If you live in one of the temperate zones on Earth, you’ve probably been beset by mosquitoes at some point. Outside the tropics, where malaria and numerous other diseases are a scourge, mosquitoes are (thankfully) mostly an annoyance.
Somewhere in human evolution, the above was (presumably) an evolutionary advantage. Perhaps it’s actually because snakes are rarer than mosquitoes, and it is more possible to avoid them. Perhaps it’s because the defense against snakes and mosquitoes is different. For snakes, avoiding them or fighting them off might be the best survival tactic, as each individual snake could kill you. For mosquitoes, the ‘go away’ reaction to annoyance is perhaps actually the best defense, as we automatically wave our hands to shoo them away.
Interestingly, if you think about it, we find mosquitoes annoying, but mosquitoes didn’t evolve to be annoying, we evolved to be annoyed by mosquitoes[1]. The buzzing about, the whine of their wings, cause automatic reactions from our auditory to our reflex systems.
But what about swatting? I know that I almost automatically swat at mosquitoes, either to grab them out of the air, or swat them when they’re trying to drink my blood….but I don’t know if that’s an actual evolved automatic response, or something learned.
What is your reaction to mosquitoes? What are your other (possibly adaptive) phobias and automatic reactions?
[1] Whether we evolved from being scared to being annoyed, or from ignoring them/thinking of them as food to being annoyed is anyone’s guess….or perhaps more accurately, someone else’s research.
The utopia of Star Trek. Teams of people working together to solve problems, living in a post-scarcity society, focused on science and exploration.
This is sometimes called ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’ (from the Atlantic article), sometimes called ‘Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism'[1] (by the memes).
USS Enterprise, flying through space, trailing a rainbow, with the caption ‘Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism’ (Source: knowyourmeme)
One would think that if this was truly our goal as a species, we would be working together, working tirelessly to get ourselves closer to this post-scarcity utopia. But we aren’t. Something is getting in the way (probably many somethings). Here is my (tentative)[2] list of obstacles, each to be explored in a subsequent post (linked from here when I’m done):
My list of possible Reasons Why We Can’t Have Nice Things:
1) Humans just don’t want nice things. Either because they’re uncomfortable with the required introspection or amount of change required, or because it interferes with or would reduce something they want instead (cf. ‘finite games vs. infinite games'[3])
2) The Ideology of Conservatism. Much of conservative ideology is built around unnecessary hierarchies and the presumption that humanity is better off when more people are worrying about the lower levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy.
3) Capitalism. Somewhat related to the above, the goals of capital in most of its incarnations are at odds with post-scarcity, and it tends to shy away from incarnations that could be congruent with it, often as a result of:
4) Regulatory Capture. Any system that would lead to post-scarcity must have some boundaries or regulation. Unfortunately, any such regulations are enforced by humans, and humans are subject to ‘capture’ by those they are meant to regulate (cf. The Big Short)
5) The inability/unwillingness of humans to scale delegation or decision-making. Caleb Gamman mentioned that Film Studio execs attempt to concentrate power and film ‘IP’, but are unable to flexibly use all of the resources (of various types) that they have concentrated, being only able to focus on a small number of things at once, leaving large amounts of resources to languish or be inefficiently used.
6) Others to be named later
Let me know what you think! What did I leave out? What did I get wrong? Should we be aiming for something different as a species?
[1] This phrase feels surprisingly difficult, probably due to the ‘Green Great Dragon‘ problem
A tweet by Matthew Anderson from the BBC quoting Mark Forsyth’s ‘The Elements of Eloquence’: “Things native English speakers know, but don’t know how we know: “adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac. It’s an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out. And as size comes before colour, green great dragons can’t exist.”
[2] Tentative for now, as I write the other posts that make up this series. This list may change, the ordering may change.
[3] In this context, I’m referring to the difference between a ‘finite game’, one which is played to gain power or ‘win’ against other humans, and an ‘infinite game’, which is played for the betterment of one’s self. I was introduced to this concept by the title of the book:’Finite and infinite games’ by James P. Carse, which purportedly plays with some of these concepts.
[Note that this post may include mild spoilers for the Gold Box games ‘Pool of Radiance’ and ‘Curse of the Azure Bonds’, as well as ‘TES IV: Oblivion’.]
How ‘large’ is a game? How many ‘encounters’ does it have? How many ‘quests’? (And how does the type of encounters & quests affect how large the game feels?)
In an attempt to quantify my feelings, I’m working on ways to measure the ‘size’ of games, and it’s become clear that we need some standard definitions.
Most Computer Role-Playing Games (CRPGs) have the concept of ‘encounters’ and ‘quests’.
‘Encounters’ are generally defined ‘this is who you meet/this is what happens when you go to this place’.
‘Quests’ are generally defined as ‘Someone asks you to go somewhere and do something’.
Encounters are simpler, so we’ll investigate them first.
Many aspects of these definitions are cribbed from the pen and paper language around RPGs, where there will be a map with a numbered encounter key, describing what happens in each location. This visual language has persisted in ‘clue books’ and online hint/walkthroughs, such as this one, from the clue book of one of my favourite CRPGs, ‘Pool of Radiance’:
Map from the clue book for the CRPG Pool of Radiance showing ‘Kuto’s Well’. Note the well featured prominently in the center, and the multiple locations possible for some of the encounters.
In the picture above, you can see 5 numbered encounters, with some of them happening or being able to happen in multiple locations.
In this particular instance, encounter ‘1’ is an encounter with some Kobolds who are trying to sneak away from you, with a chance of occurring each time you enter one of those squares. Encounter ‘2’ is a large multi-wave battle that starts whenever you enter one of those locations (triggering an ambush).
Other similar encounter keys might have a ‘each time you enter one of these locations for the first time, ‘.
So, how do you count the number of ‘encounters’?
Let’s break down the definition of ‘encounter’:
– You go to a place[1]
– You see something/meet someone/meet something
Encounter ‘1’ above triggers when you enter the first place out of a logical set of places that you enter, that probably feels like one encounter for these purposes, as it’s happening in a logical place.
Encounter ‘2’ is similar.
At the opposite end are ‘random encounters’, which are generally used to use up player resources, or to create a sense of urgency, so that players don’t dawdle[2]. These I will generally count, but count separately from ‘placed’ encounters. (Edit: S mentions that random encounters, for example in Pokemon games are often used by the player to ‘grind’ or ‘farm’ XP, to level up their characters outside of the more story-based game content. Interestingly, one could measure how much a game is in the ‘survival horror’ genre by how difficult and resource-consuming random encounters are (cf. SystemShock).)
Somewhere are in the middle are random encounters which have a sequence of some sort, but are not tied to any one particular location, such as those in the ‘random’ dungeons in Curse of the Azure bonds:
Map from the clue book for the CRPG Curse of the Azure Bonds, showing the first level of the ‘Shadowdale Dungeon’. Note that ‘All encounters are random’
Game locations designed in this way have the same ‘number’ of encounters, and even though they occur in a defined order, telling a story, the fact that they happen entirely at random, without regard for the location or geography, breaks immersion terribly (at least for me). They tend to feel emptier than other encounters, and (to me), only contribute a fractional amount.
What if a place is different when you go back? Is that a second encounter? I don’t know yet. I’ll have to assess that when I get to examples.
What if you have the same encounter 10 times, with each in an identical but seemingly logical place(such as guard posts)? Is that really 10 encounters? Not really…but it also doesn’t really feel like only one. I posit that it’s somewhere between. I’ve been using a log function internally, probably with base e, as base 10 feels too large and base 2 feels too small, but I could easily see it be something else, where the first few seem ‘real’, but after that they run together much more.
Now, let’s move on to ‘quests’
We can break ‘quests’ down into:
– Someone asks you to do something
– You go somewhere
– You do a thing
Pretty simple, right? This includes all ‘fedex’ fetch quests, escort quests, and even most of the ‘escape from this location’ quests.
The trick is when one of the above is missing, such as when you accidentally find the object of a quest before someone tells you to go looking for it (VLDL has a humorous portrayal of this here). This is generally still defined as the same ‘quest’ in the game notes, as well as in strategy guides, but some (such as S) believe that the ask is required (and without the ask, this is simply ‘world-building’).
Sometimes, no one asks you to do something, but there is still a reward when you do it (such as this quest from Oblivion[3]), or they are happy that you’ve done it (such as the dungeon below Kuto’s Well above, where you get a quest reward for defeating the bandit horde of the notorious Norris the Gray). I would still call those ‘quests’, though. Perhaps there’s a difference between ‘Quests’, which require all three, and ‘quests’, which are ‘whatever the game designer says’. 😀
What if you don’t need to go somewhere? This might just be an encounter, or if it’s particularly involved, it could be an all talking interpersonal drama gaming session (or even a game within a game….)
What if the ‘thing you need to do’ is just getting to the destination? I feel like this one can go either way. Most of the quests in the Oblivion Assassins’ guild have a ‘pre-quest’ which involves getting the assignment. I’m not sure why they did it this way, but it kind of makes sense that an assassins’ guild would want it to be difficult enough to figure out what they were doing, that it might be a quest just to get to the dead drop to find the assignment. However, about half of the locations in Curse of the Azure Bonds are just places that the party has to traverse to get somewhere in order to do something important. To me, this doesn’t really feel like a separate quest (sometimes not even like a separate location), and in a lot of ways makes the game feel smaller.
What do you think? How would you define an ‘encounter’ or a ‘quest’? Do you disagree with any of my definitions above? Let me know in the comments below!
[1] There are variants where encounters can come to you, but that’s usually a different type of story/measurement and is out of scope. This method would probably treat these as one encounter, or you could get really fine-grained and treat that as an entire adventure with ‘locations’ represented by the state of affairs at each step.
[2] There’s also a theory that random encounters are useful because they allow for a differential in stakes between different encounters by having lower-stakes encounters.
[3] I can’t begin to describe how frustrating this quest was, and how difficult it was to do, even with the walkthrough page open beside me. Probably the most ‘realistic’ of the ‘finding something hidden’ quests out there, though.
Spock is the center[1] of Star Trek. Many othershave written (or videoed) about this, either about Spock himself (and Leonard Nimoy’s excellent portrayal), or the ‘part-human’ outsider archetype that has been present in every Star Trek show/movie.
Perhaps my favourite Spock scene (or at least the one that I find myself quoting most regularly) is this one from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Shortly after having his katra rejoined with his body, Spock is working through a set of tests of memory and problem solving across numerous disciplines, when, after successfully navigating through and solving myriad technical problems three at a time, he is blocked and stumped by the simple and very ‘human'[2] question: “How do you feel?”
Screenshot of the “How do you feel?” scene from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
I suspect that many other neurodivergent folks also saw a lot of themselves in Spock. Whether it was aspirational (such as his ability to quickly solve problems across disparate disciplines very quickly in critical situations), or because we connected with his ‘outsider’ nature (his slow learning to be more in touch with his human side, or Data’s yearning to be more human), or even because we also wanted to be part of a tightly-knit team, where the science officer would figure out part of the problem, and pass it off to the leader, who would assemble it into action and a solution.
Much of this blog has been about chronicling my journey to better understand myself, from my first post on paying more attention to and bringing out fleeting thoughts, to my entire category ‘Thoughts on Thoughts‘. Through all of this, I continue to search to understand how I feel and why I feel the way I do. In a way, I think[3] that working to understand how one feels is fundamental to the human condition, and we do ourselves a disservice by not investing in investigating ourselves in this way.
There are fundamental questions humans have been asking ourselves since time immemorial: ‘Why are we here?’ and ‘What is our purpose?’. Perhaps a lot of the answers boil down to ‘How do you feel?’
[1] Many of the meanings of ‘center’ are applicable here, whether it’s the logical ‘heart’, or the ‘focus’, the self-insert for an otherwise under-served audience, or even the person or archetype that many plots revolve around, whether it’s solving problems or being put in peril.
[2] This is part of Amanda Grayson (Spock’s mother)’s work to help Spock reattach his human side, now that his katra has been reattached ‘in the Vulcan way.
You can also see Spock’s answer to the question at the end of the movie, showing that he now better understands friendship and himself (source for this insight):
