Rather ambitious title, eh? I'll exceed the ambition of the title with some oversimplified talk about the evolution of the brain. I'm going to set the neurophysiologists rolling in the aisles with this little gem of crayon-level anatomy:
There are three basic levels in the brain. The lowest and earliest level is concerned strictly with internal body functions: reminding the lungs to take a breath every now and then, making sure that bowel movements take place before the intestines explode, and so forth. These are the autonomic functions. There are also the basic motor functions: managing the contraction and relaxation of muscles in just the right sequence to get the legs moving along properly. Just about every animal has something like this.
The next level up concerns itself with responses to external stimuli. This is roughly what some people call the "reptilian brain". Now, even a fly will respond to external stimuli; ever try to swat one? But there's still a level of brain activity in which responses to external stimuli are in some way based on what has been learned about the external environment, and it is this element of learning that I sieze upon as most characteristic of this second level. A fly will dodge my oncoming flyswatter, but it will dodge any large dark mass. But a reptile is capable of recognizing components of its environment and responding to them differently. I don't want to suggest that reptiles think; I'm instead trying to differentiate the truly primitive nervous systems of bugs, worms, and suchlike, from the more advanced nervous systems of snakes, iguanas, and Barney.
The key point that I want to make about this reptilian brain is that its basic pattern of behavior is instantaneous stimulus-response. That is, gila monsters don't sit around contemplating their decisions. Following the dictates of Yoda, they "do, or do not." If the gila monster doesn't know how to respond to a situation within a few hundred milliseconds, he'll never know.
Let's not dismiss this structure as primitive. The basic design is something that I call "schemolic", and is capable of integrating a large number of considerations into a single decision. Here's all this data streaming in from the sense organs, and it must be processed immediately. If the gila monster sees large moving objects, lots of dark shadows, and feels low-frequency vibrations through its skin, it integrates all of this data together and concludes in an instant that something very large is approaching, a situation calling for escape. Another set of stimuli will be integrated into the nearly opposite conclusion that there is prey nearby, and it should start chomping. Whatever happens, it happens in one fell neurophysiological swoop. To summarize: gila monsters don't contemplate.
This instantaneous integrative aspect of the reptilian brain has a weakness: how can a complex of past experience be integrated into the decision-making process? It's easy to design a brain that is hard-wired to respond to one set of stimuli with one response and another set of stimuli with another response. But how can Steve Stegasaurus (or whatever they call him these days) recognize that Tommy Triceratops is big but harmless, while Al Allosaurus just as big and dangerous? You really can't afford to hardwire all that information into place; if you did, Al would just grow kids who look roughly like Tommy and Steve's kids won't stand a chance. No, you need a more flexible process, something that allows greater responsiveness to change. You need a system for learning.
But there's another constraint: whatever is learned must be integrated into the rest of the shoot-from-the-hip thinking that goes on inside that reptilian brain. You can't just store data on good guys and bad guys into some remote corner of the brain, then go look it up at your leisure. Remember, reptilian thinking is all-together-now stuff. How to proceed?
The solution to this problem (as I speculate) will surprise you: emotion. I will suggest that emotion is nothing more than experience distilled into a form that is instantly integrable into the decision-making process. For example, consider the following scenario: you're walking down the street when suddenly you confront your old enemy, Snidely Adams. Your heartrate soars, adrenalin pours into your system, your teeth grind in anticipation, and your stomach prepares extra stomach acid for the impending meal. A second later, you pass Snidely without so much as a snarl or a spit, and immediately start regretting all the clever insults you failed to heap upon him. Note how your emotional reaction was already far advanced before your cognitive reaction had the opportunity to figure out that there was something to think about.
Emotion is pre-computed thinking. It boils all sorts of experience down into simple behavioral terms. We don't bother remembering whether Snidely bit our ankle or our shin &emdash; all we care about is the fact that he injured us. We take our experiences and digest them down to terms that are immediately and operationally significant. This view of reality may be simplistic and unfair, but it sure works well when you suddenly bump into a carnivore.
These are not useless observations. Remember, we're trying to model human behavior, and we face much the same problem that the reptiles face: we can't afford to carry out extensive, time-consuming computations. We need fast results. So take a tip from the dinosaurs: use emotion as a means of pre-digesting experience. It'll save you megabytes of RAM and lots of cycles. And it'll have to do until the industry evolves a true PC sapiens.
Now we come to the third and most complex layer of the brain, the mammalian brain, and once again I will give the neurophysiologists heart attacks with my blithe simplifications. I'm going to say that the operational significance of the mammalian brain lies in sequential processing. Remember, the reptilian brain is an all-at-once, holistic, schemolic brain. It integrates all the sensory data and triggers a single response. But the mammalian brain tackles more complex problems involving sequentiality. For example, I can dangle a toy mouse in front of my cat, and then drop it into a shoe &emdash; the cat will reach into the shoe to retrieve it. The cat does not see the mouse, but remembers that the mouse was over the shoe a moment ago. It infers from the sequence of events that the mouse is inside the shoe, and that if it reaches into the shoe, it will recover the mouse. This is sequential thinking.
Sequential thinking requires a fundamental leap in neural organization: temporary storage of sensory data for later integration into processing. Consider the cat's processing of sensory data. The cat's initial observation is that there is no mouse. Remember, the sensory data is not that there is no longer any mouse, but rather that there is no mouse. In other words, in order to realize that the mouse has disappeared, the cat must first remember that she had seen a mouse a moment earlier. Only when the old sensory data ("mouse visible") is combined with the new sensory data ("mouse invisible") does the cat have a basis for deducing that the mouse is inside the shoe. The sensory data stream, rather than flowing directly into a processing network which immediately responds, must now be stored temporarily for the more complex processing. The big idea behind the mammalian brain can thus be described in computer terms as a buffer, and it serves the same purpose. When we respond instantaneously to input, as in an action game, we route the input data directly to the response routines, but when we intend to carry out more complex calculations with the input, we store it into a buffer first.
Sequential processing opened up a whole range of opportunities for mammals. I would expect such neural behavior to have been initially confined to short sequences requiring small amounts of memory. However, the benefits of increased memory are irresistible, as owners of personal computers can testify, and mammals quickly stuffed their crania with megabytes of additional RAM.
Thus, my pig Penelope, upon emerging from the barn on a bright spring morning, can recall the weak place in the fence where she escaped the day before, humph and grunt her way 200 feet to that spot, shove her way through it, and waddle several hundred feet in the other direction to reach the section of pasture with the most pleasant spot for a nap. Because this journey is such a highly sequential operation, it requires considerable memory on her part, yet her execution of this sequential thinking is so reliable that I have given up trying to repair the fence and now just leave the gate open for her.
New technologies designed to solve one set of problems often create unanticipated new possibilities. Thus, the automobile, designed to increase the ease of transport, created suburbia, freeways, and teenage parking rituals. The computer, designed to solve complex computational problems for business and academia, gave rise to computer games; therefore, I shall refer to this phenomenon as Nolan's Law. In the same fashion, increased memory in mammals led to a great variety of new behavioral possibilities. Toolmaking is one of the more exotic examples. Consider just how much sequentiality of thinking is required to sustain the concept of toolmaking. Social structures are another example. Mammals have developed a great variety of complex social systems to further their survival. Starting from the simple mother-child relationship implicit in their name, mammals soon expanded the concept to provide extended care for young, group support systems, and social hierarchies. I'll be coming back to the subject of social hierarchies later.
In deference to Stephen Jay Gould, I don't wish to veer into the vainglorious folly known as the great chain of being, so let me instead describe hominids as one class of mammals that genetically "chose" to energetically exploit sequential thinking. They developed ever-larger cortexes, with correspondingly greater memories, and this gave them the capacity for really complicated sequential processing, including very complex social structures.
Then came another great leap: language. I like to think of language as initially an extension of the social structure mechanisms of the hominids. The more advanced your communication system, the more flexible your social structures can become. But language requires lots and lots of sequential processing, so we had to evolve great big gobs of greasy grimy cortex to support this snazzy new feature.
The investment paid off remarkably, but the leap in performance is most easily perceived when you shift your focus from the individual to the tribal unit. That is, language makes an individual more effective, but to really see the benefit, compare a language-using tribe of hominids with one that doesn't use language. The former group can respond to threats in a more organized fashion, while the latter group, lacking the coordinating benefits of language, operates more like a collection of individuals. More important, the language-users are able to share experiences and pool knowledge. The tribal unit develops a group memory reflecting the accumulated lessons of generations, passed from generation to generation through language and stories. Clearly, such language-using tribes are much more effective organisms.
Now I come to a truly fascinating point: the interaction between language, social hierarchy, and individual personality. I'll begin with the observation that social hierarchy provides a major determinant of individual genetic success. That is, if you're at the top of the social hierarchy of your hominid tribe, you'll probably be more successful at having your genes spread through the gene pool. After all, you get the best babes. But language serves as more than a coordinating and memory-pooling technology; it also serves as a medium of social conflict, an adjud-icator of the social hierarchy. Language is one of the means by which you impress or manipulate your fellows to achieve higher social status. In a dominance-contest between two males, one might beat his chest and wave branches, while the other might stare at him coldly and say, "Go ahead, make my day." The latter strategy might well be more intimidating. It sure worked for Clint Eastwood.
The use of language to manipulate the social hierarchy brings us to the subject of "personal image". Each us of projects an image to others, and it is this image that determines our place in the social hierarchy. In most primates, personal image is created and maintained primarily by behavior, but in homo sapiens, language plays a larger role in establishing personal image. The "make my day" example shows the role of language in establishing dominance, but it is important in all other aspects of image-making. When the gal asks the guy "will you still respect me in the morning?", a great deal of his future reproductive success hangs on his answer.
Ah, but words are such supple things, so easily bent to suit the selfish purposes of the speaker. In the above situation, the guy will certainly answer in the affirmative regardless of his true intentions. Much of our verbal communication is concerned with the establishment of image, not the communication of truth. Moreover, we all know this; the gal in the above situation fully expects an affirmative answer, but she will gauge his response on its sincerity and conviction. We all play games with words to suit our selfish interests, and we know everybody else is doing it, so we bring considerable skepticism to our conversations.
Think of this process in terms of measure and countermeasure. First we invent language as a way to communicate; then we figure out how to use language as a tool to manipulate people towards our own interests. As a response, we next evolve "truth detection" behaviors that allow us to catch the subtle cues that tell us when somebody is lying. What's the next step? How can we defeat the truth detection circuits built into everybody else's brains?
This problem is particularly difficult because in many cases, the message we are speaking is not true. I want the gal to believe that I'll respect her in the morning, but the important thing is to impregnate her. I can decide about respecting her after I've accomplished my primary goal. By the same token, she will say whatever it takes to secure the best possible father for her children, and, if I'm a dominant male, I'll want to detect any untruthfulness in her claims. So everybody has a need to detect untruthfulness and to defeat other people's truth detectors.
The best way to make other people believe your sincerity is to be sincere &emdash; to believe the truth of your words absolutely. The easiest way to believe your own statements is to tell the truth, but that's not a good idea if, as is likely, you are anything less than magnificent. No, if you're mediocre and you want to convince a potential mate that you're God's gift to the gene pool, then you'll have to convince yourself first. The solution to this dilemma is an artifice that we call consciousness.
Take your personality and split it into two portions. One part, the real you, is the selfish gene part, interested only in furthering its position in the gene pool. The other part is a fiction, an artifice. I call mine Chris Crawford. This mental artifice truly believes all that claptrap about altruism and nobility and love and honor. This little puppet of mine wanders around society yammering about all that claptrap, which impresses everybody else. Men grudgingly yield me a certain amount of dominance and power; women bat their eyelids at me. All in all, this particular puppet seems to have served my purposes fairly well. Of course, he thinks that he's running the show, and I allow him to think that; it's all part of the deception.
It gets even wilder: language is not only the medium that makes possible the social manipulation behind all this; language processing is also the internal mechanism behind consciousness. I don't mean to identify language processing with consciousness, but rather to suggest that the development of language processing played a major role in the parallel development of consciousness. The two developed hand in hand and are still closely tied together. Parents try to teach their children to say, "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never harm me" but in fact, words do harm kids, because words create a psychological reality. If Joey calls Tommy a dummy, the existence of the word creates a reality somewhere inside Tommy's head, and that reality hurts. If we can believe our own word-spawned lies, then we can just as easily lend reality to the wordy lies of others. A great many human conflicts arise because one person has created words that besmirch another person, and the second person perceives an internal need to contradict that verbal reality.
Besides, if words can never harm you, howcum we have slander suits?
John Jaynes, in a book entitled The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, argues that consciousness arose about 3,000 years ago, when humankind stopped thinking with both hemispheres. I think that he squeezes his data too hard, but there's definitely something in there. Over the course of the last few thousand years, there has been a shift in the way we think. For me, the best evidence of this comes from the Incas, a pre-Bronze Age people who were conquered and assimilated so quickly that we have written records of the way they thought, such as Garcillaso de la Vega's commentaries. There's no question, these people thought differently. I can't articulate the difference, but there is definitely something alien in their thought processes.
I suspect that the nature of human thinking is indeed changing, but that this change has been proceeding continuously. I reject Jayne's suggestion that it happened in a single dramatic episode spanning a few hundred years. Instead, I believe that language changed the way we thought, making consciousness inevitable, and that language continues to change our thought processes. More important still, the process is still at work.
For example, consider two crucial events in the history of western civilization: the adoption of writing and the rationalist explosion of the Greeks. The first event took several thousand years to simmer, starting with the earliest Sumerian writing and moving on through the Egyptian writing. Initially, writing was just a form of accounting, a way to keep track of sheep, grain, and other commodities moving around society. Later, it became a form of exposition, with edicts and histories recorded for public consumption, but in this form, writing was still confined to a limited range of expression &emdash; let's call it royal pronouncements.
But with the Greeks came a third stage in the evolution of writing. The Greeks were the first society to treat writing as a basic ingredient of their culture, rather than the preserve of a tiny elite. This new egalitarianism suggested something entirely new: that the writing itself could be subject to independent evaluation. If your king or pharoah unveils some grand statuary with incised writing describing his mighty triumphs, etc, etc, you aren't in much position to quibble. But if your distant friend sends you a letter, that's another story entirely.
Perhaps this egalitarianism sprang from the alphabetic nature of Greek writing, which was easier to learn and so quickly spread to other cultures. The Semitic peoples from whom the Greeks derived their alphabet seem to have a taken a similar stance, and certainly the Old Testament of the Hebrews exemplifies this. Whatever the reason was, the important thing was the result: writing catapulted sequential thinking to a new level.
This new level of sequential thinking I will call "multi-sentence thinking". The sentence is the basic unit of linguistic processing. All languages have something like sentences, sequences of words ordered in some grammatically defined fashion to communicate meaning. Our brains can process sentences in a flash; apparently there's something basic about this form of linguistic processing that allows us to instantly grasp its meaning. But what happens when the thought spans more than one sentence? How do we process ideas that span a series of sentences?
The short answer is, "not very well at all." Consider the following paragraph:
My left hand is the opposite of my right hand. Every detail of my right hand is precisely matched by a corresponding but opposite detail on my left hand. There exists nothing in the universe more perfectly opposed to my right hand than my left hand. Yet, at the same time, there is nothing in the universe that more perfectly matches my right hand than my left hand. In mass, form, and texture, every detail of my right hand is mirrored by a corresponding detail on my left hand. Therefore, if I am to classify any objects in the universe, then I must place my left hand in the same classification as I place my right hand, for how can I place any two objects in the same classification if they match each other even less than my left hand matches my right hand? Since my left hand and my right hand must occupy the same fundamental classification in any taxonomy of the universe, I must conclude that my left hand is the same as my right hand.
This paragraph is the verbal analogue of those delightfully paradoxical drawings by M.C. Escher. Your eye runs around the image, and at every point along the way, the geometric logic of the image is impeccable, but when you step back and look at the big picture, it contradicts itself. Your eye is fooled because the image is bigger than the chunk of image that you normally process, and so you take it in as a sequence of smaller chunks, which themselves don't add up. In the same fashion, the paragraph above breaks an idea down into single sentences that individually make sense, and the transition from one sentence to the next is reasonable, but the paragraph as a whole is self-contradictory. Your linguistic processor can readily digest each sentence, and can even link one sentence to the next, but you cannot string together many sentences and retain the sense. Somewhere between two and five sentences, you lose the ability to hold it all in your head.
Here's where writing comes in. Writing allows us to go back and re-examine the language. When you first read my Escher-style paragraph, did you not go back and re-read it, because you were confused? Did your mind not flit from end to beginning, comparing the two contradictory sentences, trying to fit them together? Did it not do the same thing your eye does when struggling with an Escher visual paradox?
Try this experiment: select an appropriate victim and read my Escher-style paragraph to him. Don't allow your victim to read the text; just read it out loud. Upon finishing, wait expectantly for a reaction; you will get none. In all probability, your subject will shrug it off as idle verbiage, and will fail to notice the contradiction between the beginning and the end of the paragraph. When you present the words in spoken form, the language processors miss the paradox; when you present the words in written form, they catch the paradox.
This is the real benefit of writing. Remember how I claimed earlier that the big innovation provided by the mammalian brain is its short-term memory, acting like a buffer for sensory data? Writing does the same thing externally; it stores the words externally for more detailed parsing. The cortex is like RAM; it stores raw sensory data in a quickly-accessible form. The written word is rather like magnetic tape storage: it's an off-line form of memory that buffers additional material for our language processors. We humans grew impatient with evolution's sluggish expansion of our cortex and augmented it with artificial, off-line cortex.
But once again Nolan's Law goes to work. Writing may have been invented for accounting and promulgation, but its value as an off-line buffer for sequential thinking suddenly magnified the ability of the human mind to process sequential logic. Ideas that required more than two sentences to understand could now be grappled with. I believe that the rationalist explosion that was classical Greece was directly attributable to the Greeks' adoption of writing as a basic component of their civilization. Once they all started writing ideas down, they found they could think bigger thoughts, longer sequences, and still keep them straight.
Go back and reread any of the Platonic dialogs sometime. What strikes me about these dialogs is the sense of fascination with the discovery of the logical power of writing. In each dialog, Plato presents some long, complex string of logic, a few sentences at a time, with the student of the dialog nodding bovine assent as they march down the primrose path, until they reach Plato's intended conclusion. And always, the student expresses surprise at the result. "Garsh, Socrates, I would never have thought of that, but you make it sound so logical that I just can't deny your conclusion." Plato seems quite pleased with his cleverness, his ability to make the better seem the worse (as it were). Much of classical Greek thought bursts with this giddy sense of excitement about and confidence in the new-fangled style of thinking. They don't waste any time worrying about what the old authorities might have said; each thinker boldly presents his own ideas as if the world of thought is new and unexplored and he is staking out virgin territory.
It's easy for us to shrug this off with our knowledge that the Greeks built the foundations of Western Civilization. When you took your college course in Western Civ, it had an introductory chapter on Sumerians, Assyrians, and Egyptians, and then got down to business with the Greeks. From our perspective, history pretty much starts with the Greeks. But remember, they didn't have our perspective. From their perspective, there was plenty of history before they came along. Accordingly, their enthusiastic exploration of the world of ideas had all the trappings of a voyage of discovery because they truly were the first explorers in this world. And writing was the navigational device that made their explorations possible.
The first manifestation of this new-found capability was the "proof", a sequence of statements, that, taken as a unit, yield a result in which we place complete confidence. The Greeks pioneered this concept, but during the medieval period it was refined and polished. During the late medieval and Renaissance periods, a great deal of energy was expended on analyzing, defining, or postulating the precise meanings of the components of sequential thinking &emdash; words. In theology, we saw the development of exegesis as a major force. In law, we saw the beginnings of the hair-splitting precision which even today drives us batty. The concept of the legal contract &emdash; a written statement defining the relationship between two parties &emdash; was established and developed during the same period. Meanwhile, mathematics developed as a new and parallel form of writing, one that allowed a different kind of statement to be put down on paper. That led to science, and things really took off from there.
The latest development in this process is the creation of programming as a form of writing. I think that we have all missed the significance of programming as an extension of writing. We seem to think of it as merely a way to make the computer do wonderful things, something for programmers, but nothing more. But transport yourself back in time to Sumeria and argue with the scribe who tells you that writing is merely a system for keeping track of goats. "A means of communicating great ideas?" he laughs dismissively. "A form of art? Get your head out of the clouds!"
Programming is a highly specialized form of writing, a language whose forte is the description of processes. Conventional human language is a general-purpose expressive vehicle, meant to handle the full range of human predicaments. The weakness of conventional language is its emphasis on "nounification", a phenomenon I discussed in an earlier essay. The dramatic shift in programming languages is their shift of emphasis to what happens rather than what is. This process-intensive approach is, I think, a profound shift in the way we think about the world around us. Just as writing opened up vast new territories of understanding to the Greeks, so too will programming open up new territories to us.
But before that can happen, we too must undergo the transformation that the Greeks put themselves through. We cannot afford the luxury of delegating programming to an elite of scribes; we must democratize programming, spread it through our culture, make it clear that a person is not truly educated without an understanding of programming. Perhaps we will need to change the nature of programming before this can happen. Egyptian writing remained an elitist activity because there were too many hieroglyphs for an individual to learn easily. It was the creation of the alphabet and phonetic spelling that made writing readily accessible to large numbers of people. Perhaps programming now is too similar to hieroglyphics; perhaps it takes too long for anybody but a specialist to learn. If this be so, then what we need is a new kind of programming that doesn't demand so much learning time. Surely we have the hardware resources to support such a language.
We need to remember, amid all this intellectual excitement, that this new style of sequential thinking represents a new layer of thinking, not a simple extension of the older, reptilian style of emotional thinking. We have souped up the original cortical sequential thinking with the written word, but our high-powered sequential thinking is not a turbocharged version of reptilian instantaneous thinking, it is a completely different approach.
Thus arises the conflict between logic and emotion. Logic is just another word for sequential thinking, where emotion is reptilian thinking. It is all too easy to dismiss the reptilian approach as inferior, but we should not be so quick to overlook its utility. Reptilian thinking is fast, clean, and holistic in style. It is also a lot more natural. Consider these two questions:
1. What is the product of 13 multiplied by 8?
2. Would you mind if I stabbed your little sister?
Now, for the first of these, you paused and thought. Odds are you just gave up, finding the task too tedious and difficult. The question demanded lots of contorted mental activity; and had I made the problem a little harder (42 x 13, say) then you would have had to resort to paper (the written word!) to solve the problem.
But the second task took no time at all to process. You instantly knew the answer to that question. Both questions have a correct answer, yet the former requires an alien, unnatural thought process while the latter involves a comfortable manner of processing.
My point is that sequential thinking is alien to our natural way of thinking. It certainly is powerful, to be sure, but it's also damned uncomfortable. We don't like it &emdash; and all too often, we substitute easy, comfortable emotional thinking for difficult, tedious logical thinking.
What's striking is that we don't seem to be able to merge the two thinking styles. They are mutually exclusive styles of thinking; it's one or the other.
Now let's talk about the type of thinking demanded by interactive entertainment. Recall my old definition of interactivity: a sequential process in which each agent alternately listens, thinks, and speaks. Let's zero in on that middle step: thinking. What kind of thinking are we asking our player to execute in our products?
The skill and action games, which constitute a major portion of the products on the shelves, require thinking with the lowest of the three levels of the brain. It's straight motor control stuff, requiring no direct application of emotional processing. That is, you don't need emotion to play the game; emotion is a consequence of playing, not a component of playing. Indeed, the best players report a kind of altered state of consciousness when playing truly well; they lose their sense of themselves and link directly into the game. I suspect that this altered state of consciousness is really a suppression of all brain activity other than the lowest level activity. It seems quite possible that you could perform a massive lobotomy on a person and not detract from his videogame-playing skills. Do we have any volunteers for this experiment?
There are also the strategy and puzzle games, which leapfrog the reptilian brain and challenge the sequential processing layers of the cortex. Wargames, adventure games, and role-playing games all fall into this category. They are exercises in logic, not emotion. Indeed, I am continually astounded by the manner in which emotional issues are transformed into strictly logical matters in such games. We transform injury into "hit points"; instead of feeling pain, you simply observe that your ration of hit points is growing low. Combat becomes a matter of calculation. Or consider such constructs as "charisma" in the classic role-playing games. Here is an ability that is reduced to straight numerical expression.
I must insist on a fine point here: the distinction between internal processing and external representation. Clearly, if we are to compute the behavior of the characters in the game, we must provide numerical algorithms accessible to the computer. Transforming the emotional to the logical is an imperative if we are to utilize the medium of the computer. However, I distinguish between the internal processes of the computer and the external representation of the game. Why must those internal algorithms become a part of the gaming experience? Why should the player calculate whether his charisma is adequate to charm the dragon into cooperative behavior?
What's particularly absurd about this approach is its inversion of human convenience. Remember, sequential thinking requires effort but emotional thinking comes easily. So here we take a supposedly emotional process &emdash; sweet-talking the dragon &emdash; and convert it from fast, clean emotional processing to slow, clumsy logical processing. Talk about doing it the hard way!
I confess, I'm being too hard on the designers. The real reason why they choose the sequential approach has more to do with their own programming difficulties than with the convenience of the audience. It's quite simple to write a line of code:
IF (CHARISMA > SUSPICION) THEN MAKEFRIENDS(); ELSE BBQHUMAN();
But how do you write program code that expresses all the subtleties of facial expression, voice intonation, and body language? What kind of coding would be required to make the player think to himself, "This isn't working, I'd better get out of here."
This line of thinking seems to be taking us in a decidely blue-sky direction. After all, if emotional thinking were so easy to do, then surely we would have done it by now. The cynics will point out that emotional thinking is holistic in style, very much neural-network stuff, and quite beyond the reach of 1990s computing.
I disagree. It's not as if emotional thinking is so utterly beyond human understanding that we cannot process it; indeed, the entire output of art might well be called an exercise in emotional thinking. Yes, it has taken a few millenia to figure out how to do it well, but now we have a magnificent heritage of past work on which to draw. Consider how much we have learned in the fields of art: in sculpture, dance, painting, theater, poetry, music, photography, and novels? The body of human knowledge in expressing emotional thinking is vast.
The important observation, I think, is not that such knowledge is unknown, but that it is unknown to the people designing interactive entertainment. How many books of poetry does the typical game designer keep on his shelf? When was the last time he went to the opera? What does he think of Klee's work? Game designers have missed the boat because they never bothered to notice it.
At the same time, the new flood of multimediaphiles are simultaneously programmingphobes. They want to use the computer, but refuse to dirty their hands with the tedious labor of programming. It's not laziness that prevents them from taking the necessary steps, for they lavish tidal waves of effort on their work. It's prejudice, the refusal to accept the necessity of the logical approach.
And so the game designers grind out artless clones, and the artists pound out mindless piles, and the interactive artform drifts aimlessly.
If we are to master this new interactive art form, then we must come to grips with the age-old war between the two layers of our brains, logic and emotion &emdash; and we must put an end to it. Spock must die. For centuries the self-indulgence of the artists has been pitted against the self-importance of the logicians. Let those small creatures continue their pointless struggles; we have a larger task before us. The interactive artist of the future must plant one foot firmly in the emotional and the other foot firmly in the logical, joining the two into a mutually supporting whole. For that way lies the future of humanity.