Cold Constructs Blog

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It seems people are still trying to find ways in which humans differ from the the rest of the animal kingdom. Again and again we discover these “unique” human features in other animals. Yet we still search for the gap.

There is no gap. You’re a fucking animal — get over it. Look outside at the world around you. Do you see a particularly unique species? Just like other animals we use language, tools, mathematics and other abstract thought (watch documentaries about ravens or squirrels or dolphins etc.), plus we all murder, play, shun those different from us, cooperate, love… all traits seen in other animals.

If there was anything that separated us from other animals, it’s that we often look to the sky for redemption, as if there was something there that would save us all from this odd tragedy (clearly your gods have made the world so much better over the millennia). But I wouldn’t count delusion as a uniquely human trait either.

People can’t stand the fact that there’s nothing special about them. Against all evidence they will always rationalize anything to get them to feel better about themselves. This can be depressing, but there’s a reason for that.

Stubbornness aside, there’s an interesting lesson to be learned here: if you want to design pleasant experiences, flatter your users. Make them feel special. Pop up a smiley face every time they successfully submit a form. Ask them how they feel. Give them a useful tip for life. Just give them any kind of positive/thoughtful and personal reaction to their actions. You’d be surprised at how much positive feedback you’ll get afterwards.

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By far the biggest hurdle that grand innovations have to jump over is the law. The internet is the most recent grand innovation as it has changed the way we work, live and play. It’s more than a new frontier though since it not only freely gives individuals some of the productive powers previously held by commercial enterprises, but it also provides everyone with communicative powers that were previously impossible. So of course it’s going to break new ground on a scale that bares no precedent and change the rules of civilization entirely. Yet the problem is not public acceptance of the change — it’s the government that must be forced to accept it.

It is believed that the government makes laws and the people follow them. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Governments were actually established to formalize existing rules that spontaneously emerged from the day-to-day interactions of people holding common ground. Communities didn’t suddenly decide they wanted a few of their members to boss them around — they simply wanted to enforce their existing unwritten rules in order to prevent disputes that arise from a misinterpretation or misunderstanding of those rules. They needed a formalized set of laws that were clear to everyone. (This worked so well that they expanded the laws to encompass everyone of their culture. Voila, the nation-state.)

So when something as disruptive as the internet comes around, it is the government’s job to mediate the progress and, when the new patterns of behavior emerge and settle, to finally formalize those patterns as laws.

Unfortunately no one in office quite understands this historical process and so people continually have to fight the very government they established themselves in order to get it to do its job properly.

A nice article by Timothy B. Lee over at Ars Technica details this process by comparing the development of the internet with the development of property rights. Abundant land was a disruptive condition that current laws could not handle. But instead of adapting to the new conditions, the government fought to preserve old laws that clearly no longer applied (they’re just doing what they were told). Eventually the gov had no choice but to adapt to the people’s informal arrangements. It only took a few decades.

If we are to keep pace with the river of creativity and inventiveness that flows through our society, we will need to establish a political system that is just as swift and flexible. It’s a matter of trusting the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ and seeing patterns as quickly as they emerge — not acting brashly but at least be understanding of the process. If there’s a new medium that undermines almost every industrial-era business model, it should be pretty easy to spot. If you can’t see it, you should at least see the massive paradigm shift it’s leaving in its wake. In the case of the internet, it’s all of the court hearings being brought onto people who are simply acting the way that made the most sense to them — eg “I bought this CD, but I’d like to listen to it on my mp3 player or computer, so I’ll rip it.” Now it’s turning into “fuck CDs, I want download everything because it’s easier and even better.”

The onslaught of court cases should be the tell-tale sign of the shift, telling business and its laws that it needs to change because, quite simply, it’s the ‘common person’ who writes the rules and we’ve already done so. They can either catch up or we’ll force them to adapt. It’s kind of weird though, talking about ‘us’ and ‘them’ — they’re members of this society too, right? So what’s their problem?

Update: Probably this.

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Colin McGinn over at the Wall Street Journal posted a wonderful review of Watson’s book Against Happiness.

I must say that this view of happiness would go far to turn us towards a better direction in reality. Currently, it seems all we care about is happiness in and of itself. This neglects the better things in life such as satisfaction, which doesn’t necessarily end with happiness. With pure happiness (which is close to what McGinn correctly identifies as a kind of hedonism) there is no reason to make things better because they’re already so good. But how can they be? A quick look around the world and yes even around you personally and of course within your very own cognition… all is not well.

It should come as no surprise that ignoring the negativity would only result in a dull shell of a being. Take some time out to passively observe the patterns in nature. You will see that there is one fundamental principal on which the world operates: balance. Yes, too much CO2 is bad but so is too little. Certainly a lot of carnivores will ravage the lands if they’re in abundance, but without them the lands would be ravished by the herbivores. The systems of the world balance at the edge of order and chaos, achieving a beautiful synergy of opposing forces. (I’m not Buhddist, but I am a systemic thinker.)

So with a balance of happiness and sadness, we are brought away from superficiality, away from self-destructiveness, towards a keen understanding of life that can only be attained from a balanced perspective. Question yourself, the things people do and say, the way things happen. Do not blindly accept cultural norms or products as they are because everything we’ve made and done has flaws–whether it’s a flaw in usability, short-sightedness, resource usage, engineering, ignorance or what-have-you.

Interestingly, McGinn justly points out that Watson doesn’t identify sadness as having intrinsic value like happiness does. Why is happiness valuable? It obviously isn’t enough to simply be happy. As McGinn says, pessimism can lead to thoughtfulness, depth, or to add my own, the charge to improve things. Happiness, Watson argues, leads to stagnation and emptiness. So why shouldn’t sadness be held in at least as high regard as happiness? I know that I am much more satisfied with life when I am accomplishing something or fighting for something better, even though the battle inevitably brings along sadness. That is the nature of progress, movement, adventure. Embrace it why don’t we?!

Of course we shouldn’t become cursed wretches–we must approach it with a balanced perspective. Sadness is as good as happiness, not better or worse. They both have their place in our being. They can both lead to better living. But neither of them are ends in themselves. There is no end in life, but death itself. True satisfaction is in the adventure. As Lewis Black said about the book, “there are important lessons in our pain and.. a smile may make a better moment, but not a better world.” Dissatisfaction, after all, is what makes the world go round.

What a brilliant idea. Why should we continue to push sticks of graphite around? What unique purpose does it serve but to express ourselves? It is now obsolete with the onset of typing and voice-recognition software, therefore it should be forced into the category of “art”.

With the advent of computers it is entirely possible to get rid of paper and pen as a tool for writing. It was possible with the advent of typewriters, but now, with computers, it is preferable. Typing and talking is significantly faster, more accurate (no need to squint to discern letters in badly-written script) and altogether more humane.

Think about it.

UPDATE: After a 5-second discussion with my brother, it became clear that a good reason to teach handwriting is that not every place has power, for one, and also the fact that power sometimes goes out, in addition to the fact that batteries wear out at often in-opportune times. So, uh, it’ll be a while before this is a reasonable proposal.

Sometimes we get so caught up in our own little worlds that we simply take too much for granted (in this case, electricity and computers). It is in this way that bad ideas are able to parade as good ones.

Interesting food for thought, at any rate.

From the perspective of a game designer, people are stupid. Okay, that can be a perspective anyone can have, but the reason game designers have is that people aren’t buying the games they’re asking for.

Doesn’t make sense at all, does it? As a hardcore gamer (also casual when my Free Time Meter^tm is low), I’m deep into the gaming scene - forums, news feeds, modding, and so on. While in these trenches (actually they’re pretty comfy chairs) it’s obvious that originality is lacking and every gamer knows it. We want more original titles! But hey, don’t pay attention to the sales figures on that last Madden game or MMO expansion - we really don’t like endless franchises (pay no attention to that Final Fantasy XIII).

Yet every time an excellent original title comes out, it falls short of even the most conservative financial expectations. Okami, Rez and Psychonauts are just a few of the many original titles that hit huge critical acclaim but fell flat on store shelves. Why?

It seems there’s a pattern to all this. I’m probably wrong, but I wouldn’t know that until you said something (there’s a comment section for a reason eh). Anyway, it appears that each original yet unsuccessful title had a vague objective (or many diverse objectives) like attack monster in a variety of unfamiliar ways or explore this illogical realm and so on. On the other hand, all the successful titles were very clear - win football games or kill anything that moves or conquer bases by building your own and so on.

So could it be that the reason original games are failing in the market is because we don’t understand what they’re about in the 5 seconds we take to consider it? This isn’t too far fetched, considering the fact that the average American has the attention span of the average goldfish (goldfish are shiny). If we don’t understand something at a glance, well, forget about it. Literally.

But is this really surprising? We’re overloaded with massive amounts of information every hour, so in order to continue functioning well enough to do our jobs (studying or writing memos, whatever) we have to be damn good at filtering out the noise in the signal. There’s already a ton of stuff about the attention economy and whatnot, so this certainly isn’t new. What is new is how we’re coping with it all - we still haven’t quite figured that out yet. We’re still developing the necessary tools to get us back to pre-internet info loads.

So how do we design around this? In games, the way I would do it is to present a very clear objective, but while you’re playing the game, slowly introduce a new and (hopefully) interesting gameplay mechanic, without ever confusing the player about what the goal is. If you try to slap the player with a new concept from moment they look at the cover, forget about it. Alternatively, you could take the Katamari approach and have the only objective be so incredibly simple that it could be translated to the potential player in so few words or pictures.

This could also be applied to anything else really. You just have to make sure your design is a natural extension of what they already know in order to keep people’s attention - grabbing it is easy. Even better though, you could stick to simple designs. (But oh wait you have to have real talent to do that, so it’s an unlikely course of action for most designers, unfortunately.) There’s a lot of hubbub regarding simplicity in everyday designs (software, internet and other types of interfaces, other products or even architecture and so on) and how we should probably scale back the features to the point where the purpose of the object is pronounced so clearly that the user wouldn’t have to think twice about it. Because they won’t even if we want them to.