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Reflections on overwhelming information acquisition.
Learning vs Creating. A delicate balance.
Supergame Bakedown 2008
As 2008 started, I decided to participate in a month-long
game creation competition. While it was not a high-profile
competition with promises of prizes and fame, I saw it as
an opportunity to commit myself to make a game.
Making a game.
It came to me as I wondered how to develop one of those
ideas I can't quite express with precision.
In particular, one which has obsessed me a great deal
these past two years is our relationship with the
acquisition of new information (knowledge) and especially
its conflict with the act of creation.
A demo did not appear to be the best medium for
it. Interactivity would help to convey the emotions I
was familiar with. Or so I hoped!
The idea of the game very shortly put is to tell the
story of the relationship between mankind and
information.
It's about translating the pleasure of learning new
facts, new beliefs. These could be truthful or not,
important or trivial. The matter is not about truth but
about the emotion of learning.
Another idea I wanted to convey is the addiction we
sometimes develop towards this acquisition of knowledge,
especially as civilization evolves and let us grasp an
ever expanding world of information.
And finally, central to the concept was the idea that
creation serves as a counterpart to the acquisition of
knowledge. The painful, yet necessary behaviour of
translating knowledge into new forms.
When things are difficult, use the simplest path
The draft logic of the game was written in a darkened
room, in a bar more exactly, to the sound of the weirdest
combination of flamenco and traditional japanese music.
Despite my attempts, one month proved too short of a
timeperiod to complete the game. This did not stop me to
release its last
working prototype
(2.8Mb)
The control scheme is the standard computer mouse. Only
the first button is exploited, and represents an extension
of the player over a two dimensional world.
This world is populated with two different types of
objects: tokens and portals. Tokens are
of differenting polarities, and can be grabbed
around and attracted by the invisible hand. Portals are
immobile objects that can be fed with tokens.
The player's performance is recorded in the form of a
numerical score, whose formula attempts to make them:
- feed as many tokens as they can to the portal
- feed as many tokens of the same polarity in a short
time period
Tokens represent facts to be learnt. Polarities represent
the compatibility of those facts. Learn two many
incompatible facts (paradoxes) and they cancel out.
And that's about it. The prototype did not touch on
the creation aspect of the idea, nor did it
represent the relationship of facts together, nor the
different models of knowledge acquisition.
An economic model of learning and creation
The full unrealized concept was like so:
The goal is to represent two human traits that I
regularly notice in myself and others. The (diminishing)
pleasure of learning, the (rewarding) pain of creation,
and how they balance each others out.
The first trait is the pleasure we derive from the
acquisition of knowledge. That pleasure does not seem
linked to the truthful nature of the information we
acquire, rather it seems derived from a certain degree of
uniqueness. We appear to derive this pleasure with very
quick sequences of new experiences. For example, beaming
randomly a sequence of pictures every 200-500ms.
Although we crave uniqueness and would quickly call the
experience boring if it does not entertain us enough, we
also crave for a certain similarity.
Knowledge is represented in the game as tokens that the
player acquire and select, seek and gather.
Score would at first appear to increase with the
acquisition of knowledge, and the experience of gathering
tokens should be pleasurable and full of little
details. However the score would be influenced by the
quality of tokens we acquire. For example, acquiring couple
of paradoxical tokens (one fact and its inverse taken as
true) should impact score in some negative way.
Also a too high rate of acquisition of token would have
progressively diminishing returns on the score, as
information gets understood more and more superficially as
it is acquired massively.
Another important factor to consider is information that
cannot be processed at all. Often, a piece of knowledge
can only be learned when the learner is already very close
to understanding it. This would lend itself pretty well to
a videogame mechanic.
Another trait I would like to cover is the human
experience of creation. The creative act which transforms
our environment.
Knowledge enables us to act on the environment,
to create. This creation reflects itself into a
modification of the outlook of the game's playground: the
originally flat display would start taking twisted forms;
the outlook would get more sophisticated and detailed; new
elements of knowledge (tokens) would be introduced into
the environment as combination of previously acquired
tokens, ready to be eaten back; new special objects would
get introduced such as wormholes, walls to constraint the
flow of knowledge.
Chosing to act/create would first appear to come at a
cost, slightly decreasing the score.
However doing it is necessary for a player to restore the
possibility of score being increased by the acquisition of
knowledge: it would reset the negative diminishing returns
of acquiring new knowledge.
Using those two main traits, the player would be
confronted with various playgrounds, each representing
different stages of civilization.
At first knowledge is difficult to obtain, and can only
be acquired through an active search of the environment.
Then as levels and civilization progress, knowledge is
stored and obtained from increasingly large knowledge
stores (churches, libraries) able to release tokens
with a certain speed. The player, however may not always
have the right to access the most truthful or consistent
stores of knowledge.
In the early stages, those knowledge stores can only
slowly produce tokens: slowly enough not to negatively
impact the score too much on their own.
The final stages would represent our current state of
information-sea, with a constant flood of tokens which
would have to be avoided in some way to avoid negative
impact of the player's performance. This, as a
manifestation of our current civilization where each
person is submitted to an endless stream of factoids, in
such amounts that he may have to make an effort not to
encounter them.
nicolas at uucidl dot com
References
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