Mind Candy

If you haven't worked in the game industry, you might think of a game designer job as a dream job. You get to create your own toys and then play with them! Well it certainly has its moments, but it's important to realize that the job is still a job. There will always be boring parts that need to be done. And more often than not, the job involves creating your own toys and then figuring out why the won't work or aren't fun. In fact, it's a lot like every other programming job except you get to make toys rather than spreadsheets, word processors, or websites. While it's fun to design toys for a living, there's a pretty high cost to it. And I don't mean the "there's boring stuff too" cost that comes with every job. Here is the cost:

The more time you spend designing a game, the harder it is to enjoy playing it.

The problem is that over time, you have to think of the game in terms of its individual core mechanics. But the wonder and enjoyment comes from how those mechanics are organized into something greater. No game has infinite replayability. There always comes a point where you think, "That was fun, but I won't ever want to play this game again." A game might have 10 hours of good fun, or even 100 or 1000. But no game is fun after 10,000 hours. Why is that? Why can't games be fun forever?

Games are mind candy.

They are a thought treat. Personally I approach games as puzzles to solve. The very act of thinking is fun, at least for my mind. The challenge is learning how the make the best move in each novel situation the game presents. As you play a game more, you learn it better. And eventually you simply recognize the situation and can play on autopilot. At that point the game ceases to be fun because it is no longer challenging. It can still be entertaining to execute the actions, and in playing I can encounter a few new challenges, but in general the candy of the game no longer tastes sweet to my mind.

Unfortunately, my job as a game designer isn't done until I've solved the game and determined there are no degenerate solutions. The harder it is to determine a game's optimal solution, the more replayability it has. (Note that replayability just defines how long it takes for the game to cease being fun. It has nothing to do with whether or not the game is fun in the first place, or to what extent.) If it's too easy to solve the game due to an obvious dominant strategy, no one will have fun playing the game once they figure it out and all my design work is for nothing.

While I'm not an author, composer, or movie producer, I suspect this problem extends to all jobs designing entertainment. A really satisfying book is one where all the plot pieces fit together nicely and there are no obvious plot holes. The characters need to feel genuine and you need to understand how their development as people natural extends from their personalities and experiences. No author can convincingly do that without really getting into the minds and lives of these fictional people. To build the depth of a good book, the author must understand that depth before the final editing pass is done and the book is sent to print. They will never have the enjoyment and wonder of watching how the lives of their characters unfold. They sacrifice that potential joy so that other people can experience it too. It's just part of the creative process.

For my part, I find I don't enjoy playing first person shooters as much as I did many years ago. Maybe after a few years break I'll enjoy them again, but that's just the personal price I paid so that other people get more enjoyment from the games they play.

Abstract Art

As part of a special program in high school, one of my classmates, Chris, applied to work under an orchestral conductor during his senior year. Chris was a brilliant musician, but the interview process with this particular conductor was a grueling two hour endeavor, much more than the typical person in the program would have gone through. The conductor wanted to find out if Chris could do more than play music well. He wanted to know if Chris understood what music was. Chris related that the experience was more of an intellectual sparring match than an interview, and everything revolved around answering one question:

What is art?

Now there are all kinds of meaningless philosophical answers to this question. "Art is whatever you say it is" or "Art is beauty". If you dig into these answers, you just end up with the tautology "Art is art". That's true, mind you, but not very helpful. However, the music conductor had a very good answer to the question, and he accepted Chris' application when Chris understood the answer.

Art is expression.

When I heard the answer, it really resonated with me. That's a real answer, not a tautology! The purpose of art is for the artist to convey a point to those people experiencing the art. That means art can be measured by two factors:

• How important the point is to the audience
• How well the audience understands the point

Note that the audience is a crucial part of art. Immediately when I heard this answer, I understood why I'd always hated abstract art. It's bad art because it neglects the audience. Generally abstract art boils down to one of two types.

Type 1: "This black square set against a mess of orange and red circles represents the current triumph of humanity against nature, but the ultimate futility of the struggle." While that might be a good point, it's not particularly novel, and the point isn't conveyed very well. Other artists have done a much better job of creating works that express this point without even intending to. Fundamentally I feel like this art exists so that art snobs can feel elitist, because they "understand" the point and other people don't. But obfuscating your point doesn't make you clever; it makes you a bad artist.

Type 2: "This black square set against a mess of orange and red circles doesn't represent anything because art doesn't need to have a point. It can mean anything and everything!" In that case, the artist isn't expressing anything at all. They are doing an exceptional job of doing nothing. It's not art because it's not expressing a real point.

This doesn't mean art needs to be hyper-realistic. Reality isn't as fuzzy as the impressionistic paintings Monet did of water lilies, yet millions of people from different cultures and backgrounds have all recognized the beauty of that artwork. The true test of art is not whether its point is realistic, but whether the point has been successfully conveyed to the audience.

With that as the framework, I'd like to talk about something different from Artificial Intelligence: the writing of this column. You might notice that I express a lot of stuff in layman's terms, glossing over details, sometimes going back to them and sometimes not. It's my goal that this column will never require more than a first year undergraduate's experience to understand. That's explicitly because it's crucial that people can understand what I'm writing. If I can't explain things simply, then I'm not doing my job as a writer.

Each week I pick a topic that might be interesting. This column is partially just a personal soap box-- I talk about things I find interesting and usually I relate it to AI. But I cannot escape the purpose of art, that art is only meaningful to the extent that your audience cares. So I want to get a better understand about what topics and styles you, the reader, appreciate the most. It's my job to write about things you want to read.

I analyzed the articles I've written and they fall into one of four categories:

• Technical discussions of exactly how an algorithm works. Discusses actual code.
• Overview discussions of how to approach an algorithm. Discusses situations that would require programming, but not actual code.
• Reflections on artificial intelligence and computer science in the abstract. Discussion relates to philosophy.
• Philosophical discussions. Usually relates to intelligence, may or may not relate to artificial intelligence.

I'd love to know what kinds of articles people enjoy the most so I can plan a good mix of them. Please, post your preferences in the comments! And if you're interested in hearing a particular topic covered, also mention that and I'll try to cover it at a later date.