supernormal

It’s 11 p.m. on Valentine’s Day, so I’m watching Emma play Breath of the Wild. Somehow I didn’t play it when it was, you know, running the gamut as the best game ever made.

The weapon durability mechanic always confused me, though. In that game, weapons break in like 50 hits. From what I understand its easily the most controversial choice the developers made.

Subtext: I was confused because I didn’t take the time to understand what this mechanic does do. I was content just being vicariously annoyed by what it doesn’t do.

It doesn’t let you keep a favorite weapon. I tend to stick with just the one in FromSoft games. In BioShock Infinite I would literally find the exact gun I put down — not the same type of gun, the same gun — so I could carry it through the whole game. We’re very attached to weapons in games.

Weapons in Breath of the Wild were designed to work like consumables. Because it’s not a fighting game, it’s an exploration game. To continue fighting, you have to explore and find new weapons. They become a reward for engaging with the world.

That’s what game design, design in general, is all about: rewarding the behavior you want.

(Photo from Zelda Dungeon, btw.)

Tuesday is game night, so I hoped to flip through a couple of articles and come back with a snappy readers digest. Maybe some original material.

My chosen topic: Why do we feel guilty when we enjoy narratives through movies, television, video games, but not when we read books? Seems like a pretty universal experience.

I was surprised that no body of literature exists on the subject that was quickly Google searchable. I found an Atlantic article about Americans’ perennial guilt about watching TV. And I remembered some pieces of Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You, which argues, among other things, that books would be viewed with suspicion if they were invented after video games somehow. That argument is mostly about how new media is also good, not the reverse: why reading is better. As far as I remember.

In fact, “why reading is better” is mostly how that question got phrased online. People wondered why reading is better than television, like it was a mathematical principle they just didn’t understand. Others were there to answer them. “It engages the imagination.” “It takes longer to read a book than watch a movie.”

Those things are true, but I wonder why they’re considered advantages and not differences. One centerpoint of TV guilt comes from parents feeling the need to “sneak away” from family duties if they want to watch an hour episode of TV. In that case, isn’t it more of an advantage to have a shorter platform than books?

A plausible explanation, in my opinion, would be that reading and writing are just older than those other media. They’ve had time to mature. One note the Atlantic article makes about TV guilt is that marketers discovered shows with a seemingly intellectual center do better in the “guilt market.” Hence the procedural crime drama, which Steven Johnson describes as setting of the explosion in smart TV (so to say).

(Aside) Writing tip: all you need to start developing ideas of your own is to read two things and then smash them together. Flint, meet steel. He-Man action figure, meet Hot Wheel truck.

Early novels, as far as I understand them, weren’t particularly complex. I’ll tell you about Lucian of Samosata’s A True Story some other time, but I think it’s basically unreadable. It took novels a while to sort themselves out.

(Aside) I thought I was onto something: shousetsu, the word for “novel” in Japanese, uses the characters for “small” and “rumor.” I thought I was onto something, like the etymology of this word expresses some suspicion about the novel format. Alas, I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. It did let me stumble into the “cell phone novel,” though, which I am over the moon to explore.

Unfortunately, I’ll leave it — and the guilt market — for another time. I’m going to go enjoy game night. And I’m going to feel great about it.

This post continues my exploration of spoilers and story arcs.

I saw Avengers: Endgame (which, I’m sorry whatever spirit I angered, please don’t make me mention Marvel properties here again) before every one of my friends back home. It released later for them, somehow, than it did for me in rural northeast Missouri. When I saw it, my group chat allowed me to send one text, one byte, to indicate the number of post-credits scenes: 0, 1, or 2. No “dude guess what happened,” no “I can’t say any more but,” not even “I liked it” or “I didn’t.”

My friends and I pathologize spoilers. Why? Endgame isn’t art. It’s not confronting. Its creators would never suffer a twist ending. What did we all seek from unblemished viewing?

Well, I’ve been thinking about catharsis theory, or any of the explanations for why we like sad and scary movies. No one claims to have cracked this thing wide open, but plenty of reasonable explanations pry the question ajar. All have to do with stimulation.

When we are exposed to the supernormal (gah, I love that), we’re switching on lights in potentially disused parts of our brains. You don’t usually get to enjoy it when a masked figure hurtles at you with a kitchen knife. In the safety of a story, you can. It’s rehearsal.

We experience sadness more commonly, so sad movies are less kicking the wheels and more about taking our emotions out for a spin. Empathy rules, and getting to feel empathy where no one you love is actually being hurt rules more. This feels like it’s on the right track.

Sadness, fear — but also joy and righteous anger. Surprise, the startle response, is another foundational emotion. Surprise is ephemeral by definition. Tragedy and true terror linger on for a long time, so it’s easier to noodle on the depth of experience afforded by those emotions. Why don’t we give surprise a fair shake?

Art is about novelty, among other things. Surprise is the emotional response to novelty. Don’t these two naturally pair?

In D&D, we huck dice all the time. Running that game would be so much easier if I could just describe what I want to happen. But that murders the magic of the game. Dice reflect uncertainty. They are ersatz novelty — something for us non-Lynchian laymen, still chipping through our nonfiction books but watching three Bond movies in a month, who have moments rather than tortured days to consider how the Character’s decision will unfold in the direction of their Motivation, towards Tragedy and Bliss.

If you could tell me how every die roll would turn out, the game would be ruined. If you could spoil it, in other words, the game would lack surprise.

Stories conjure sadness, fear, happiness, anger, and surprise. Some arcana could probably thieve the joy from a happy movie — just try watching a feel-good flick starring a hard cancelled actor. But in a world where it’s easy to steal joy or fear or rage we would need some word for it. We don’t. We only have spoilers, because surprise is easy to spoil.

Surprise doesn’t star in superhero movies. At best it’s on the fourth or fifth screen of the credits. “Robert Downey Jr., with surprise and Buncha Crunch.” The event of Endgame, though, had drama all its own. There were stakes. 0, 1, or 2? We didn’t know what was next. We all wanted to walk away with our own experience, our own opinions, ones that were ours. Spoilers, maybe the thrill of spoiling, is that you can make someone else’s experience your own.

And people love power. No surprise there.

Every single thing requires attention. Attention suffers not from the problem of being hard to define — instead, so many definitions exist in so many different fields that you could find useful interpretations of it everywhere you look.

Cognitively, attention is the ability to concentrate on one thing while tuning out other details in the environment. It’s about what you see, but also about what you don’t see. If we couldn’t pay attention, we would die under a crushing mass of stimuli.

On the internet, the cognitive definition of attention holds up, but is heightened: rather than “focusing” and “tuning out,” architects of the online world sever you from the information they think you shouldn’t see. While on TikTok, you’re not tuning out all of the videos that don’t cross your For You page. On Instagram, you’re not concentrating on your feed. In both cases, it is a given that your attention is wholly engaged with the platform. Whatever it shows you, you’re all in. Everything else is dead limbs.

That’s what surprises me about social media: how small it feels, despite literally everyone being on it. It’s the world’s hugest, sugariest cake that we’re only allowed to eat one bite at a time.

Maybe this is a good way for thinking about attention in general. We are overwhelmed by the world. By the huge cake. Some people are able to take measured forkfuls and stop when they get a tummyache, sure. Others of us just can’t help ourselves. We shovel it in, pink and oily, hand over hand, until we’re raw from the girt of sugar crystals and heaving. Wouldn’t it be better to sit, lean with our backs against the old-god dessert, and let someone else measure it into our mouths?

Cognitive metaphor theory comes to us from linguistics, and it argues that we translate abstract concepts into concrete metaphors. What is the mind? I don’t know. So I say “I’m a little rusty,” “we’re running out of steam,” “his ego is fragile,” “I’m firing on all cylinders.” I speak in metaphor: The Mind is a Machine.

These metaphors end up becoming so pervasive that we think about, speak about, and operate one thing as though it were the other. If someone carries a great emotional weight for a very long time, and suddenly collapses, unable to function from the stress of it all, I could say they “broke down.” That’s all the explanation you’d need. Even though, what does that even mean?

One of the great, early cognitive metaphors is, “Time is Money.” It so pervades language that it’s become a saying all it’s own. We waste time, save time, borrow time, invest time, put time aside, budget time, make time, lose time. “Attention is Money” feels tempting as a corollary, except that’s not really right. You can give someone your attention, you can pay attention. But it can’t be saved, or budgeted. It can’t be wasted, since if you’re not paying attention to something it’s not like your attention is bleeding out onto the floor. If you’re not paying attention, then the attention just doesn’t exist. Time is the number line, attention is points you plot along its axis.

Also, the way more salient metaphors we use for attention — other than “pay” — are “keep,” “hold,” and “lose.” Time is value, but attention is valuable.

Something else interesting about attention-as-commodity (we’re stepping away from cognitive metaphors here) is that you can’t hoard attention. The only thing you can do with attention is give it to something else.

These are just my scattered thoughts on attention, after both failing to understand attention as a machine learning concept and being disappointed by the Atlantic article I mentioned yesterday. Something something fMRI, something something brain waves. But I did read it. Every word.

If you read this whole thing, I guess I should thank you for your attention.