asking the player

Computers can’t pass human judgement on things.

“Our culture, obsessed with numbers, has given us the idea that what we can measure is more important than what we can’t measure. . .” (Thinking in Systems (Meadows), p175; full-er quote here)

Computers can measure. Computers are computing machines, and they’re great at measuring. This isn’t just about computers: we also have mathematics and logic. Jack: I can relate to what you said a couple years ago, that you felt “much more familiar with truths in logical, didactic forms than the kind you see in poetic forms.” It’s comforting to have a scheme, the “promise of a solution, of a right way to do things“ — some beautifully unambiguous feedback that we’re on the right track.

Years, years, years ago, I was having lots of conversations about the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic rewards, as if one was better than the other; then I convinced myself that one was not better than other; and now I’m back to present a quick framework that shows how one is clearly better than the other.

Prelude over. The real blog post begins here.

Who Is Responsible?

Oh, it’s this old theme again 🙂

Extrinsic rewards or feedback take the responsibility of judgement away from the player, but the more important part is that the responsibility is taken away from the player and placed into the hands of a machine. Machines are good at measuring some things, not so much others.

That relationship goes like this:

The player does something -> The machine judges

Intrinsic rewards or feedback are things that are ‘intrinsically’ valuable; that is, the player values them for themselves. Supposedly! But this distinction has never been good enough for me. As usual, I do prefer a clean solution, a measurable solution 😉 So, to contrast the above relationship, we have one where the roles are reversed:

The machine does something -> The player judges

This also reveals a couple of interesting variants, but rather than get into any sort of taxonomy of discrete cases, let’s just make a nice two-axis graph.

Responsibility Graph

I have the feeling that most discussions of interactivity have focused on the horizontal axis: who acts? If it is on the right, if the players act, then it is an interactive experience, thus a game of some sort. If it is on the left, then it is a non-interactive experience, thus not a game…

I don’t know if I’ve ever encountered a framework for discussing what lies on the vertical axis. Am I judging, or is the computer/machine/system judging?

The Consequences.

I opened with a short quote from Thinking in Systems. A quote from later in the same section goes like this: “Pretending that something doesn’t exist if it’s hard to quantify leads to faulty models.”

It’s interesting, because there are things that computers are good at, that they’re great at. Computers are great at refereeing “hard” systems, and as a result the bottom-right-hand portion of our graph is well-covered by those parts of videogames — where you do something, and the computer gives you feedback on whether you did a good thing or a bad thing and you use that to update your model.

Okay, it’s time to get into the most inflammatory topic ever…

Aside: Are Videogames Art?

I won’t introduce this long-standing and ridiculous debate, haha. I bring it up in a mostly tongue-in-cheek kind of way. But there’s something very interesting to me to think about how “videogames” and “art” fit in to this graph. Of course we do judge videogames ourselves, at some level. But there is a significant proportion of gameplay which involves being judged ourselves — not by people, but mainly by machines who are best at measuring a limited spectrum of what may be judged.

Okay, back to the real topic.

The Consequences. (No, Really.)

I opened with a short quote from Thinking in Systems. A quote from later in the same section goes like this: “Pretending that something doesn’t exist if it’s hard to quantify leads to faulty models.”

Even later: “No one can define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can define or measure any value.“

The consequences: The part of the medium of videogames that relies on a computer to referee — and actually, the part of our world that relies on rigid systems to referee our actions — are incapable of responding appropriately to any value that cannot be measured.

I always say this, but I think that’s the form of something that’s been bothering me about games for a long time, and I suppose the shape of what haiku games feel like they promise an escape from. If only we can realize them.

Tools, the future.

For me, this represents a heartening tool; the first step to solving a problem is identifying it, right? Getting my hands on it.

I’d like to make more games that ask players, explicitly, to judge things. More gameplay that asks you, hey, what did you think of that, what did it make you feel?

What category does this belong to?

Which option is better?

And, especially and specifically, asking these questions in a way that does not feed back into the judgement of the machine. Games that let you make a ‘build’ of capabilities don’t count if your judgement is then judged to be correct or incorrect in some concrete way by the game-system.

(E.g. Magic: the Gathering allows me to make judgements about what card is better and what card is worse, but then my judgement may be proven true or false by actually seeing how the card functions during play. Screw that!)

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P.S.

Thank you for reading my letter, as always <3 I wrote it all the way through in one go and basically did not edit it. I’d like to improve on that, but damn, blogging software makes it so easy to write something and just publish it straight away. What would it even be like to ask someone else to really judge my words? To improve my writing, to edit? Scary as hell.

Sounds fun.