“games”
15 posts under this tag.
There are more concepts than words. Hence the phrase.
Jorge Wagensberg
this slow starting quote. The 1st paragraph seemed just vague philosopher fluff (philo-fluff-y?) but then at the 2nd a fascinating example is hinted, by the 3rd I was swooning. How Borgesian, fantastic and ultimately impossible a language Trobriander is!
The Trobrianders are concerned with being, and being alone. Change and becoming are foreign to their thinking. An object or event is grasped and evaluated in terms of itself alone; that is, irrespective of other beings. The Trobriander can describe being for the benefit of the ethnographer; otherwise he usually refers to it by a word, one word only. All being, to be significant, must be Trobriand being, and therefore experienced at the appropriate time as a matter of course by the members of each Trobriand community; to describe it would be redundant. Being is never defined, in our sense of the word. Definition presents an object in terms of what it is like and what it is unlike; that is, in term of its distinguishing characteristics. The Trobriander is interested only in what it is. And each event or being is grasped timelessly; in our terms it contains past, present, and future, but these distinctions are non-existent for the Trobriander. There is, however, one sense in which being is not self-contained. To be, it must be part of an ordained pattern; this aspect will be elaborated below.
Being is discrete and self-contained; it has no attributes outside of itself. Its qualities are identical with it, and without them it is not itself. It has no predicate; it is itself. To say a word representing an object or act is to imply the existence of this, and all the qualities it incorporates. If I were to go with a Trobriander to a garden where the taytu, a species of yam, had just been harvested, I would come back and tell you: “There are good taytu there; just the right degree of ripeness, large and perfectly shaped; not a blight to be seen, not one rotten spot; nicely rounded at the tips, with no spiky points; all first-run harvesting, no second gleanings.” The Trobriander would come back and say “Taytu”; and he would have said all that I did and more. Even the phrase “There are taytu” would represent a tautology, since existence is implied in being; is, in fact, an ingredient of being to the Trobriander. And all the attributes, even if he could find words for them at hand in his own language, would have been tautological, since the concept of taytu contains them all. In fact, if one of these were absent, the object would not have been a taytu.
Such a tuber, if it is not at the proper harvesting ripeness is not a taytu. If it is unripe, it is a bwanawa; if overripe, spent, it is not a spent taytu but something else, a yowana. If it is blighted it is a nukunokuna. If it has a rotten patch, it is a taboula; if misshapen, it is a usasu; if perfect in shape but small, it is a yagogu. If the tuber, whatever its shape or condition, is a postharvest gleaning, it is an ulumadala. When the spent tuber, the yowana, sends its shoots underground, as we would put it, it is not a yowana with shoots, but a silisata. When new tubers have formed on these shoots, it is not a silisata but a gadena. An object cannot change an attribute and retain its identity. Some range of growth or modification within being is probably allowed, otherwise speech would be impossible; but I doubt whether they are conscious of it. As soon as such change, if we may introduce one of our concepts here, is officially recognized, the object ceases to be itself.
Game: 2 players take turns to say a number between 1 and 9. Numbers may not be repeated. The goal is to be the first to say 3 numbers which add up to 15.
Sounds like fun? Try it with a friend!
Fun it ain’t.
It’s hard to remember the said numbers and “playing” is a chore involving many additions in your head. Maybe it’s fun for the better short-term memory endowed or those who enjoy arithmetic but that ain’t me.
Turns out that game above is none other than the beloved tic-tac-toe. You see:
This is what I love about information design (and what I tried to do in my calendars) this is its art, its magic: it can turn a chore into a game! It recasts our weaknesses —linear, verbal processing— into a form suitable for our talents —gestalt visual processing.
In math words: it finds useful language-graph same-shapes (isomorphisms)!
Grouped under the ARG, Alternate Reality Gaming, label for lack of a better term. I think all 3 exemplify something new, unsettling, and fascinating that I don’t yet have a word for.
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Little BrotherELZR, now available as atoms and bits, has a glorious climax of hundreds of vampires invading San Francisco’s civic center, messing with general paranoia.
> RULES FOR VAMPMOB
> You are part of a clan of daylight vampires. You’ve discovered the secret of surviving the terrible light of the sun. The secret was cannibalism: the blood of another vampire can give you the strength to walk among the living.
> You need to bite as many other vampires as you can in order to stay in the game. If one minute goes by without a bite, you’re out. Once you’re out, turn your shirt around backwards and go referee—watch two or three vamps to see if they’re getting their bites in.
> To bite another vamp, you have to say “Bite!” five times before they do. So you run up to a vamp, make eye-contact, and shout “bite bite bite bite bite!” and if you get it out before she does, you live and she crumbles to dust.
> You and the other vamps you meet at your rendezvous are a team. They are your clan. You derive no nourishment from their blood.
> You can “go invisible” by standing still and folding your arms over your chest. You can’t bite invisible vamps, and they can’t bite you.
> This game is played on the honor system. The point is to have fun and get your vamp on, not to win.
> There is an end-game that will be passed by word of mouth as winners begin to emerge. The game-masters will start a whisper campaign among the players when the time comes. Spread the whisper as quickly as you can and watch for the sign.
> M1k3y
> bite bite bite bite bite!
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Freezing Grand Central, a most elegant improv piece (via Alan).
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That great Free Hugs campaign a while ago:
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Got more samples along these lines? I wanted to quote something from SFZero but I’m still too new to it…
“The Humean predicament is the human predicament”
What are you absolutely certain of? Of what are you sure without any conceivable doubt? What is true no matter what? What is necessarily true? Just one thing. Whatever. As long as you’re sure.
I’ve been playing the game for a while and I’ve been shocked to be unable to answer the question. Now, of course I’m familiar with Hume’s skepticism (you don’t really know an apple is going to fall, you’ve just seen all similar objects fall before at similar conditions but you don’t know) and I thought I knew how dear truth was but lately, slowly, I’ve started to realize that not even reason or logic are to be trusted.
Let’s start by quickly demolishing every statement about experience, like, say, that you are, well, you, that you broke your knee when you were fifteen, that your mother exists, that other people exist (solipsism). The usual shortcut is just to ask you how do you know it isn’t all a dream, but I prefer Russell’s more imaginative version, the extreme omphalos hypothesis: how do you know that the world wasn’t created five seconds ago, set in motion, and with fake memories? Clever, huh?
OK, that sweeps off a good big swath of possible answers. As for reason/logic, its problem is that it’s either redundant or not binding at all. But don’t 2 + 2 = 4 whatever fucking nightmare the world might turn out to be? How could time or space not exist? My gosh, can you look me in the eye, and tell me that numbers aren’t infinite? How demented do you need to be to doubt Aristotle’s syllogisms, the very rules of thought (if it’s true that humans are mortal and that Socrates is human, Socrates has to be mortal!)?
But it turns out these conceptual statements aren’t certainties either. When you probe them further, carefully, rigorously, you realize that to advance you have to start defining. If you do it conscientiously, defining or making explicit even the dumbest, most-taken-for-granted assumptions you start to realize that 2 + 2 = 4 because you said so, because you assumed your conclusion from the get-go, and your statements are true in the same empty way that a bachelor can’t be married or a car has to be an automobile too. Yes, it’s a kind of truth, but a rather measly one.
The other thing that usually happens when you probe concepts is one of the most wondrous experiences I know of, exhilarating and unnerving at the same time, dizzying. I call it sense of could. It means taking an entrenched concept and realizing it is not necessarily so, discovering your singularity is just an instance of something subtler, deeper, finding out your rose is one among thousands, seeing that what you thought fixed is just another degree of motion.
Like when Cantor found out there are many kinds of infinities, some bigger than others (!). Like when you realize logic isn’t the complete science Kant thought and open the gates to the non-classical logics. Like when you probe the very fabric of the universe by looking for primitives to space and time. More worldly, like when you question your ethics, your religion, your politics, and you find only possibility where you were looking for necessity.
Now, those two options, redundancy and non-necessity, are the ones I’ve always stumbled upon but I don’t really know that happens for every concept. Or neither do I know if you can dismiss all experience in one fell stroke. That is, I’m, of course, not even sure that you can’t be sure of anything. Would you care volunteering an answer? %(p)Or a question?)%
Who would’ve guessed it? While chess playing programs grabbed all the headlines, the real world changing app was solving crossword puzzles.
(Google stock recently passed $600 for the first time btw.
It begun at $85 a share, in August 2004.)
Statetris, a geographical tetris where states are the blocks. Besides Europe there are versions of Africa and several countries. Even more than its originality or its addictability (no surprise here, this is tetris after all), the most intriguing thing about it is how educational it is. One day with this in elementary school and kids would never get Malta’s position out of their heads. I know I can’t.
Food. Hands down.
Though, strangely, if it’s between hunger and lust, then lust. Hands down.
You? Food or Sex? Hunger or Lust?
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.
—Richard Feynman, Cargo Cult Science
Watched Al Gore’s An Inconvenient TruthWP a couple of days ago. Besides being astonished by the quality of the presentation that is the core of the documentary, he did manage to intrigue me, if not convince me, about global warming—I’m definitely reading Skeptical EnvironmentalistAM, E soon.
At any rate, what surprised me most was Gore’s evident hubris and mocking towards skeptics. I thought of a question for him then,
what reasons are there to disbelief your believes and your conclusions?
And it hit me that it was too good a question not to ask ourselves.
That’s the game I’m proposing today. It’s like when they asked you in high school to take the other side of a debate only this time it’s not about arguments, it’s about reasons—the difference here being that a reason is a fact you yourself are forced to accept while an argument is a verbal tool you use to to try to convince others. This is not about others, posing or fighting, this is about you and truth.
You know there have to be reasons for both sides, don’t you? Anything of more than trivial complexity is inherently ambiguous. If you can’t find them it’s probably because your knowledge of the subject is, well, trivial and superficial.
So take one of your most entrenched beliefs—say, in my case, that government is evil or that there is no god—and find a reason—a reason you can do nothing but accept—for disbelieving it. It is not about you abandoning that belief, it’s about letting doubt back inside your cramped head.
Personally, I’m losing so far. It’s incredibly easy to come up with plausible, convincing arguments that would be good weapons and yet you personally know are ultimately flawed and phony. But to come with true reasons—well, it’s much, much harder than I thought…
We will come to think of interface design as a kind of art form —perhaps the art form of the next century.
Steven Johnson, Interace Culture, p213
“Hello, how are you?” being written in Dasher. (Hit escape to halt animation.)
A text-entry interface for the tetraplegic, it’s like nothing you’ve seen. Not only does using it have the same rush and exhilaration of playing SonicWP, it is also unbelievably efficient. And again, sheer fun.
It will take you some 5 minutes to get the hang of it (not out of difficulty, out of profound weirdness) but believe you me, you won’t regret it. Read the quick, 3-page explanation and try the Java version in-browser or download it. It’s free software and there are localized versions in many languages.
If such deep novelty, such striking unrealityELZR lies in something as mundane as text-entry, what wonders lie yon in the craft of interface design?
Scratch
Visual programming has been a perennial pipe dream of mine and just some three months ago the MIT Media Lab unveiled the best embodiment so far of my vague and unspecified dreams. It’s called Scratch and it’s meant to introduce children to computing by giving them easy, programmatic means to media manipulation.
The brilliant breakthrough has been to Lego-fy programming, making control blocks actually, well, blocks, and turning programming into block stacking. Yes, it’s messy and you have to fumble around for blocks but it’s visual, incredibly intuitive, and—get this—syntax error free (since blocks have shapes and will only fit in ways that make syntactic sense).
It was scary, you know, when I first knew about Scratch, just some days after it was launched, my evangelizing streak came back with a vengeance and I felt this strange calling to go and teach it somewhere, wherever. Here was finally an easy way to show “normal” people what programming was. Here it is.
I have always envied Alexander the Great, because he had Aristotle as a personal tutor. In those days, Aristotle knew pretty much everything there was to know. Even better, Aristotle understood the mind of Alexander. He understood which topics interested Alexander, what Alexander knew and did not know, and what kinds of explanations Alexander preferred. Aristotle had been a student of Plato, and he was himself a great teacher. We know from his writings that he was full of examples, explanations, arguments, and stories. Through Aristotle, Alexander had the knowledge of the world at his command.
With that, Danny HillisW, E introduces his idea for Aristotle, an AI tutor that will move in a smarter web he calls the knowledge web. I find his dream somewhat unconvincing, somewhat pedantically unrealistic and somewhat suspicious of oversimplification. (Even though he considers it but a steppingstone towards Neal Stephenson’s Young Lady’s Illustrated PrimerWP, ELZR, which I love.) It is from the eminent responses to his essay where there’s gold.
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