In computers, generationally I was trying to gesture at the fact that in all the biographies of the computer pioneers, it’s clear they had a very different relationship to computers than we did. Their world was one where the computer won’t do anything until you learn the language, learn how it works, learn how to gradually make more and more elaborate things. Ours is one where it’s meant to not challenge you in that way whatsoever. It’s a solved problem; you have better things to do!
I felt as though the simplicity, the legibility, the accessibility of computing itself was a kind of poison pill for the human mind, but I couldn’t really put a solid thesis behind the mechanism. It didn’t make immediate sense to argue it; it just seemed like a suspiciously elitist superstition. Likewise when I was reading about ergodic texts I was struck by the concept of anamorphosis as a component of mastering ‘video games’:
During the cybertextual process, the user will have effectuated a semiotic sequence, and this selective movement is a work of physical construction that the various concepts of “reading” do not account for. This phenomenon I call ergodic, using a term appropriated from physics that derives from the Greek words ergon and hodos, meaning “work” and “path.” In ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text. […]
So what exactly is the difference between the ergodic and the nonergodic work of art? If we are to define this difference as a dichotomy (and such a definition may well end up serving the ideology it is trying to unmask), it would have to be located within the work rather than within the user. The ergodic work of art is one that in a material sense includes the rules for its own use, a work that has certain requirements built in that automatically distinguishes between successful and unsuccessful users. 1
Anamorphosis, then, is when the work hides a vital aspect that requires you to adopt a non-standard perspective to understand it. There is something to master in engaging the text; you are working together as a system producing symbols, co-creator of an individual story, an individual map through a text. It demands that you change, temporarily become a different thing, in order to get to the end.
In Paul Ford’s 2015 article, The Sixth Stage of Grief Is Retro-computing, he outlines something similar about older computers and their followers:
This was how a network comes together. You bought something and then you wanted to understand it, so you went out and found other people. You found them via posters in hallways, or word of mouth, or by purchasing a magazine that caught your eye and then reading the ads in the back.
I was struck by what a strange idea this was to me. To buy something and have it be functionally useless until I master it is very foreign; I felt as though everything I used was trying to be as friendly as possible for all common situations. As an example, I have an espresso maker that just one-button pulls the shot and stops at a specific point. When my friend was inspired to go get an espresso machine in which she had to figure all that out, get the water to a specific temperature, assess how to do a pull correctly … I didn’t really know how to relate. To me the process felt as though it was as simple as a Keurig machine.
Even when I wanted to teach myself something, it felt like it didn’t require massive changes of perspective so much as iterating on similar patterns of acquiring and integrating information. To be truly stumped on a problem, to find an ‘a-ha’ moment … isn’t that the whole pleasure of programming? I can name a number of times I’ve felt that and they were minor leaps for my career; suddenly I found a previously difficult thing easy to do. Now the next step up felt like a challenge: designing a system myself, creating x or y substrate beneath what I normally write…
Picking apart what was once context is what Alan Kay points out in his Quora answer explaining his quote that “point of view is worth 80 IQ points”:
As with many of these momentous uncoverings, the “invisible” was slightly visible but deemed so unimportant that if was effectively not there. This was the idea — and fact — that most of what we take to be “plain reality” are actually just beliefs, and most of these are so taken for granted that we are almost never aware of them. We use them in our reasoning and decisions but think our logic is absolute rather than relative to the — “context”, “perspective”, “point of view”, “world-view”, “paradigm”, etc. — in which we are operating.
McLuhan used this as part of his assertion that the learning of a communications/representation system must require the brain/mind to change (this is what learning means), and that the most important changes are the ones that are absorbed as “context” and rendered effectively invisible.
If you try to make the invisible contexts visible, then it is easy to see that some of them are very positive with respect to advancing “civilization”, and others were terribly retrograde. What people “believe is ‘reality’ “ is the most important to put light on, especially if their “reality” doesn’t include the idea that “their reality is mostly just beliefs with no stronger foundations”.
Being able to understand assumptions inherent in a system that makes something else invisible, that sets up a ‘frame’ or a ‘context’ for its participants, requires you to adopt a perspective that requires your mind to change.2
Pointlessly obtuse
I knew all these things and yet it didn’t quite click until I started playing Final Fantasy XI a week ago: video games were much less legible even just twenty years ago. I’m playing the retail version with lots of quality of life changes and even still so much of the way the game is played is obscured. It’s not clear what you must master in order to get better; where to go; how to interact with its six storylines; when you are wasting time. The menu key? That’s the - key. The mouse is extraneous. You’re often better off tabbing through who’s in front of you and then hitting Enter to interact in whatever manner.
Don’t worry. There are guides. They even tell you how to set up the GUI to get around the weird defaults. I actually think you may need them in order to engage with the game. For example, there are features that were added late in the game’s lifespan that add a ton of experience and rewards for doing basic things and require you to know to manually turn them on when you need them. You can only have so many on at a time. The guide tells you what ones to turn on and when. There are two or three items that give you buffs that will immensely save your time. They will give you +150% XP to 10,000 XP total or +100% XP to 15,000 XP total up to 7 hours or whatever. Which one is more optimal? I don’t know. The guide does. You must always recast these when they expire. You could very easily start the game without learning about trusts and that you can summon NPC allies. You also need to recast those all the time.
The experience ends up feeling like you are wandering – and very slowly wandering – trying to come up with a purpose. In exchange, you are much more reliant on interacting with others, or engaging with the written or filmed content of others, in order to create a working model of how to play the game well. Then you realise there are warp points by touching these books in the field. The books themselves are hard to find and I often go wandering even when I know the map quadrant just to enable them for later fast travel.
I was describing this to my friend and said “but the way it’s so slow and obtuse is weirdly intriguing. Like I want to know it better, I want to get better at it, I want to master it.” And I meant it! I feel weirdly captivated even though I was also so frustrated.
I think over the years I’ve lost patience with any game that won’t immediately instruct me toward its way of seeing. A lot of games would get you to fail hard and immediately until you get it, but it’s seen as harsh now; it’s not fun; it will cause the player to refund the game. And I think in turn, anything that requires me to actually change my mental model has this weird voice in my head telling me to offload it to someone else.
I’m being told this is a good thing – we can all be the ideas guy and just start companies with squadrons of language models. But I feel like maybe the constant adoption of new perspectives – the malleability involved in being able to gradually understand things that require several layers of hidden inferences, even as I get older – is what maintaining intelligence is … after all, intelligence is a process, a pattern of engagement with the world; a thing that can atrophy.