as a system of activity which includes the game only as a subset. Consider the rare cases of games-within-games: in PGR, one could have an arcade machine in ones garage which ran the instant classic XBLA game Geometry Wars. The goals achieved in playing Geometry Wars had no influence on the superset of activities offered by PGR, just as the goals of playing PGR have no affect on the superset of real life.
Unless one considers the goal of playing to be the passing of time. But surely this implies the process of play is the goal.

Which leads us to the position that game play is a self-actualising goal, for a game must be played, and play is a process, and if a process is a goal - you see where this is going.

But then how can it be detrimental to enjoyable gaming to have games with too little structure and guidance? If just being there was enough, designing a game would be just a matter of providing the tools.
Hmm...this seems incomplete - perhaps a little more depth of examination is required...

Agent S, I presume?

Increasingly, I am convinced of the inevitability and necessity of personality-attuned neurologically-interfaced semi-autonomous hierarchical software agents (PANISAHSA's?). An exo-cortex. I am a surfer on the crest of a techno-informatic wave, constantly on the verge of 'wiping out', and despite my skills, training, innate intelligence and constant effort to maintain my position, I have no guarantee of remaining current, wired, up-to-date. If you fall behind, you've fallen off, there's no catching up. So what I need, what would save me from obsoletion, is a system of information retreival and processing complex and powerful enough to handle the wired and well-connected world.

Santa, I wanna exo-cortex!

Bush, Iraq and my 2 cents

KI-AI! Take that, neo-cons!
Filled out a media analysis survey for my sister, the media student. She is doing this qualitative survey for her course, and while I could comment on her scientific method, I'd rather just pontificate on the topics raised :D Here goes:

Media Analysis Survey

Q1 Which sources do you regularly locate your news from?

Random headlines from top of the gmail inbox, and friends sending online links, so mostly internet. But also headlines on papers in shops, tho I dont buy the papers for news

Q2 How and when did you first hear about George W. Bush?

A report (possibly in a paper or magazine) about how this redneck wannabe cowboy upstart was overhauling John McCain in the Republican primaries for the 2000 election, which sounded like bad news but no big deal since he could hardly go on to win the presidency, could he? Which was true.

Q3 What information was relayed to you in this first news report/article, etc.?

See above

Q3 What was your opinion of him initially?

A cowboy upstart. No, at first I really did think of him as a political anomaly and unlikely to have to worry about, as I underestimated the Bush family's power, since I was 12 when Poppa was in power.

Q4 Has that changed since then?

Yes

How and why?

I still would be surprised if there were no power behind the throne, but I do believe that when he is allowed to, he acts as he wants and is the most powerful man on earth. Thus he is a force to be reckoned with, a direct effect on my life and a very much a force for harm.

Q5 Did you feel positive or negative about George Bush's policies and actions post 9/11?

Negative

How and why?

Its empire building, pure and simple. Its destructive to take the resources of the worlds only superpower, garnered 30 years ago during the boom time of cheap energy, and squander them sending armies around the world chasing the dwindling stocks of oil instead of investing everything in ways to generate energy without destroying the world. There may be no way out of the energy trap, but at least it wouldn't be going backward.

Q6 Do you feel that the Bushisms, e.g. "I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully", affects the public's opinions of him?

Yes

How and why?

Say anything enough times and people begin to accept it as the truth, It wasn't very hard for everyone to believe that Bush was a simple man, and when they had a reason to dislike him, switching to believing he is a simpleton is a small step.

Q7 Do you feel that the Bushisms affect international public opinion more than U.S. public opinion?

Yes

How and why?

Most americans feel like Bush is similar to them, because he is fallible but in a christian way. I.e. he makes mistakes but ones that are publicly acceptable in circles where being morally 'upstanding' is important. Foreigners wouldn't ever feel similar to Bush, and so can feel scorn for him more easily.

Q8 Do you feel that George Bush's primitive speech may be used to his advantage?

Yes

How and why?

Well yes because it allows him to connect with the simple people who support his war and have little in the way of shades of grey in their beliefs.
But then again no because it makes him more devisive than if he appeared intellectual, but was still a Texan cowboy - if he was thusly, liberal classes might be able to at least trust the quality of his thinking, if not agree with anything he thinks. Now they just think he pulls everything out of his 'gut'...

Q8 What is your reaction to the term "Shock and Awe"?

reminds me of 'Blitzkrieg'

Q9 Do you think that it has played an important part in the U.S. public opinion on the war in Iraq?

Don't know

Q10 Have you seen any of the prisoner abuse photographs that have come into the public eye?

Yes

Q11 What were your feelings about them?

Resigned unsurprise

Q12 What images or thoughts come into your mind when you hear news reports about the war in Iraq?

Pictures I've seen of the exploded heads, where most of the skin remains but the insides have been squirted out...

Q13 In general, would you say that the tragedy of the war is apparent to you, or do you feel desensitised to it?

Oh, desensitised completely. I'd need direct contact stimulus to be moved by it.

Q14 Do you think that it is possible to consider the gravity of the situation each time you hear more news about the war in Iraq?

Yes. Because the gravity is global, yet the carnage is nothing special globally. So we can consider the widespread, longterm implications and how the situation will affect us. On the other hand, as the war on the ground goes on, so too it could be happening anywhere else, and is in Darfur, Lebanon, Palestine, Afghanistan, Central Africa...Thus, war is almost inevitable and meaningless on a personal level, until it affects one personally. And the farther effects of war are political, economic, social, all things which obey trends that can be predicted, if not accurately. So considering the gravity of the situation is just a matter of measuring the breadth, depth and longevity of the trends.

Playing with Fire...

Damn this is a little belated. Play 'Play with Fire'! Buy it, in fact. But at least try it. I know at least some of you out there would enjoy playing as a ball of flame, burning things up. Kris?

Why did it take me 3 months to plug this? Weird.

Pull the strings...

No one would have believed at the beginning of 2007 that human affairs (the AIIDE'07 conference) were being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than Man's. Yet, across the gulf of space on the planet Zenok Prime, intellects vast and cool and unsypathetic regarded Earth (actually just Stanford) with envious eyes, and slowly and surely, they joined their plans against us (them).

Doo DOO DOOOOOOOOOOOO!!

Yes, I shall shortly be invading! The plans have been laid, all is in readiness, all I need do now is play the waiting game.
And then, I too will know the way to San Jose. Its on the Caltrain, three stops down from Palo Alto, right?

I think I'll wear a flower in my hair...

12 Modern Delusions that must be challenged. #1

Numero Uno. The world's population problems, and the spread of Aids, can be solved without the use of condoms.

This is not only the most dangerous, but also the most criminal error of the modern world. Millions of people will suffer, and die premature and humiliating deaths, as a result of the policies pursued in this regard through the UN and related aid and public health programmes. Indeed, there is no need to ask where the first mass murderers of the 21st century are; we already know, and their addresses besides: the Lateran Palace, Vatican City, Rome, and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC. Timely arrest and indictment would save many lives.


My Reply:

See reply to last delusion! Ok, I do have something to say on both of these topics. I'm still going to beg off for the moment, and try to rewrite a paper, develop a player typological experiment, write a book chapter on in-game adaptivity and continue to incrementally improve my decision theoretic player modelling method for Pacman. Phew!

All seems kinda insignificant when you look at these delusions...

12 Modern Delusions that must be challenged. #2

No 2. The only thing 'they' understand is force.

This has been the guiding illusion of hegemonic and colonial thinking for several centuries. Oppressed peoples do not accept the imposition of solutions by force; they revolt. It is the oppressors who, in the end, have to accept the verdict of force, as European empires did in Latin America, Africa, Asia and as the United States is doing in Iraq today. The hubris of mission accomplished in May 2003 has been followed by ignominy.

My Reply:

Ok, oddly enough (given the topic) nothing quick and inspired is coming to mind for me here. So I am going to switch tactics, hope that some others have caught onto the presence of these posts, and leave the answering to others. Maybe I'll get something up in time. Right now, I'm settling into that slightly panicked mode of feeling like I haven't worked enough lately, which is my main source of short-term motivation. So...nose to the grindstone!

Sometime later...
Tansy emailed around a very interesting article on the aestheticisation of violence, which I have posted below. This was in the context of another discussion, but I thought it very appropriate here as it speaks directly to our own role in the whole topic expressed above. We permit our leaders to pursue these imperialist policies - they are not dictators, they must have a mandate from the people, however far removed their day-to-day activities may feel from our own powers and influence. I have raised the point in delusion #8, that people need the sense of emancipation of belief in the efficacy of their own free will. Free will may or may not exist in fact, but in attitude it is all important. So certainly oppressed people will revolt, inevitably they will throw off the shackles of oppression or be destroyed in the attempt (whether through annihilation or assimilation); yet the shackles are imposed time and again, as though history was a blank slate, lessons unlearned. So in addressing this delusion, let us accept these inevitabilities and look instead to ourselves, and how it all becomes possible starting at home.

Tansy*:
hey folks...

this is something i found while researching a college project but thought that it was worth emailing around. concerning bush and his Shock and Awe-some War on Terror...

T

The aestheticization of violence for political purposes

Though many tools are available for political purposes, the threat or use of violence attracts those of a more proactive disposition as the simplest way to resolve any conflict or achieve any ends, because its strategies are well-known and weapons easily obtained. When asked to identify alternative nonviolent techniques, people find it difficult to visualise effective methods; moreover, sceptics can quickly raise moral and practical dilemmas to complicate any set of choices until violence appears the easiest option.

Thus, this topic is relevant across a spectrum of causes from those disagree about social or commercial practices within their local community, to those unhappy with the political regime in their own country, to those who believe that another country is a threat.

Nevertheless, a person or group wishing to use violence as a strategy must overcome objections from both prospective supporters and the other interested parties. No cause will prosper until the majority agrees with the justifications offered for the decision to use force, because all who adopt aggressive strategies require emotional and logistical support from the local community for success.

Hence, the aestheticization process is used to direct the audience's interpretation of events by shifting the values of the lexical words used to minimise consideration of the moral, ethical or other costs. In Nineteen Eighty-Four , George Orwell proposed that the means to achieve complete control of people's minds or their ability to think rationally about the issues at stake is to invent a new language, more primitive and less articulate than current "oldspeak". That is the intention of aestheticization. It seeks to subvert the rationality of the current paradigms through doublespeak and goodthink , and to persuade the majority that the use of violence in the particular context is not merely necessary or expedient, but just and glorious in the prosecution of higher ideals.

Whether the use of violence is or is not justifiable is irrelevant for these purposes. The sole interest lies in the mechanism for the transfer of the particular use from the paradigm of unacceptable into the paradigm of acceptable. In contemporary terms, this brings semiotics into a position of prominence both to set the frame and to deconstruct it.

[ edit] An example of semiotic analysis

In January, 2003, the U.S. implemented a battle plan based on a concept developed at the National Defense University. Called " Shock and Awe " (see Americanism ), its stated purpose was the psychological destruction of the enemy's will to fight rather than the physical destruction of his military forces. The choice of name is revealing, even at a denotative level.

Shock refers to the surprise and distress caused by events and, when associated with battles, means the violent interaction of individuals or groups as they join in combat. Meanwhile, awe is an overwhelming sense of wonder or admiration that may, to a greater or lesser extent, be associated with fear. But, at a connotative level, the use of the words is intended to fulfil several distinct aims:

In reality, the army may be going to kill large numbers of people, both combatant and non-combatant. These words are not the actions but they represent them at a symbolic level. Analysis shows that the words fall within the paradigm of lexical words signifying the emotional responses to external stimuli: responses that can only be experienced by those who are alive. The intended implication is that enemy soldiers and civilians will be so disoriented by the display of power that they will simply surrender rather than face the threatened injury or death. Hence, the enemy casualty count will be low and the immediate gains will significantly outweigh the moral, ethical or other costs of the enterprise.

All warfare involves death and destruction on a scale that may be shocking to the sensibilities of the ordinary person, so what is the value of these words? Applying the commutation test, substitutes for "shock" might be: excitement, impact, and surprise, as opposed to: scare, trauma, and upset.

The substitutes for "awe" might be: admiration, reverence and wonder, as opposed to fear, horror, and terror. Both words are capable of signifying less appealing qualities but, by setting them in a conjoined relationship, the expectation is that they will both be given the same value. The sui generis rule applies so that second and subsequent words in a conjoined sequence define the class. Evaluating the substitutes for "shock", the degree of match as synonyms seems reasonably adjacent and the balance of connotation can be considered balanced.

This would give the word "shock" a relatively neutral value. Since the preponderance of connotation to "awe" is positive (the negative substitutes are less directly synonymous), the relationship in the phrase is intended to invoke values suggesting a certain degree of magnificence in the technology and the manner of its delivery. Not only those on the receiving end are expected to experience awe: all external observers may be impressed by this display of power, and, perhaps, feel not a little afraid — a useful general propaganda gain.

The connotation of the word awe tends to refer to unequal power relationships, e.g. a beginner may be in awe of the skills of a professional, an ordinary mortal is in awe of a deity, etc. The implication is that this war is such an asymmetrical contest that the enemy might just as well give up before the battle is joined with such an overwhelmingly superior force.

Figurative usages provide what the semiotician Roland Barthes called a "pleasure of the text" (1970), i.e. the pleasurable reaction produced by a clever arrangement of signs. So figurative words are more memorable than literal words, particularly when used in unexpected contexts. Using this phrase in the otherwise literal context of declaring the opening of violent hostilities is incongruous and that contextualisation has made the phrase memorable, effectively displacing all the imagery of imminent death and destruction that might otherwise have dominated.

Monosyllabic words wield considerable rhetorical might: they are short, punchy, and memorable. Through the careful mixing of short and long words, the impact provided by the short words stands out against the rhythmic flow provided by long words. Rhetorical theory maintains that any proposition can be expressed in a variety of ways.

Hence, when persuasion is the overriding goal, the rhetorical perspective suggests that the manner in which a statement is expressed may be more important than its propositional content. In this instance, the repetition of two sounds, a binary pair of semi-onomatopoeic words, produces hyperbole. Whether written or spoken with an appropriate intonation and body language, the phrase is memorable and serves its aestheticization function.