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.

credit: chazoid

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.

Earlier in my lifetime I sincerely believed that violence depicted in video games wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s just a video game, an artificial and often a poor representation of reality. I know that it’s fake–isn’t that all that matters?

Turns out I didn’t care about violence in my games–I just wanted to play violent games. But now that I can play and see whatever I want, I’ve dedicated a lot of time and effort discussing and thinking about the issue seriously. Thing is, video games aren’t “just another” medium for creative folks to play with. Video games are the first truly interactive form of art we’ve created due to its computational qualities (capable of true simulation). There’s been others before, but they’ve been extremely limited and rare (non-computational), and video games standardize the interaction as an accepted method of expression/entertainment. But what makes VGs potentially harmful is not only that they’re a complete audio/visual experience, but they’re fully interactive–they can react to our in-game decisions in ways not possible in other forms entertainment. This makes all the difference.

In books, the reader supplies the imagery for the story being told. With VGs, everything is drawn out for you, and since the PS2 generation of consoles (much earlier for PC games), the imagery has been vivid and detailed enough to desensitize us to blood and gore. Movies have been doing this for some time. However, with VGs, the experience is much more immersive (due to the interactivity) and therefore more potent as a medium of relaying new audio/visual experiences.

So after we’ve played so many games where we (not the distant actors seen in movies) hack apart and gun down virtual people, we no longer feel repulsed by scenes (real or not) that used to be considered disturbing and otherwise repugnant. Many of us wouldn’t think about doing such hideous things in real life, but because of the extreme desensitizing of doing the acts ourselves virtually, it becomes easier to do them in real life. Now, video games can be used as a tool to vent our frustrations, but more often they tend to teach us, subconsciously, that violence isn’t all that bad–in fact they teach that violence can be fun.

Think about that. Fighting and killing = fun? No. Sex is fun; building cool stuff is fun; going to new places is fun; playing real sports is fun. Harming other people (and other animals alike) as an action by itself is fucked up (unless you’re defending yourself!) but harming others as an act of entertaining yourself is ground for wiping you off the face of the planet. If you think violence is ok, then I’ll smash your face in and see how you feel about violence afterwards. (Come to think of it, inflicting pain on yourself and friends is a common passtime these days, but such activities have been around longer than video games. Some VGs simply enforce the belief that such violence is fun.)

And that’s the problem. Violence in video games is helping immensely to desensitize us to violence in real life, which builds the belief that violence in real life can be fun. That’s pretty fucked up and needs to stop.

But don’t get me wrong–there are some games that depict violence in a way that is actually disturbing, enhancing the story-telling, and not an explicit part of the gameplay. This way, the game is accurately telling the player that violence is wrong and not at all a good time. And that’s awesome. It’s other games where the objective or a level-progressing option is to beat, murder, and otherwise harm virtual humans that is disgusting and wrong.

The problem is that these types of violent games (that depict it wrong, like it’s some kind of reward) are readily available to ages that they should not be. If you’re a teenager or younger, you shouldn’t get to play those games because you’re still very suggestible (no, really) and in a fragile phase of your life. You’re still developing your mental abilities and fortifying perspectives of reality, so during these times you should be exposed to experiences that enforce creativity (with certain RPG games or non-violent sandbox-style games like Spore), strategic thinking (like Supreme Commander–it’s war, but there’s no humans getting brutalized), analytic skills (…I personally hate games of the puzzling variety, so I can’t offer any suggestions, but most people love them so you should have no trouble finding good ones on shit like Xbox Live or your local VG store), and many other valuable mental exercises, as well as spatial reasoning and even eye-hand coordination.

There are endless ways to make a game really fun, so developers who make bloody games either lack the talent and/or creative resources to do so, or they simply lack a mind of their own, much less a sense of social responsibility.

The first step towards real change is a change of perspective–a change in how you view the world.

I recently saw a couple movies that express excellent worldviews. The fact that they’re movies is incredibly important, because movies communicate messages in the most intelligible form known to man: stories. In Syriana, it isn’t about madmen bent on the destruction of the human race. It’s about a few ordinary men, doing their jobs. All they do is act in their best interests, and survive–even if it means securing themselves not in this world, but the next. It’s a symphony of tragedies. The relationship between these lives create the web of reality, and while their individual actions are local, together those actions make a global impact. The characters were closed-minded, paying no attention to the grand scheme of things, questioning nothing beyond their immediate environment or their place in it. That was their mistake. In the end some of them gain (or re-gain) a proper perspective, but sometimes it was too little too late.

In Lord of War, Nicolous Cage played the role of a salesman. He sold weaponry, and he was good at it. Arms proliferation is generally a Bad Thing, since there wouldn’t be the means for undeveloped countries to kill their own people or each other. Yes, they can use machetes (it’s happened) but shooting a gun is easier than hacking off limbs. But it doesn’t matter. This is a big world, no matter how small the internet makes it look. There are people in high places who, just as in Syriana, are just doing their job. What they do affects more people than they can imagine, but indeed they can’t imagine much if they don’t question their role in society and what that implies. Those that can’t are weak and do not wish to succeed, where success means leaving the world a better place than it was when you arrived. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.