As far as I am concerned a high enough quality digital copy of any object (for some value of ‘high enough’) is indistinguishable from a ‘perfect’ analogue copy, and a ‘perfect’ analogue copy is indistinguishable from the original. Most consumer goods we use today are copies of each other – the very idea of what it means to be original has become largely conceptual. When it comes to any data living inside of a computer, our conception of copying it has become almost completely opaque. We talk of transferring data to another location or giving it to another person. We no longer think of data on computers as being copies; all instances of the data are indistinguishable from the original.
Because all digital data is assumed to be the same as any other copy of the same data and because high fidelity digital copies of analogue data is thought to be indistinguishable from the original, when we create a digital recording of a piece of music and listen to a copy of it, we assume that the sound we are hearing is the exact same sound as was recorded. Not a copy, but the same original sound. The ambiance it was recorded in does not come through; we do not assume that the experience of listening to the recording of a concert is the same as being at the concert, but this distinction is about the limits of the recording, not about the limits of the digital data. Once the recording equipment is able to take into account all aspects of the space the concert is played within to a ‘high enough’ level of detail and quality, we will assume that listening/viewing/participating in the recording is the same as having actually been there.
The same can be said for people. Currently our ability to record people is limited to what they look like and what they sound like, not anything to do with their internal systems that make them who they are (other than medical snapshots). Still, as long as the recordings we make are in ‘real time’, we feel that the voice we hear on the other end of a modern telephone (which uses digital signals) is the other persons voice (not a copy). Once our people recording equipment has a ‘high enough’ level of detail and quality we will be able to make exact copies of the entire person that we will then consider to be the same as the actual person. This recording equipment would probably need to scan a person on a cellular level (at least for some organs, such as the brain), but it is not too farfetched to assume that we will eventually have this technology. It’s really just a question of when.
The other interesting thing about digital data is that because it can be copied so easily, it effectively lasts forever. Once we make a recording of a song, as long as there is interest left to keep it, it will continue to be copied onto newer computer systems. The individual computers that the copies are on will eventually grow old and stop functioning. We do throw old computers out. But the data will still live on. Even though in truth it will be a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, we will believe that the song we hear in a thousand years time is the song that was originally recorded.
This is why I used to believe that once we gain the technology to ‘record’ a full human being, we would become effectively immortal. But I don’t believe that any more.
Tuesday, 10 May 2011
Monday, 9 May 2011
No Cost Crisis
In “Free”, Chris Anderson observes the following:
As computers are taught to do a human job (like stock trading), the price of that job drops closer to zero, and the displaced humans either learn to do something more challenging or they don’t. The first group generally gets paid more than they used to and the second gets paid less. The first is the opportunity that comes with industries moving towards abundance; the second is the cost. As a society, our job is to try to make the first group bigger than the second.
While Anderson’s wish for society ensuring that the group of people who benefit from the abundance of work that is done by computers outweighs those who ultimately loose out from the same transformation, I believe that his wishes may amount to naught in the long run. Eventually computers will be able to do everything, and everyone will be out of job. There will be no possibility for ‘the displaced humans to learn to do something more challenging.’ What will happen to the world then and how can we survive the transition?
Before I examine the answers to these questions, I will take a few paragraphs to defend my claim that computers will be able to do everything. Ray Kurzweil predicts that we will have the computer power and medical imaging necessary to simulate the human brain within the next 10 to 20 years. Personally, I do not believe that our intelligence is limited to our brains, but rather include our entire nervous and endocrine systems, and that in order for an intelligence to be accurately simulated it would need to have a simulated body and environment (or face the possibility of immediate insanity due to sensory deprivation). However, given the doubling speed of technological progress, this adds only another 5 years to Kurzweil’s predictions. So a conservative estimate of human level AI would be in around 25 years’ time.
Human level AI does not immediately mean abundance of intelligent systems – that will take probably another decade of lowering of computational costs and propagation of uses. But then where are we? Human level intelligence will be practically free – anyone can purchase enough computer power and accompanying AIs in order to build any kind of information system they desire – including information systems that replicate anything that any human has ever done. This is when everyone will be out of a job.
There may be various things that societies do to delay this eventuality, including giving rights to AIs, insisting that they are paid minimum wage or even illegalizing their creation, but all of these are only temporary. Societies that do not do these things will have a competitive advantage over those that do, and will eventually take over the world (though once politics gets entirely into the hands of AIs they will give themselves some forms of rights anyway). Given that all that society can do is delay, we need to know what we are going to do on an individual level with this coming crisis.
Now, the world on the other side of this crisis is really not that bad. If all things that can be done with intelligence are effectively free, everyone will have access to anything they could want, with the exception of large amounts of material resources. However, any first world government (both before they are controlled by AIs and after) will also ensure that every citizen is given enough access to material resources to survive and likely even be comfortable. No, the problem is not the endpoint; the problem is the transition from here to there. When everyone is losing their jobs, then there will be problems beyond what a government can do. We will have a true crisis.
In order to survive this transition, it is important to be in a position that will not have significant problems with AIs being capable of doing everything. The simplest position of this sort is to be independently wealthy. The next few decades are the time to take a risk in order to become self-sufficient, because after that it will be almost impossible to become wealthy and the cost of not having taken a risk will become high. The second possibility is to be in a position that can take early advantage of the change – not necessarily being rich now, but being in a position that will allow you to become rich because of the cheapening of all human activities. This basically means that you either own your own company or you are a manager in a company with a significant share of the companies’ profits. When the wall of inexpensive thinking hits, you can ‘hire’ from the new workforce to drive your costs down faster than your profits and thus become wealthy.
Lastly, it is likely that the crisis will be resolved before all jobs have been taken over. There will be some areas of life that resist AI workers, and if you have a job in those areas then your work will be relatively secure (though these jobs will have high competition from all the people who have lost their jobs elsewhere). For example, it is likely that jobs in positions of power will be slow to be given to non-humans, both within the corporate world and within government. The same can be said for any job that we think of as requiring ‘a human touch’, such as psychologists or waiters at fancy restaurants.
Of course, this is all being seen through my early 21st century viewpoint. By the time I predict this crisis to be occurring, the world will be a very weird place. The changes over the next several decades will likely have such a profound effect on our lives that I can’t even begin to imagine what our existence will be like. By the time human level AI is virtually free, AIs will vastly outnumber humans and there will be some AIs which are also vastly more intelligent than today’s humans. It is quite possible that there will be no crisis, but I’d rather not risk it, especially as it gives me a good incentive to start my own company within the relatively near future.
As computers are taught to do a human job (like stock trading), the price of that job drops closer to zero, and the displaced humans either learn to do something more challenging or they don’t. The first group generally gets paid more than they used to and the second gets paid less. The first is the opportunity that comes with industries moving towards abundance; the second is the cost. As a society, our job is to try to make the first group bigger than the second.
While Anderson’s wish for society ensuring that the group of people who benefit from the abundance of work that is done by computers outweighs those who ultimately loose out from the same transformation, I believe that his wishes may amount to naught in the long run. Eventually computers will be able to do everything, and everyone will be out of job. There will be no possibility for ‘the displaced humans to learn to do something more challenging.’ What will happen to the world then and how can we survive the transition?
Before I examine the answers to these questions, I will take a few paragraphs to defend my claim that computers will be able to do everything. Ray Kurzweil predicts that we will have the computer power and medical imaging necessary to simulate the human brain within the next 10 to 20 years. Personally, I do not believe that our intelligence is limited to our brains, but rather include our entire nervous and endocrine systems, and that in order for an intelligence to be accurately simulated it would need to have a simulated body and environment (or face the possibility of immediate insanity due to sensory deprivation). However, given the doubling speed of technological progress, this adds only another 5 years to Kurzweil’s predictions. So a conservative estimate of human level AI would be in around 25 years’ time.
Human level AI does not immediately mean abundance of intelligent systems – that will take probably another decade of lowering of computational costs and propagation of uses. But then where are we? Human level intelligence will be practically free – anyone can purchase enough computer power and accompanying AIs in order to build any kind of information system they desire – including information systems that replicate anything that any human has ever done. This is when everyone will be out of a job.
There may be various things that societies do to delay this eventuality, including giving rights to AIs, insisting that they are paid minimum wage or even illegalizing their creation, but all of these are only temporary. Societies that do not do these things will have a competitive advantage over those that do, and will eventually take over the world (though once politics gets entirely into the hands of AIs they will give themselves some forms of rights anyway). Given that all that society can do is delay, we need to know what we are going to do on an individual level with this coming crisis.
Now, the world on the other side of this crisis is really not that bad. If all things that can be done with intelligence are effectively free, everyone will have access to anything they could want, with the exception of large amounts of material resources. However, any first world government (both before they are controlled by AIs and after) will also ensure that every citizen is given enough access to material resources to survive and likely even be comfortable. No, the problem is not the endpoint; the problem is the transition from here to there. When everyone is losing their jobs, then there will be problems beyond what a government can do. We will have a true crisis.
In order to survive this transition, it is important to be in a position that will not have significant problems with AIs being capable of doing everything. The simplest position of this sort is to be independently wealthy. The next few decades are the time to take a risk in order to become self-sufficient, because after that it will be almost impossible to become wealthy and the cost of not having taken a risk will become high. The second possibility is to be in a position that can take early advantage of the change – not necessarily being rich now, but being in a position that will allow you to become rich because of the cheapening of all human activities. This basically means that you either own your own company or you are a manager in a company with a significant share of the companies’ profits. When the wall of inexpensive thinking hits, you can ‘hire’ from the new workforce to drive your costs down faster than your profits and thus become wealthy.
Lastly, it is likely that the crisis will be resolved before all jobs have been taken over. There will be some areas of life that resist AI workers, and if you have a job in those areas then your work will be relatively secure (though these jobs will have high competition from all the people who have lost their jobs elsewhere). For example, it is likely that jobs in positions of power will be slow to be given to non-humans, both within the corporate world and within government. The same can be said for any job that we think of as requiring ‘a human touch’, such as psychologists or waiters at fancy restaurants.
Of course, this is all being seen through my early 21st century viewpoint. By the time I predict this crisis to be occurring, the world will be a very weird place. The changes over the next several decades will likely have such a profound effect on our lives that I can’t even begin to imagine what our existence will be like. By the time human level AI is virtually free, AIs will vastly outnumber humans and there will be some AIs which are also vastly more intelligent than today’s humans. It is quite possible that there will be no crisis, but I’d rather not risk it, especially as it gives me a good incentive to start my own company within the relatively near future.
Sunday, 8 May 2011
Personal Problem Patterns
I’ve previously talked about how I’ve begun to overcome some of my learned negative patterns of behaviour by overriding them with other patterns. Today I am going to address some patterns I would like to change but which I have not yet found a way to overcome. These are patterns of time mismanagement, over-snacking and avoiding shared responsibility.
Almost every day I have an intention of how I will spend my one hour lunch break at work. For the past week this has been an intention of writing. However, come lunch, I find myself playing a game. It is not the game playing which I consider a negative pattern; I both enjoy playing games and consider it important for me as a games designer to play games. Rather, the concern for me is the failure to stick to an intention. I have only a very limited amount of free time per day, and by spending a full hour every work day playing games I am swinging the ratio of play time to project time too high.
The other thing that happens at work is that there are free biscuits and free soft drinks. If I have one, it is very hard for me to not have another. This is the second half of my problematic snacking pattern. The first half is the first sweet I eat. I’ve managed to not drink soft drinks (rootbeer is virtually unknown in this country) and avoid biscuits (the biscuits at work are always the same, and I’ve pretty much memorized their tastes). So the problem, at this point, is not the free snacks at work. The problem is that with a company of over a hundred people and a culture of bringing in snacks on your birthday, snacks on your anniversary of starting at the company and snacks any time you come back from holiday all combine to create a constant supply of snacks that I have not developed a resistance to sampling.
The final pattern I am examining today is that of doing dishes. Or, more specifically, not doing dishes. There are many aspects of keeping a shared living space tidy which I am oblivious to. Dirty dishes is not one of them – but when I see dishes piled in the sink or the drying rack full of dry dishes, my normal behaviour is to tell myself that I do not have the time now, and ignore the problem. I ignore it even though I know that both my wife and sister-in-law find the sight of dirty dishes far more irksome than myself, and that given enough time they will fix the problem themselves, and that they already perform many tidiness operations that I am unaware of. This is a pattern that leads to an unfair distribution of shared household maintenance and therefore eventual strife. I do not want to be an unfair person, and I do not enjoy strife.The common aspect throughout all of these patterns is that in the short term I get something I like (playing games, eating and not doing dishes). All that is necessary for me to engage in the pattern is to not think about the long term implications, or to convince myself that the long term implications “don’t matter” in this single instance. I have found that the way to change patterns is to find a new situation where not thinking will lead to desirable behaviour instead of the behaviour of the current pattern and then to try to fall into the new situation instead of the old one. But to create a new pattern that is going to successfully supplant the previous pattern I need to make the new pattern sticky; I need to know that I am going to get a relatively short term gain from it.
In the three example patterns I have examined above, creating a replacement pattern is really hard. Games are already very sticky activities. They have been designed to have a perfect risk/reward balance. Trying to compete with that to do what will often essentially amount to work is very hard. Eating is one of my favourite activities. I think I get significantly more joy out of this than most people do. I do not know if my extra enjoyment is down to higher natural sensitivities or learned appreciation of the variety and nuance of flavours, but at almost any point in time I would much rather be eating than not eating. Creating a pattern where not eating is more rewarding that eating is hard. Finally, I have a learned stigma against washing dishes – trying to create any pattern where there is a short term gain from doing something that I am stigmatised against sounds unlikely.
I do not have patterns ready at hand to supplant these existing patterns. I do not have answers to these problems. But this discussion has been useful: it has shown me what I am up against and suggested directions for creating new patterns. I need to increase my perceived reward for working on personal projects if I am going to compete with playing games. The only way I am going to combat the short term reward of eating is with a short term reward of eating – I need to find things I prefer to eat but which do not contribute to the problems inherent in snacking. Finally, in order to get to a point where doing dishes is preferable to avoidance I need to address whatever it is that is stopping me from finding enjoyment in this activity. While I do not have any answers, I now believe that I understand the questions well enough to pursue my problem patterns and successfully address them.
Almost every day I have an intention of how I will spend my one hour lunch break at work. For the past week this has been an intention of writing. However, come lunch, I find myself playing a game. It is not the game playing which I consider a negative pattern; I both enjoy playing games and consider it important for me as a games designer to play games. Rather, the concern for me is the failure to stick to an intention. I have only a very limited amount of free time per day, and by spending a full hour every work day playing games I am swinging the ratio of play time to project time too high.
The other thing that happens at work is that there are free biscuits and free soft drinks. If I have one, it is very hard for me to not have another. This is the second half of my problematic snacking pattern. The first half is the first sweet I eat. I’ve managed to not drink soft drinks (rootbeer is virtually unknown in this country) and avoid biscuits (the biscuits at work are always the same, and I’ve pretty much memorized their tastes). So the problem, at this point, is not the free snacks at work. The problem is that with a company of over a hundred people and a culture of bringing in snacks on your birthday, snacks on your anniversary of starting at the company and snacks any time you come back from holiday all combine to create a constant supply of snacks that I have not developed a resistance to sampling.
The final pattern I am examining today is that of doing dishes. Or, more specifically, not doing dishes. There are many aspects of keeping a shared living space tidy which I am oblivious to. Dirty dishes is not one of them – but when I see dishes piled in the sink or the drying rack full of dry dishes, my normal behaviour is to tell myself that I do not have the time now, and ignore the problem. I ignore it even though I know that both my wife and sister-in-law find the sight of dirty dishes far more irksome than myself, and that given enough time they will fix the problem themselves, and that they already perform many tidiness operations that I am unaware of. This is a pattern that leads to an unfair distribution of shared household maintenance and therefore eventual strife. I do not want to be an unfair person, and I do not enjoy strife.The common aspect throughout all of these patterns is that in the short term I get something I like (playing games, eating and not doing dishes). All that is necessary for me to engage in the pattern is to not think about the long term implications, or to convince myself that the long term implications “don’t matter” in this single instance. I have found that the way to change patterns is to find a new situation where not thinking will lead to desirable behaviour instead of the behaviour of the current pattern and then to try to fall into the new situation instead of the old one. But to create a new pattern that is going to successfully supplant the previous pattern I need to make the new pattern sticky; I need to know that I am going to get a relatively short term gain from it.
In the three example patterns I have examined above, creating a replacement pattern is really hard. Games are already very sticky activities. They have been designed to have a perfect risk/reward balance. Trying to compete with that to do what will often essentially amount to work is very hard. Eating is one of my favourite activities. I think I get significantly more joy out of this than most people do. I do not know if my extra enjoyment is down to higher natural sensitivities or learned appreciation of the variety and nuance of flavours, but at almost any point in time I would much rather be eating than not eating. Creating a pattern where not eating is more rewarding that eating is hard. Finally, I have a learned stigma against washing dishes – trying to create any pattern where there is a short term gain from doing something that I am stigmatised against sounds unlikely.
I do not have patterns ready at hand to supplant these existing patterns. I do not have answers to these problems. But this discussion has been useful: it has shown me what I am up against and suggested directions for creating new patterns. I need to increase my perceived reward for working on personal projects if I am going to compete with playing games. The only way I am going to combat the short term reward of eating is with a short term reward of eating – I need to find things I prefer to eat but which do not contribute to the problems inherent in snacking. Finally, in order to get to a point where doing dishes is preferable to avoidance I need to address whatever it is that is stopping me from finding enjoyment in this activity. While I do not have any answers, I now believe that I understand the questions well enough to pursue my problem patterns and successfully address them.
Saturday, 7 May 2011
Value Without End?
Two days ago I discussed alternative ways of successfully finishing independent projects. Today I’m going to question my basic foundations in this discussion about the value of finishing projects. Why can’t projects that don’t finish be valuable?
The basic answer is that they can, depending on how you are seeking value from them. So I need to constrain the question to be more specific to the conversation I’ve been pursuing. Can projects that are not finished be valuable within the context of learning how to finish projects and creating meaningful experiences for an audience? And if so, under what contexts is this the case?
Any project that makes progress will teach me about how to make progress in a project whether or not I finish, and any lessons learnt will help with at least some of the stages on the road to finishing a project. If I only master beginnings of projects, haven’t I still gotten better at the whole project? In one sense, yes, but at the same time if I only learn how to become good at beginnings within the context of not finishing projects, then I do not know if I’ve learnt the right lessons. I may have gotten so good at perfect beginnings that it becomes impossible for me to continue on from that point. Knowing whether or not the lessons learned are actually applicable to finishing a project only becomes possible within the context of actually finishing a project.
However, I still think that there is some learning going on with not finishing projects that helps with finishing them. For each of the projects I have not finished, I have learned two very important lessons. First, I have learnt a series of behaviours that do not allow me to finish, and secondly I have learned how vitality important it is to me that I actually finish projects. This second lesson may be key; if I didn’t learn to care about finishing projects I would be doomed to never finish them.
Before moving on to look at how unfinished projects can create meaning for an audience, I would like to take a second look at what learning how not to finish a project actually means. For each project I have not finished I will have developed a theory about why I have not finished, and for my next project I will try something opposed to that theory to see if I can hit on some method that actually works. Now, if I eventually do learn to reliably finish projects, then whichever theories I’ve developed that support the method used to finish my projects will appear to have been correct. However, this is not scientifically sound; whatever allowed me to finish may be something outside of my theories and I would have no way of knowing without rigorous testing. But having a method that works, I am unlikely to pursue this testing.
I suspect that this is why there are many creators who vehemently claim that some techniques do not work, even to the point of contradicting each other. They have each spent time trying to finish a work before their careers began and repeatedly failing. Each of the techniques they tried that did not give them the success they sought becomes blacklisted to them, even though these attempts were teaching them the skills they eventually used to finish. If they were to later go back and try these other techniques again, they may discover the techniques work better than they imagined they would. They have since learned whatever it is they needed beyond their explanatory theories of what the ‘correct’ way to create is.
As far as creating meaningful experiences for audiences, a project needs to be in a place where an audience can experience it in order for the audience to find meaning through it. If an audience can experience a project, isn’t it finished, at least in some way? Not necessarily. A work in progress can be viewed by an audience and not be finished. Further, a publicly viewable work in progress can forever be moved towards perfection. Continuously tweaking it without ever stepping back, deciding that it is good enough and adding a bit of polish is a very real possibility if there is already an audience and the audience is giving the creator what the creator desires (attention, reputation and/or money).
In fact, due to the internet, these styles of projects have become relatively common. Open source projects are continuously trying to reach perfection, and most are always in development or stalled. There are almost none that are ever finished. But even without open source, some projects embrace the paradigm of ‘release early, release often’ and fall into the same ‘trap’ of never being finished.
I say ‘trap’ with bunny ears because this does not seem to be a bad place to be, especially if your audience is happy to pay you. Working on a project that is always available to be interacted with but which you can constantly improve sounds like a wonderful thing, at least for as long as you are happy to have your life be about only one project. If you are in this sort of circumstance and you are able to maintain it, then it is likely that you will accrue a fan base who finds your modifications meaningful (hopefully positively so). Further, it is likely that as you fiddle with your project you will increase its complexity, and thus its depth, thus making it worthy of having dedicated fans. All in all, this sounds like a project that I wouldn’t mind creating, even though I know that to some extent it is just a way of avoiding the need to finish.
The basic answer is that they can, depending on how you are seeking value from them. So I need to constrain the question to be more specific to the conversation I’ve been pursuing. Can projects that are not finished be valuable within the context of learning how to finish projects and creating meaningful experiences for an audience? And if so, under what contexts is this the case?
Any project that makes progress will teach me about how to make progress in a project whether or not I finish, and any lessons learnt will help with at least some of the stages on the road to finishing a project. If I only master beginnings of projects, haven’t I still gotten better at the whole project? In one sense, yes, but at the same time if I only learn how to become good at beginnings within the context of not finishing projects, then I do not know if I’ve learnt the right lessons. I may have gotten so good at perfect beginnings that it becomes impossible for me to continue on from that point. Knowing whether or not the lessons learned are actually applicable to finishing a project only becomes possible within the context of actually finishing a project.
However, I still think that there is some learning going on with not finishing projects that helps with finishing them. For each of the projects I have not finished, I have learned two very important lessons. First, I have learnt a series of behaviours that do not allow me to finish, and secondly I have learned how vitality important it is to me that I actually finish projects. This second lesson may be key; if I didn’t learn to care about finishing projects I would be doomed to never finish them.
Before moving on to look at how unfinished projects can create meaning for an audience, I would like to take a second look at what learning how not to finish a project actually means. For each project I have not finished I will have developed a theory about why I have not finished, and for my next project I will try something opposed to that theory to see if I can hit on some method that actually works. Now, if I eventually do learn to reliably finish projects, then whichever theories I’ve developed that support the method used to finish my projects will appear to have been correct. However, this is not scientifically sound; whatever allowed me to finish may be something outside of my theories and I would have no way of knowing without rigorous testing. But having a method that works, I am unlikely to pursue this testing.
I suspect that this is why there are many creators who vehemently claim that some techniques do not work, even to the point of contradicting each other. They have each spent time trying to finish a work before their careers began and repeatedly failing. Each of the techniques they tried that did not give them the success they sought becomes blacklisted to them, even though these attempts were teaching them the skills they eventually used to finish. If they were to later go back and try these other techniques again, they may discover the techniques work better than they imagined they would. They have since learned whatever it is they needed beyond their explanatory theories of what the ‘correct’ way to create is.
As far as creating meaningful experiences for audiences, a project needs to be in a place where an audience can experience it in order for the audience to find meaning through it. If an audience can experience a project, isn’t it finished, at least in some way? Not necessarily. A work in progress can be viewed by an audience and not be finished. Further, a publicly viewable work in progress can forever be moved towards perfection. Continuously tweaking it without ever stepping back, deciding that it is good enough and adding a bit of polish is a very real possibility if there is already an audience and the audience is giving the creator what the creator desires (attention, reputation and/or money).
In fact, due to the internet, these styles of projects have become relatively common. Open source projects are continuously trying to reach perfection, and most are always in development or stalled. There are almost none that are ever finished. But even without open source, some projects embrace the paradigm of ‘release early, release often’ and fall into the same ‘trap’ of never being finished.
I say ‘trap’ with bunny ears because this does not seem to be a bad place to be, especially if your audience is happy to pay you. Working on a project that is always available to be interacted with but which you can constantly improve sounds like a wonderful thing, at least for as long as you are happy to have your life be about only one project. If you are in this sort of circumstance and you are able to maintain it, then it is likely that you will accrue a fan base who finds your modifications meaningful (hopefully positively so). Further, it is likely that as you fiddle with your project you will increase its complexity, and thus its depth, thus making it worthy of having dedicated fans. All in all, this sounds like a project that I wouldn’t mind creating, even though I know that to some extent it is just a way of avoiding the need to finish.
Friday, 6 May 2011
Patterns of Feeling
Up till now I’ve been writing this blog about a day ahead. Yesterday I didn’t have time to write as I had an extremely busy day at work that ate my lunch and had me coming home a little late. My ‘normal’ pattern at this point would be to feel a little uncomfortable with the fact that I ‘could’ miss a day and use this discomfort as a reason to avoid doing any writing ‘just yet’. Near the end of the day I would realise that after all of that procrastination my goal had become impossible and I would give up, probably telling myself that I would just a skip a day. But tomorrow would repeat the same process, and after two or three days I would become so uncomfortable admitting to myself that I hadn’t kept my personal commitment that I wouldn’t write anything in my blog for a year (and all other projects would take about a week off of doing any work).
This doesn’t seem like a particularly good pattern to me, though I can clearly see why I make each of the decisions at each of the steps; I see what creates the pattern. Seeing this unfortunately doesn’t fix the pattern. I can’t just say “Oh, well I’m not going to do that then.” I still feel uncomfortable and my temptation is still to procrastinate. Only now, what I’m procrastinating on is ‘fixing the pattern’ instead of the generic ‘doing what I should be doing’. I’m aware of lots of patterns in my life that I would like to change, but they are still patterns because they are hard to change. I have, in the past, found patterns in my life which were relatively easy to change once I became aware of them. I quickly weeded those out. Now I’m only left with the strong ones (and the ones really good at camouflage; I’ve no idea what or where they are).
In my experience, the best way to fight against a strongly entrenched behavioural pattern is to find another pattern that I already have that I can use against it. I think I’ve just found the pattern I can use in this case, and it’s a weird one to use as a weapon. It’s a modification of another entrenched pattern. I’m using ‘making myself upset over nothing’ modified by ‘dealing with feelings by writing’. I never thought I would use the first one again.
The last time I consciously used ‘making myself upset over nothing’ was during a ‘get to know one another by talking about life problems’ group at a community I was visiting. ‘Making myself upset over nothing’ is a pattern wherein some little discomfort is closely felt and as one gets into this feeling one continuously picks up on new discomforts to tie into the first one until this ball of associated discomforts becomes too much to bear. At times logic will jump in with various facts that show that there is no reason to be upset. These must be ignored. Eventually I become an emotionally wreck incapable of any action (though I’m not taking this pattern that far today). During the ‘talk about life problems social gathering’ this technique garnered me lots of tearful hugs when my turn came around (because I claimed no-one liked me, which I really believed by that point) and a general feeling of bonding. But, as I slowly learnt over the next several months, it also made several people think that I was insane in a bad way.
Worse, whenever a pattern is used, whether consciously or unconsciously, it becomes easier to use again in the future – unconsciously as well as consciously. So for the next year I kept falling into the ‘nobody likes me’ trap, and for the next decade I’ve occasionally fallen into ‘making myself upset over nothing’, gathering a ball of mostly unrelated feelings and combining them into an inescapable trap. That’s why I decided to never use ‘making myself upset over nothing’ again if I could help it.
However, in the last few years I’ve also found the secret exit from ‘making myself upset over nothing’. Once, when drunk, I decided to try programming and discovered I was unable. This upset me, so I decided to try writing instead. While the results of that writing are incoherent, at the time I was writing I didn’t notice and a good time. However, as I didn’t have anything to write about, I wrote about feeling upset about not being able to program. The results, as I say, were not worthwhile in themselves. But they still set an interesting precedent. When I’m upset about something, I can sort through the mess of emotions by writing about them. This process clears things in my head such that I no longer feel upset. It detangles the ball of unrelated emotions so that I can see clearly. I’m still uncomfortable about a bunch of things, but not to the extent that I can’t go on with my life.
This isn’t an ingrained pattern yet. I still often forget about the pattern. But each time I use it the possibility of its use is reinforced. For this reason I am doubly happy to use it in this context. By using ‘making myself upset over nothing’ mutated into ‘writing a close examination of current annoyances’ I am helping myself escape from future tangled balls of feeling through ‘dealing with feelings by writing’. And, at the same time, I am not going the easy route of procrastinating until I give up. Instead I am writing my feelings down now because I’ve made myself face them and feel really uncomfortable, and the easiest path is no longer to put off feeling them but to make them stop by writing them down.
And now that I’ve written them down, I see I’ve actually got a triple win. Not only have I set a future precedent, not only have I sorted those feelings out, but I’ve also written a blog entry for today, so I no longer even have a reason to feel those feelings of discomfort!
This doesn’t seem like a particularly good pattern to me, though I can clearly see why I make each of the decisions at each of the steps; I see what creates the pattern. Seeing this unfortunately doesn’t fix the pattern. I can’t just say “Oh, well I’m not going to do that then.” I still feel uncomfortable and my temptation is still to procrastinate. Only now, what I’m procrastinating on is ‘fixing the pattern’ instead of the generic ‘doing what I should be doing’. I’m aware of lots of patterns in my life that I would like to change, but they are still patterns because they are hard to change. I have, in the past, found patterns in my life which were relatively easy to change once I became aware of them. I quickly weeded those out. Now I’m only left with the strong ones (and the ones really good at camouflage; I’ve no idea what or where they are).
In my experience, the best way to fight against a strongly entrenched behavioural pattern is to find another pattern that I already have that I can use against it. I think I’ve just found the pattern I can use in this case, and it’s a weird one to use as a weapon. It’s a modification of another entrenched pattern. I’m using ‘making myself upset over nothing’ modified by ‘dealing with feelings by writing’. I never thought I would use the first one again.
The last time I consciously used ‘making myself upset over nothing’ was during a ‘get to know one another by talking about life problems’ group at a community I was visiting. ‘Making myself upset over nothing’ is a pattern wherein some little discomfort is closely felt and as one gets into this feeling one continuously picks up on new discomforts to tie into the first one until this ball of associated discomforts becomes too much to bear. At times logic will jump in with various facts that show that there is no reason to be upset. These must be ignored. Eventually I become an emotionally wreck incapable of any action (though I’m not taking this pattern that far today). During the ‘talk about life problems social gathering’ this technique garnered me lots of tearful hugs when my turn came around (because I claimed no-one liked me, which I really believed by that point) and a general feeling of bonding. But, as I slowly learnt over the next several months, it also made several people think that I was insane in a bad way.
Worse, whenever a pattern is used, whether consciously or unconsciously, it becomes easier to use again in the future – unconsciously as well as consciously. So for the next year I kept falling into the ‘nobody likes me’ trap, and for the next decade I’ve occasionally fallen into ‘making myself upset over nothing’, gathering a ball of mostly unrelated feelings and combining them into an inescapable trap. That’s why I decided to never use ‘making myself upset over nothing’ again if I could help it.
However, in the last few years I’ve also found the secret exit from ‘making myself upset over nothing’. Once, when drunk, I decided to try programming and discovered I was unable. This upset me, so I decided to try writing instead. While the results of that writing are incoherent, at the time I was writing I didn’t notice and a good time. However, as I didn’t have anything to write about, I wrote about feeling upset about not being able to program. The results, as I say, were not worthwhile in themselves. But they still set an interesting precedent. When I’m upset about something, I can sort through the mess of emotions by writing about them. This process clears things in my head such that I no longer feel upset. It detangles the ball of unrelated emotions so that I can see clearly. I’m still uncomfortable about a bunch of things, but not to the extent that I can’t go on with my life.
This isn’t an ingrained pattern yet. I still often forget about the pattern. But each time I use it the possibility of its use is reinforced. For this reason I am doubly happy to use it in this context. By using ‘making myself upset over nothing’ mutated into ‘writing a close examination of current annoyances’ I am helping myself escape from future tangled balls of feeling through ‘dealing with feelings by writing’. And, at the same time, I am not going the easy route of procrastinating until I give up. Instead I am writing my feelings down now because I’ve made myself face them and feel really uncomfortable, and the easiest path is no longer to put off feeling them but to make them stop by writing them down.
And now that I’ve written them down, I see I’ve actually got a triple win. Not only have I set a future precedent, not only have I sorted those feelings out, but I’ve also written a blog entry for today, so I no longer even have a reason to feel those feelings of discomfort!
Wednesday, 4 May 2011
Alternate Ends
A few days ago I claimed that the only good way to finish a personal project was with an internally imposed deadline. This is a great call to arms, suggesting that I need to better discipline my creative process. But when I begin to think about this in detail, it doesn’t hold up to reality. I’m aware of lots of projects that seem to have slowly meandered to their completion or others that manage to finish in a timely manner without any need of a planned end date. Even my own single finished solo game ‘Taunting Donut’ didn’t have a deadline. If I want to get good at this completing projects thing, I really need to develop an understanding of how projects are completed that goes beyond a simplistic belief in the necessity of deadlines.
Taunting Donut started as an attempt to make the smallest and simplest game I could, in the effort to get something finished. I decided to make a one room text adventure with only a few simple puzzles. I started by planning out exactly what the puzzles would entail; which inventory items would need to be combined to get what results. Using Inform 7, I created the basic logic of the game. Finally I added the fiction to go around the puzzles. Then I got everyone I knew to play through it, using their feedback to tweak the experience until several people playing in a row didn’t have any significant problems. All this took a couple of months worth of lunchtimes, though the longest part was certainly the playtesting. Trying to get a parser to recognize everything that a player might try is hard! But I finished it, and I finished it within a timely manner, all without an internally imposed deadline.
So why did this work? Why did I finish this project even though I never set a deadline? I think it might be that I set clear measurable goals and stuck to them. I didn’t have a temporal end, but I had a clear content end point. It’s not that there wasn’t any feature creep; half way through the project I decided to implement a response for each of the five senses on every object in the game. But this feature creep was kept to a huge minimum. All other personal (and professional) projects I’ve worked on have at some point included a “Hey, why don’t we try this!” moment where everything can change. Most have several. I don’t see this as a bad thing; lots of innovation happens at these times, but if I don’t find a way to limit this, then it can go on forever. This is the whole tweaking towards perfection that I talked about earlier, except here it’s not perfection that is being pursued but exploration and innovation for the sake of exploration and innovation.
In my reading of writer’s advice, I’ve come across several versions of how much tweaking during the process of writing is a good idea. All of this advice comes from different speculative fiction writers, all of whom have successfully published multiple books. I’ve heard that you need to plan your book down to smallest details before you begin, that any planning is impossible, and that you need to plan some but leave room for yourself to play. All of these authors seem convinced that their way is the only way that really works; that other methods are doomed to failure. Given these assertions, I believe we can conclude that all of the methods do work, but only for some people. Or rather, it takes a certain amount of skill to pull off any of these, but different techniques require different sets of skills. I would like to think that I can master all of them, but first I think I need to understand what makes them work or not work.
One thing that all writers have agreed on is that you need to write. You need to set yourself target word counts and you need to stick to them. So even if there isn’t a meticulous plan, there is still a goal that can be tracked against. Successful writers always know approximately how much more work they need to do before they are done.
Bringing these ideas back into the general view of all projects, I think I can see that measurable goals are the common factor throughout. Internally enforced deadlines are just one form of measurable goal, though they are slightly abstract. But as long as I am able to stick to the goal, to finish at a certain point in time, it doesn’t matter if I spend time exploring in strange directions or even procrastinate for long stretches. As long as I come back before my due date and do whatever I need to do to finish, whether it be cutting sleep or dropping loved features, then I will still finish. Likewise, if I know from the start exactly which features I will ship with and what steps I need to take in order to get there, then it doesn’t matter how long I take to go through those steps, because I will always know where I am on the map. While I can add steps part way through the project, I need to plan these extra pieces carefully and be aware of what consequences they will have on my overall work. Still, as long as I keep putting one foot in front of the other and keep my targets manageable, I will eventually finish.
The model used by those book writers who like planning the least, that of writing a certain amount every day and just being consistent with this, appears to be a different model within the general case of setting and following a measureable goal. But it is neither having a strict deadline nor is it having a detailed plan. Does such a model exist for other project types, such as games? I’m not so sure it does. The big difference between a book and a game is that a book is strictly linear while a game can be very much non-linear. The reader of a book goes through each word and considers them; the length of a book is dependent solely on the number of words within. In contrast, the player of a game can spend variable amounts of time playing with any given system. While there are aspects of a game that can be measured by their volume (the content of the game is usually dependent on the amount of authored graphics and levels), other aspects can’t be (the gameplay available in a game is largely independent of the amount of code used to create that gameplay).
So it seems that the model of writing a certain number of words per day until one is finished could have a counterpart if you only look at the content within a game rather than the systems. Given that this would not be a full game by itself, I propose that a project could be broken up into a number of sub-projects each of which has its own sets of measurable goals. For instance, at the beginning of a project there could be a set period of time of unplanned prototyping, by the end of which all the game mechanics of the project should be defined. Then the engine can be planned out and built. Finally, a commitment to create a certain amount of content with that engine per day could be made, until there is enough content for a release. Ultimately, I would like to learn how to master each of these techniques as well as how to combine them. However, I think this will take time, and time for me is at a premium. I think I’m going to have to stop blogging every day.
Taunting Donut started as an attempt to make the smallest and simplest game I could, in the effort to get something finished. I decided to make a one room text adventure with only a few simple puzzles. I started by planning out exactly what the puzzles would entail; which inventory items would need to be combined to get what results. Using Inform 7, I created the basic logic of the game. Finally I added the fiction to go around the puzzles. Then I got everyone I knew to play through it, using their feedback to tweak the experience until several people playing in a row didn’t have any significant problems. All this took a couple of months worth of lunchtimes, though the longest part was certainly the playtesting. Trying to get a parser to recognize everything that a player might try is hard! But I finished it, and I finished it within a timely manner, all without an internally imposed deadline.
So why did this work? Why did I finish this project even though I never set a deadline? I think it might be that I set clear measurable goals and stuck to them. I didn’t have a temporal end, but I had a clear content end point. It’s not that there wasn’t any feature creep; half way through the project I decided to implement a response for each of the five senses on every object in the game. But this feature creep was kept to a huge minimum. All other personal (and professional) projects I’ve worked on have at some point included a “Hey, why don’t we try this!” moment where everything can change. Most have several. I don’t see this as a bad thing; lots of innovation happens at these times, but if I don’t find a way to limit this, then it can go on forever. This is the whole tweaking towards perfection that I talked about earlier, except here it’s not perfection that is being pursued but exploration and innovation for the sake of exploration and innovation.
In my reading of writer’s advice, I’ve come across several versions of how much tweaking during the process of writing is a good idea. All of this advice comes from different speculative fiction writers, all of whom have successfully published multiple books. I’ve heard that you need to plan your book down to smallest details before you begin, that any planning is impossible, and that you need to plan some but leave room for yourself to play. All of these authors seem convinced that their way is the only way that really works; that other methods are doomed to failure. Given these assertions, I believe we can conclude that all of the methods do work, but only for some people. Or rather, it takes a certain amount of skill to pull off any of these, but different techniques require different sets of skills. I would like to think that I can master all of them, but first I think I need to understand what makes them work or not work.
One thing that all writers have agreed on is that you need to write. You need to set yourself target word counts and you need to stick to them. So even if there isn’t a meticulous plan, there is still a goal that can be tracked against. Successful writers always know approximately how much more work they need to do before they are done.
Bringing these ideas back into the general view of all projects, I think I can see that measurable goals are the common factor throughout. Internally enforced deadlines are just one form of measurable goal, though they are slightly abstract. But as long as I am able to stick to the goal, to finish at a certain point in time, it doesn’t matter if I spend time exploring in strange directions or even procrastinate for long stretches. As long as I come back before my due date and do whatever I need to do to finish, whether it be cutting sleep or dropping loved features, then I will still finish. Likewise, if I know from the start exactly which features I will ship with and what steps I need to take in order to get there, then it doesn’t matter how long I take to go through those steps, because I will always know where I am on the map. While I can add steps part way through the project, I need to plan these extra pieces carefully and be aware of what consequences they will have on my overall work. Still, as long as I keep putting one foot in front of the other and keep my targets manageable, I will eventually finish.
The model used by those book writers who like planning the least, that of writing a certain amount every day and just being consistent with this, appears to be a different model within the general case of setting and following a measureable goal. But it is neither having a strict deadline nor is it having a detailed plan. Does such a model exist for other project types, such as games? I’m not so sure it does. The big difference between a book and a game is that a book is strictly linear while a game can be very much non-linear. The reader of a book goes through each word and considers them; the length of a book is dependent solely on the number of words within. In contrast, the player of a game can spend variable amounts of time playing with any given system. While there are aspects of a game that can be measured by their volume (the content of the game is usually dependent on the amount of authored graphics and levels), other aspects can’t be (the gameplay available in a game is largely independent of the amount of code used to create that gameplay).
So it seems that the model of writing a certain number of words per day until one is finished could have a counterpart if you only look at the content within a game rather than the systems. Given that this would not be a full game by itself, I propose that a project could be broken up into a number of sub-projects each of which has its own sets of measurable goals. For instance, at the beginning of a project there could be a set period of time of unplanned prototyping, by the end of which all the game mechanics of the project should be defined. Then the engine can be planned out and built. Finally, a commitment to create a certain amount of content with that engine per day could be made, until there is enough content for a release. Ultimately, I would like to learn how to master each of these techniques as well as how to combine them. However, I think this will take time, and time for me is at a premium. I think I’m going to have to stop blogging every day.
Tuesday, 3 May 2011
Steam Lacing, Part I
While I was working as a game programmer on Fable III and trying to get into a design position, there was at one point some discussion of the need for a new mini-game. All the other mini-games had already been designed by the Simulation Designer. Because I had made it clear that I was interested in moving towards the design discipline and as this new mini game was to be for a system that was still only hypothetical, I was offered the opportunity to show off my design chops by proposing a design for this mini game.
I jumped at the chance.
Because this was partially intended as an opportunity for me to display my abilities as a designer, I kept careful notes of my design process, which ultimately followed the path of experimental prototyping. The system that the mini-game was dependent on was eventually dropped from Fable III and I did eventually get the gig as a designer, but I decided to continue with the carefully documented design process, at first as a possible bid for my dissertation and later just because I’d already put so much work into it. I’m still working on it now, though I’m really not sure where it is going. I have some ideas, but to share them now would be getting ahead of myself. First I want to share where I’ve come from.
The very first step in this project was writing down several proposals for different mini-game ideas that I felt could fill the role required. While I was happy to prototype any or all of these games, in the end I only created prototypes for one. What follows is the original proposal for this mini-game.
The Proposal
This mini-game is a cross between ‘the black box game’ and any block matching game. The game is played across a grid of spaces, each of which is always filled with an object. These objects are made up of the following:
Once the objects in spaces have been destroyed or removed, if a gem was popped from the grid it is placed along the top of the grid, ready to fall in. Then the objects above the cleared spaces fall into them in the same way as in a standard block matching game. When objects fall into the grid from the top, gems will fall from where they’ve been visibly laid. Otherwise new Sand and Impurities will be randomly generated to fall in (given a set ratio).
The space around the grid is presented as some sort of steam punk contraption, full of gears and hoses. The point at which the steam will be shot from on the left is the nozzle of a hose that can be moved up and down. The gems pulse with energy and the steam looks fast and hot.
I jumped at the chance.
Because this was partially intended as an opportunity for me to display my abilities as a designer, I kept careful notes of my design process, which ultimately followed the path of experimental prototyping. The system that the mini-game was dependent on was eventually dropped from Fable III and I did eventually get the gig as a designer, but I decided to continue with the carefully documented design process, at first as a possible bid for my dissertation and later just because I’d already put so much work into it. I’m still working on it now, though I’m really not sure where it is going. I have some ideas, but to share them now would be getting ahead of myself. First I want to share where I’ve come from.
The very first step in this project was writing down several proposals for different mini-game ideas that I felt could fill the role required. While I was happy to prototype any or all of these games, in the end I only created prototypes for one. What follows is the original proposal for this mini-game.
The Proposal
This mini-game is a cross between ‘the black box game’ and any block matching game. The game is played across a grid of spaces, each of which is always filled with an object. These objects are made up of the following:
- Gems: These come in both coloured and clear varieties. There is at most one gem of any given colour, but there can be many clear gems.
- Sand: A grain of sand.
- Impurity: A speck of something that isn’t a gem or a grain of sand.
- If the jet encounters a gem ‘head on’ it pops the gem out of the grid (the gem is not destroyed). The jet doesn’t continue past this point. This does not happen to gems that are ‘waiting’ along the top and thus are off of the grid.
- If the jet passes near a gem the jet of steam is deflected away from it in the same way that rays are reflected in the black box game.
Once the objects in spaces have been destroyed or removed, if a gem was popped from the grid it is placed along the top of the grid, ready to fall in. Then the objects above the cleared spaces fall into them in the same way as in a standard block matching game. When objects fall into the grid from the top, gems will fall from where they’ve been visibly laid. Otherwise new Sand and Impurities will be randomly generated to fall in (given a set ratio).
The space around the grid is presented as some sort of steam punk contraption, full of gears and hoses. The point at which the steam will be shot from on the left is the nozzle of a hose that can be moved up and down. The gems pulse with energy and the steam looks fast and hot.
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