“intelligence augmentation”
16 posts under this tag.
It’s been a while since I made a quote collage. It’s been a while since I’ve been hit by an idea this good: reality is broken, it’s game (and interface!) designers responsibility to fix it.
I’m not here to rant about game designers. I’m mad, but I’m not mad at game designers. I think that compared to the rest of the world, game designers pretty much have it all figured out. We’ve invented a medium that kicks every other medium’s ass. As game designers, we own more emotional bandwidth, we occupy more brain cycles, and we make more people happy than any other platform or content in the world. And if you don’t already believe that, if you don’t realize that we’ve already won, then you’re not paying attention to the staggering amount of time, energy, money and passion that gamers all over the world pour into our games every single day.
So why why have we won? Because as an industry, we’ve spent the last 30 years learning how to optimize human experience. We know that our brains are made for playing games. Recently, some of us have remembered that our bodies are made for playing games. And we’ve always known that our hearts are made for playing games. So as an industry, we’ve spent three whole decades figuring out how to engineer systems that fully engage our brains, and our bodies, and our hearts. And we’ve pretty much solved that problem – or, at least, our solutions are working better than other designed experience on the planet. So our systems work better than anything anyone else is making to engage human beings. And as a result, the way I see it, right now, we basically rule the world.
That’s the good news. But the problem is, we don’t rule the real world. For the most part, we rule the virtual world, because it’s easier to optimize experience in a world entirely of our own making. The fact is the real world is too f’ed up, it’s too broken, we don’t want to deal with it. So right now, pretty much every one of our games works better than reality, because we are the best designers of human experience, and we’re applying all of our talent, all our insight to optimizing virtual experience. And you know what? That needs to end, starting today.
 My rant is about the fact that reality is fundamentally broken, and we have a responsibility as game designers to fix it, with better algorithms and better missions and better feedback and better stories and better community and everything else we know how to make. We have a responsibility as the smartest people in the world, the people who understand how to make systems that make people feel engaged, successful, happy, and completely alive, and we have the knowledge and the power to invent systems that make reality work better. We have the responsibility to take what we’ve learned as an industry over the past 30 years and start making everyday life more like our games.
Can we fix it? Yes. We have the technology and the knowledge. Should we fix it? Hell yes. We have the power AND the responsibility. That doesn’t mean we should stop making escapist games. We need to make escapist games, there will always be a need to escape, and frankly, that’s how we’re going to learn more about what works, about how to engage brains and bodies and hearts. But will we fix it? Honestly, I have no idea.
We can take what we’ve learned by making games and apply it to reality, to make real life work more like a game – not make our games more realistic and lifelike, but make our real life more game like – so that when people all over the world wake up every morning, they wake up with a mission, with allies, with a sense of being a part of a bigger story, part of a system that wants them to be happy. We can do it, we should do it, and I hope that we will do it.
Styling tables presents lots of fun infodesign opportunities that are largely still untapped. Backbars is of course an example of that.
At a recent project, I stumbled on another subtle styling that I’m descriptively calling highlows from ignorance of precedents. Here it is, on the left part:
The idea is to highlight the first occurrence of a row value and to lowlight the next occurrences, until a new row value comes up and then the high switch is turned on again.
It’s a simple, useful way to help scan column values in category tables.
We were chatting. I was grasping for a great, recent quote that congealed my thoughts well but I couldn’t find it in my quote collection nor recall anything but the vaguest of phrasings.
What I remembered was that it was written by that famous author who committed suicide, I googled that but that’s sadly too broad a description. So I kept thinking and I also remembered that he was famously very much a fan of that famous swiss tennis player, whose name of course also evaded me. But googling was successful this time, retrieving not Martina Higgins, but ah, yes, Roger Federer. So now I google “federer author suicide” and that finally got me David Foster Wallace. With the name it was a snap to find the quote in my collection, and all of it happened real-timely enough to keep the flow of the IM conversation.
This sort of thing has happened often to me and I’m sure it has to you: googling for vague recall, for completing your thoughts. Instead of closing your eyes and willing an unconscious mind racking you outsorce to Google the unconvering of the tip of your tongue. What stroke me this time was the chaining and the speed (just-in-time-thinking). What got me to write this down was that in a few years such a thing will be so unremarkable I’m sure we’ll wonder how it felt before, if those in transition ever noticed how their mind was being steadily extruded.
The quote?
TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.
David Foster Wallace
This may just be the coolest interface ever. I thought it was a joke when I first read about it: interact with computers through scratching your fingernail on surfaces. Simply amazing.
From the prolific interface genius that is Chris Harrison. Jump to 3:14 for the best concrete example of the technology in use: controlling your phone with gestures on a normal table with nothing but a stethoscope on it.
Computation at its root is distilled physics, interacting with our everyday physics it can produce pure magic. Think of accelerometers as well, or the now commonplace touch displays.
Enough is enough. As much as I love Twitter, they can’t seem to get their search act together. Try it right now, search in Twitter for something you tweeted about last week. Most likely outcome is you won’t find it, at all. It’s lost, buried, retrievable only through tiresome, trial-and-error paging. Google does scarcely a better job. How can this be?
The Husband: Isn’t that why people keep diaries? To be read by someone else? Otherwise why keep them?
Nagiko: To know about themselves.
HARPOON is a simple script to give you back your tweets. Install it and navigate to your Twitter user page, \twitter.com/YOUR-USER-NAME (or, for that matter, to anyone’s user page). You’ll see a new item in your sidebar, Harpoon! →
Icons on Arts & Letters Daily is a simple script to add website icons to the links in Arts & Letters Daily. This adds a visual layer to the all-text site that enables you to quickly scan its sources.
Backbars on social link-sites is a GreaseMonkey script to turn the headlines and comments of social link-sites into ambient bar charts (of votes/diggs/views/users…) It works on Reddit, Delicious, Digg, Hacker News, and Stack Overflow (and MetaFilter now!).
The idea is to give you subtle non-verbal clues to improve your browsing experience almost subconsciously. The backbars don’t replace the count they represent, what they do is convey you its magnitude unobtrusively, and, crucially, compare that magnitude to those around it. So you can now see, almost without thinking, that, say, some comment is popular, but that there’s a comment around that’s twice as popular.
Once you have it, just start browsing at your favorite social link-site: Reddit, Delicious, Digg, Hacker News, and Stack Overflow.
 
 
 
It’s the first release but it’s very usable already, I hope.
I hope you enjoy and find it useful, please let me know what you think of it in the comments.
Wikipedia Backbars is a GreaseMonkey script to add histogram backgrounds to Wikipedia tables. It’s a great way to make tables more graphic, to visualize the patterns in the excellent, but usually very dry tables in Wikipedia.
It’s early days yet but it’s already usable enough to give it a spin.
To install it just download it from its UserScripts page. You need to have GreaseMonkey (version 0.8 or more), a Firefox extension, installed first.
To the Internet-based cognitive tools that are changing our lives — Wikipedia, Google, and the others of their kind, now and in the future.
his phrase. In 20 something words he nails down the present and future I want to contribute to, belong to.
Put in the effort. ”An overemphasis on intellect or talent—and the implication that such traits are innate and fixed—leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unmotivated to learn.” That, in a sentence, is Scientific American’s excellent The Secret to Raising Smart Kids. It’s really some of the best life advice you can get (intelligence is just a nice case example).
The result plays out in children like Jonathan, who coast through the early grades under the dangerous notion that no-effort academic achievement defines them as smart or gifted. Such children hold an implicit belief that intelligence is innate and fixed, making striving to learn seem far less important than being (or looking) smart. This belief also makes them see challenges, mistakes and even the need to exert effort as threats to their ego rather than as opportunities to improve. And it causes them to lose confidence and motivation when the work is no longer easy for them.
Praising children’s innate abilities, as Jonathan’s parents did, reinforces this mind-set, which can also prevent young athletes or people in the workforce and even marriages from living up to their potential. On the other hand, our studies show that teaching people to have a “growth mind-set,” which encourages a focus on effort rather than on intelligence or talent, helps make them into high achievers in school and in life.
[The other test group], meanwhile, focused on fixing errors and honing their skills. One [schoolchildren] advised himself: “I should slow down and try to figure this out.” Two schoolchildren were particularly inspiring. One, in the wake of difficulty, pulled up his chair, rubbed his hands together, smacked his lips and said, “I love a challenge!” The other, also confronting the hard problems, looked up at the experimenter and approvingly declared, “I was hoping this would be informative!” Predictably, the students with this attitude outperformed their cohorts in these studies.
In the growth mind-set classes, students read and discussed an article entitled “You Can Grow Your Brain.” They were taught that the brain is like a muscle that gets stronger with use and that learning prompts neurons in the brain to grow new connections. From such instruction, many students began to see themselves as agents of their own brain development. Students who had been disruptive or bored sat still and took note. One particularly unruly boy looked up during the discussion and said, “You mean I don’t have to be dumb?”
It’s a tough call, distinguishing talent from effort. Intimidation and discourage further muddle the waters. But the question is rather whether or not you want to get better. Talented or not, you will not get magically better without effort. Talented or not, you will get better with effort.
So rub your hands together, smack those lips, and join that wonderfully ridiculous schoolboy: “I love me a challenge!”
|
shorts
photos
RSS
email
