Month: March 2010

Yesterday some friends and I were discussing the advantages of working in research (as opposed to working for a company developing products). I said that to me the advantages of working in research are neatly encapsulated within a joke I heard when I was a boy. It goes like this.

A man is walking down the street, and he sees a boy in an alley with a bow and arrow. The boy is shooting arrows at a wall which is fairly far away. The man sees that the boy has already shot a number of arrows into the wall, and each arrow has hit the exact center of a bullseye.

Impressed, the man asks the boy “Could you show me how to shoot like that?” The boy says, “Sure, if you give me fifty dollars.” The man decides this is a good deal, considering how skilled the boy is. He hands the boy a fifty dollar bill, and the boy says, “Watch, I’ll show you how to do it.”

The boy then picks up his bow, and shoots an arrow against the wall. Then he walks up to the wall, picks up a piece of chalk, and draws a series of concentric circles around the arrow head.

And that, my friends, is why I like working in research.

There is something overwhelming about a professional conference, particularly on a day when you give a major presentation. To the people in the audience there is the illusion that the enthusiastic people up onstage have an infinite well of energy, that the speakers are drawing upon some magical elixar of perfect focus and endless enthusiasm.

This is an illusion. This moment of heightened performative reality carries its price. What actually happens in my case is that for the duration of the talk I go into a high adrenaline state, buoyed by my excitement at the message. But then afterward I feel drained, even dazed, as though the Muse has started charging me interest for the time I have spent in her company. It’s all I can do to get through the rest of the afternoon.

But every once in a while — like today — that price is worth it. If you can really tap into something universal for a half an hour or so, and get across a message that is truly important, or at least get people to think and to dream of what might be possible in this world, then maybe, just maybe you have helped to steer the flow of history toward a more positive place.

Spending the day in San Francisco, I am struck by the difference in the general feeling between this place and New York City. NY has a reputation (mostly left over, I suspect, from the wild days of the seventies and early eighties) of being an edgy place, a city of danger. And yet NYC these days is rather staid and predictable. Even the once dangerous strip on 42nd Street, at one time the province of thieves, prostitutes and drug dealers, has become an extension of the Walt Disney Company. Where Ratso Rizzo once stalked the naked streets, parents now take their kids to see “The Lion King”.

But San Francisco, despite its upbeat image of a place out of a Tony Bennett song, retains an edgy sense of danger. Walking down these streets at night, you feel the desperation of people hanging on to reality by their fingernails, of street bums and druggies and shadowy figures who long ago stopped taking their meds.

By day this is simply a lovely place, but by night there is a side to this city that emerges with the darkness. San Francisco, beneath the beauty of its rolling hills and ocean views and lovely houses painted in pastels, can be a dark and even terrifying place. I love to visit this city, but I am not sure I could bear to live in a place where so many people wander the night who seem to be so terribly lost.

The first time I traveled to Europe, when I was in my twenties and young and foolish (as opposed to just, um, foolish), I managed to get my passport picked from out of my pocket somewhere in Paris. When I realized I no longer had a passport, I did what any clueless young American man would do under the circumstances. I reported the theft to the Paris police. Les gendarmes, who didn’t seem particularly interested in my predicament, took down my story and issued me a piece of paper which said, essentially, that I had declared a stolen passport.

The next day I took a train to Italy to see friends. As was usual in the train, there wasn’t really any passport control. And so I found myself, a young twenty-something American, in Italy without possession of a passport (although I did have a nice note from the Paris police).

Three days later, I was travelling in the back seat of a car down to Rome, when we were pulled over in a random search by the Italian national police. These were not your usual police — their mission was to find (and hopefully neutralize) any international terrorists who might have managed to sneak into the country. To this end, they carried rather fearsome Israeli made Uzi submachine guns.

My Italian friend got out of the car and spoke with the police for a few minutes. When she came back, she explained that they needed to see our identification. Everyone else in the car brought out their passport or national identity card. I produced my little note from the Parisian police.

When she realized that was all I had, my friend got very worried. She warned me not to say or do anything funny (as in humorous). When she handed over our papers to the police, they became quite alarmed. We were ordered out of the car, and I had the opportunity to know what it is like to have several Uzi submachine guns trained in your direction.

They began speaking loudly and insistently in Italian. I told my friend to explain to them that it was ok — since I had a flight back to the U.S. the next day. Their response was even louder and more insistent. My friend, translating, explained that they were saying that I was not leaving the country. In my youthful ignorance, I had not realized that you can’t just get on an airplane and fly across the Atlantic ocean from Rome to New York with nothing but a helpful note from the Parisian police.

The U.S. Embassy in Rome was closed the next day, but fortunately one of my Italian friends knew somebody, so we managed to get an appointment anyway. The very nice woman there typed up a letter for me, an official communiqué from the United States government declaring that it was ok for me to board the plane and fly to JFK airport without a passport.

I thought that would be that, but there was a bit of a kerfuffle at Rome Fiumicino Airport. The Italian official at departure refused to accept the letter — in fact he became quite upset when he saw it. After a while a representative from the airline figured out the problem. The official didn’t seem to know or care what the letter said, he only looked for the official stamped seal — and the woman at the embassy had not stamped the letter. More loud and insistent talking ensued, after which I was eventually permitted on the plane.

Somewhat chastened, and realizing that I was one lucky young American, I boarded my flight to New York. The flight itself was uneventful, but when I got off, of course I was arriving in the U.S. without a passport (and with only, I now knew, an unstamped letter). Following protocol, the Immigration officers ushered me into a small room for the mandatory interrogation.

I was quite nervous. In my youthful imagination I was picturing the worst — they might decide I was an international terrorist after all and lock me up. This is was my general state of mind when I was sitting in a small room with a very grim looking man in a uniform, who I understood was about to ask me a series of questions.

There was a pause while he looked down at the papers in front of him. Then came the first question. The man in uniform asked: “Where were you born.” Without really stopping to think, I replied: “Bronx hospital.”

Apparently this was not an answer that would be given by an international terrorist. The man shrugged and said “OK, you can go.”

My guess is that few terrorists know about Bronx Hospital, and even fewer have a trace of a Bronx accent.

I wrote a post here some months ago about what it is like to experience of really good quality telepresence. But I didn’t address the question of what this technology might mean for physical travel.

At first blush it might seem that telepresence — were it to become a raging and universal success — would put a dampener on air travel. But I’ve been wondering whether this is really true. The effect might be quite the opposite.

Many of us remember the predictions of the “paperless office”. The thinking, as computers started to take hold in the work place, was that there would no longer be any need for paper. Printers, scanners, inter-office envelopes, manila folders — in the age of computers these were all supposed to go the way of the slide rule. Yet as we know, they are still here, arguably stronger and more omnipresent than ever.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the ability to speak with complete fidelity to people in another part of the world will only increase the desire of people to meet in person, thereby causing travel around the world not to decrease, but rather to increase.

Today is a travel day. Which means, more or less, time spent in an airport followed by a long cross-country flight. I realize that such experiences are associated with alienation (as highlighted, notably, in the recent book-turned-film “Up in the Air”). And yet, as Dean pointed out in his comment on yesterday’s post about upgrade narratives, sometimes what you really need is a short vacation from your usual self.

Like most of my friends, I’m a fairly sociable person. There are few things I find more wonderful than great conversation with someone I really like. And yet there is something to be said for the temporary monk-like existence of the air traveller. Once I board my flight I will be off the internet, and then it will just be me and my thoughts, unconnected to either coast, and therefore out of touch with any of my social spheres.

I look forward to these hours of enforced isolation as prime opportunities to slow down, to reflect, and perhaps to create. With nothing to distract me from the immediate, with blessed (if temporary) respite from emails pulling me back to my many waiting obligations, I can take time to think about something for more than a few minutes at a stretch.

And then of course, after the flight comes a kind of homecoming — the friends at the other side of the journey, the catching up, swapping stories of mutual acquaintances, happy reunions over a bottle of wine or two.

But these moments are made sweeter by the journey itself, that space in between, the hours with no company but my own. I am happy to be traveling on an airline that provides no in-flight internet service. For when I greet my friends at the end of my flight, there is that much more chance that the person they encounter will (at least temporarily) be free from that harrying day-to-day which plagues us all in this internet age, with our unkempt electronic tangle of obligations and emails and follow-up meetings.

With any luck, by the time I deplane — after I’ve had some hours away from our vast shared electronic echo chamber — my friends will be greeting a more authentic version of me.

Many computer games are structured as “upgrade narratives”. Your avatar wanders around in a fanciful world visiting far-off lands, going on quests and slaying demons, while gradually accumulating powers, tools and assorted weaponry. This basic structure pertains whether the game is a single player experience or a massively multiplayer shared world that contains millions of other participants.

Sometimes there are variants. For example in the “Half Life” universe, demons are replaced by monstrous aliens from another dimension. But that is merely a narrative flourish. The core idea stays the same — go around solving tests of skill and coordination, while gradually amassing the tools of power that let you “level up” so that you can take on progressively greater challenges.

Of course none of this is essentially different from the old games of “Adventure” and “Zork” from thirty five years ago. Except that now we have graphics rather than text. But the basic idea is the same: Whatever the quest or battle or other challenge, you’re going for those upgrades, that potion of invisibility, laser death ray, cloak of invulnerability or Scroll of Truth that will give you greater powers, so that you can take on other interesting challenges.

It was only today that I realized that this narrative structure is a perfect description of “The Wizard of Oz”, where the reward for successfully battling evil is a shiny new brain, or new heart, or infusion of courage. Of course Frank L. Baum was going for irony — the supposedly brainless Scarecrow was endlessly clever and resourceful, the Tin Man had enough heart for three adventurers, and the Cowardly Lion was as able as his companions to see the adventure through to the end.

But perhaps that precise point is the reason we enjoy upgrade narratives, when they are presented as computer games. It is not that we seek what we don’t have, but rather we seek what we already value and understand. Only the warrior truly values a better gun, just as only the spy truly values a cloak of invisibility.

I think we enjoy these structures because they reflect what we know to be true in our own lives: We seek what we are. It is not the unknown that we look for, when we go looking for adventure, but rather the possibility of finding ourselves.

The concept I described yesterday — the difference between those we love and the generic idea we have of those we love — is a kind of pattern. You can transcribe this pattern to many different contexts, and yet it remains surprisingly robust. Othello’s tragedy was linked to his problem in seeing Desdemona — he was too invested in his idea of Desdemona.

Similarly, we often have trouble distinguishing between our leaders — with all of their strengths and foibles — and our idea of a leader. This is one reason we often feel so betrayed when they turn out to have the same human weaknesses that we regularly observe — and tolerate without difficulty — in others.

There are many such patterns in the relationships between people, from the way we tend to see the woto the ways we often reenact our (possibly dysfunctional) childhoods in relationships with friends, lovers and co-workers. It would be easy to see how one could build an architecture of human relations from such patterns and the larger patterns that form as they combine.

Which puts me in mind of “A Pattern Language”, the groundbreaking 1977 book of Christopher Alexander and others. That work pulled together many connected ideas about architecture — buildings, gardens, communal spaces, windows, entrances, pathways, and all of the many elements in our built world — to create an entire language for describing good architectural design.

Perhaps we can do the same with patterns of relationships between people. I wonder, would it be possible to build “A Pattern Language” to describe the many pathways, roads and bridges, hidden rooms and secret fortresses that we build upon the human heart?

I was having a conversation this evening with a friend and she described an odd sensation that can occur, after she has gone away from home for a while (say, on a several month trip to another country). My friend said that sometimes there is a moment, when she first sees her lover after such an absence, in which things can seem a bit strange. She gives her partner a kiss, which is very pleasant, but somehow something seems not right. It’s as though this person she knows so well has become somehow vaguely unfamiliar.

She went on to say that this experience is extremely transitory. After a few moments, things tend to snap back into place, and the old feeling of familiarity returns. Yet she wonders at that moment of temporary weirdness.

I shared with her my theory: That she is seeing the difference between her lover and “her lover”. They seem to be one and the same, but they are not. The former is a flesh and blood person, whereas the latter is a concept in one’s head.

Since childhood, we each harbor some notion of romantic attachment. When we are ten years old, this might go no further than holding hands. Even then, the underlying emotions are all there, albeit in a nascent state. One day we meet someone, and these emotions become projected onto that individual. The person becomes our lover, and the traits of the real person become merged with the concept of “my lover” we’ve already been carrying around in our head.

After a long absence, our mental model of our lover can drift, perhaps just a little bit. We don’t have the actual person with us, so we fall back upon the idea of that person. Some part of our mind recalls not the individual, but the concept we’ve been carrying around with us since childhood.

This can lead to the odd moment or two. Fortunately, the sensation is fleeting, which makes sense. After all, the entire purpose of the lover we’ve carried within our heart since childhood is to prepare us for the real person — the unique individual who has won our heart.

Today I was in a discussion with a group of people who study games from a literary perspective. The question was floated as to why people play games, since they are not useful.

Now, my perspective on things in general is that if something is highly pleasurable, then it is biologically connected to something that has had survival value for our species. We derive great pleasure from the taste of food because eating is essential to our survival. The same goes for sex, and for our feelings about our children. The greater the inherent survival value of a particular behavior, the greater is the associated pleasure.

Of course this can all be subverted. The pleasure principle associated with consuming food, when it runs amok, can kill you, and sexual appetites can become highly self destructive. The point is not that things can’t go wrong, but rather that the feeling of pleasure wouldn’t even exist in the first place, unless there were some underlying biological trait that had been selected for over an evolutionary time scale.

Which is why today’s conversation reminded me of an experience I had in the Seattle Zoo about ten years ago. I was in the part of the zoo where they keep the baby animals. In one enclosed yard were the young of some species of exotic deer. The males of this species have antlers when they are adults, but the males in this particular group just had stubby little knobs, where antlers were yet to grow.

In the middle of the yard was a big rock, about the size of a smallish table. I was surprised to see that the male baby deer had organized themselves to play a game around this rock. Half the deer lined up on one side of the rock, and the other half lined up on the other side. All of a sudden the two deer at the front of their respective queues would run up, leap onto the rock, and butt heads with each other. Then these two deer would each jump off the rock, circle back around, and get in the back of their respective lines.

For as long as I watched, the male baby deer continued to play this game. They never seemed to tire of it, and they were all clearly having a great time.

In that moment I realized that “fun” for the young of a species (including humans) comes from activities that exercise and develop skills that will become not only useful, but deadly serious, once the individual grows up. Young deer butt heads, and young humans play with dolls, play fireman, and play soldiers.

I am fairly confident that we are drawn to games (not only as children but also as adults) because they exercise and develop skills that allow us to function better. We can’t always recognize or identify what those specific skills are, but if the game is fun, that’s a very good indicator that important skill building is taking place.

In this very fundamental sense, all games are serious games.