As I begin work on Fear of Software's new project, which I will talk more about later; I find myself having to stay disciplined in order to get even the most creative and "inspiration" oriented tasks done to adequacy. An excerpt by Chris Crawford comes to mind:

"In late 1981, Dr. Alan Kay recruited me into Atari Research and challenged me to dream. Most people take a lazy approach to dreaming. They put their feet up on the desk and engage in idle mental forays for half an hour, and they call it dreaming. To me, dreaming is a much more deliberate and difficult process. Dreaming is hard work!"

The Confirmation Bias

Everyone knows what the confirmation bias is. Here's an especially good article on it:

The Reason We Reason -- Jonah Lehrer

He goes on to say many things that are well known; that we look for corroborating evidence, that we're not good at hearing or processing facts that are against what we think. He cites a scientist, however, that takes this a step further and puts the whole thing together; that we don't reason in order to objectively understand the world but in order to persuade others.

Now, I'd say that it's also to persuade ourselves, but I'll get back to that in a moment. What struck me is that knowledge is mostly ornamental; our abstract reasoning is subservient to our social reasoning. As Lehrer puts it so masterfully:

"Instead, the function of reasoning is rooted in communication, in the act of trying to persuade other people that what we believe is true. We are social animals all the way down."

This seems to me to be very deeply connected with the notion of cognitive dissonance and identity. For those who haven't read my previous posts, I was suggesting that we rationalize what we do and look for evidence in order to do so because it's what regulates our identity; that acting in a totally "rational" would bring about symptoms resembling schizophrenia* Think about a computer generated actor that always makes the "optimal" choice; it would confuse the hell out of us as it would change behaviors without any warning or visible precedent. The body must fight off what is foreign and so must the mind.

This is why I say that we also look for corroborating evidence to persuade ourselves. Really, though, I didn't just bring this up to one-up Mr. Lehrer; I wanted to say that persuading others and persuading ourselves are one in the same. If we find corroborating evidence in order to construct a story for others and do the same for ourselves, then it seems fair to say that narratives are the primary way in which we perceive the world. Our instinct, when we debate with others, is to try to tell a great story; no different than when we seduce or entertain and also no different than when we make sense of our own situation by constructing an identity.

The story we tell ourselves and the stories we tell others are two sides of the same coin.

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*If anyone reading this deals with people who have serious problems such as Schizophrenia, I apologize in advance for anything presumptuous I may be saying. This blog is a loose network of working hypotheses, many of which will turn out to be extremely silly.

The Triad

1) When I was in high school I was already thinking about semiotics, albeit without any knowledge of that word. One day in high school, my biology class took a trip to this art activity held by a resident artist who had us all draw "three things that we were made of." A lot of people drew funny and goofy things, I think I took it too seriously. My three things were zeroes, ones and eyes. Zeroes and ones because those are the only two ingredients you need to create information. Why eyes? What is information without something to observe it?

This is still a haunting question in semantic and semiotic theory. That said, two might be the number of symbols (difference), but three is the number of signs. Another reason that I think three is the key number is because signs are not about one-to-one relationships between terms (that's a symbol!) Signs are about multiplicity and ambiguity; a sign has connotations and ambiguities, it can be used not only to name but to give hints and even lies. You need at least three nodes in a graph (in layman's terms, network) to create something more than a simple one-to-one mapping.

2) Speaking of signs and triads, here's a quote that I found from The Name of the Rose that seems to implicitly talk about the triad of signifying/inferring/lying that I talked about earlier:

"It is of use to me as Venantius's prints in the snow were of use after he was dragged to the pigs' tub. The unicorn of the books is like a print. If the print exists, there must have existed something whose print it is. ...The idea is sign of things and the image is sign of the idea, sign of a sign. But from the image I reconstruct, if not hte body, the idea that others had of it." -William of Baskerville

Minimal Interfaces/Information

I just installed Starcraft II on my new laptop because it's great to actually have a seriously powerful computer these days, but it made me think about a mix-up I had with one particular unit (Thor, for those interested.) I thought it was weak against aerial opponents because the numbers were particularly low and there was also a not very high number for rate of fire. Turns out that it's very powerful at taking out groups of aerial opponents because its salvos are more powerful than the individual missiles.

A small oversight that was corrected with experience, but this seems to be a problem in a lot of RTS games. The numbers are misleading and make it easy to misunderstand which units are good against others. Starcraft II added a lot more information than the original Starcraft (thank God, when I was a kid I really misunderstood counters because I only looked at the system), but ultimately we're not suited to read these numbers very well when there are so many of them.

Command & Conquer was much different in that it only showed vague approximations and the player figured out the strength and weaknesses of units via general descriptions and experience. For one thing, I always felt that made the game feel a bit more real; but my real point is that all that information misleads us and retards the process of learning how it actually works through experience.

I think that strategy games, in general, should do away with most of the explicit numerical information; it's more misleading than informative.

On Stories and Trying to Figure Them Out

From the end of my senior capstone paper in English on interactive storytelling (and once again, no idea why the font gets periodically messed up):

The hodgepodge of theories, concepts and examples with which I’ve explained the problems of interactive storytelling has not been one that lends itself to being quickly wrapped up in a concluding page, let alone five. It would perhaps be a more fitting note to end on a story; to further interconnect the many concepts explained, and if we’re lucky, see a new idea emerge. After all, if there is one thing us academics can agree on, it’s that he who of those delights can judge, and spare to interpose them oft, is not unwise.

Only a year ago, I had been recently accepted into the Honors program in computer science to begin a project whose name was simply “Interactive Storytelling.” My proposal, although over ten pages, contained little of what was needed to understand anything of the problem at hand; my understanding of narrative was confined to narrow formalist ideas of plot and a handful of scattered critical concepts.

By chance, I ended up in a class on literary theory after not making it into a different English class. Combined with the various books with which I supplemented my project, I found myself understanding narrative in ways that finally bore fruit. Combining my knowledge of mathematics and literary theory, I began to see stories themselves in a different way, abstracting them to structures juxtaposed in varying dimensions.

Nonetheless, as every structuralist knows, rules are meant to be broken and as I found myself writing this paper, a tension between the easily imagined existence of signs within systems and the inability to clearly explain their relationships to one another within some space kept me spending an entire day wondering what I was really saying, how I could find that balance between saying what needed to be said and leaving the rest open. I saw then what Stanley Fish talked about in another part of Interpreting the Variorum, a moment of tension in the process of reading.

That tension has seemed to exemplify the work I have done on interactive storytelling in the past year more than anything else; a constant tension between the axiomatic and the narrative. Mathematics is closed; there is always a clear path to understanding it. But only narratives endow us with any kind of meaning; even the great Paul Erdös would always say after proving an exceptional mathematical theorem “it’s in the book!” I’ve been standing on the edge throughout the entire year; interpreting stories with technology, looking over as I make another carefully thought out conjecture.

Yet there has been a remarkable sense of fulfillment from it all. With each day, my own project and my own writing on the subject become increasingly robust and meaningful, even as I come to terms with this lack of understanding. Every day I am capturing narratives more, not less, even as they appear more elusive with each day. Perhaps more than anything I’m gaining satisfaction from this very lack of reconciliation. After all, this tension is the mark upon us which narrative leaves; narrative exists in the friction that comes from not quite understanding, from the vulnerability of any structure we create, no matter how simple. And if such tension is what defines a narrative, then this project, this critical technical practice, is one as well.

Lies and the Lying Semioticians That Tell Them

I want you all to meditate what I'm currently meditating on:

A sign has three functions:

Signifying: ("dog" means a dog; and please, don't think too hard about that*)

Inference: (smoke is a sign that there is a fire happening nearby)

Lying

These are all related.

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*The ambiguity of semantics is reflected in this entire entry

Note: It's always a good idea to take the precaution of saying "biological" instead of "natural" in order to throw smartasses off your trail.