My attention was recently called to an aspect of my self which might be useful in game situations.  Someone was claiming that perception and intelligence were really the same thing for game purposes; I responded that they could be very different.  Using myself as an example, I am arguably intelligent but not normally very perceptive.  I can walk through a room and not know if anyone was in it, or whether I stepped on or over objects on the floor.  I tend to wander around tucked inside my own mind most of the time, oblivious to the world around me.  Someone has wondered whether I might be mildly autistic; I don’t have an answer to that.

  However, it is clear from these columns (even if from nothing else) that I do notice things.  I am not always entirely unaware of everything outside my mind.  Sometimes as I am driving I will call my wife’s attention to a particularly colorful splash of fall foliage, or an unusual license plate.  I’m particularly good at playing The Alphabet Game, in which each player has to find on road signs, license plates, billboards, businesses, and anything else outside the car, each letter of the alphabet in sequence (and we play forward and back).  I have often correctly identified the native language of a correspondent based on the kinds of difficulties they have writing English.  I am quite capable of noticing what is around me.

  There is thus this dichotomy between what I can notice and what I do notice which seems both to invite and to defy explanation.  Why is it that someone capable of recreating a scene such as Snow Day or Senseless can walk through a room in complete oblivion?

  There may be many answers to this.  In my article (elsewhere) Intuition and Surprise I suggest that there is in each of us an interplay between subliminal perception and subconscious processing that leads us to “just know” things we can’t explain.  Perhaps indeed I am aware of who is in the living room, what my kids wore to school in the morning, and whether there is laundry awaiting my attention, somewhere below my consciousness yet eager to come to the surface when summoned.  I have often said I have a mind like a sponge:  it soaks up all sorts of stuff, and you never know what will come out when you squeeze it.  So perhaps I am noticing without being aware of noticing.  I’m sure this is often the case, the explanation for many of these peculiarities.  But that aspect of noticing without realizing is not what I noticed or realized this time.

  This time, I was fascinated by the ability to “switch on” my attention; it is a talent which I suspect you will have noticed in yourself.  Driving in fog at night, aren’t you far more aware of every glimmer in the whitened darkness?  When you are awakened by a noise, don’t you hear every creak and tap in the house?  When the teacher says, This will be on the test, don’t you suddenly sit up and take notice?

  Games attempt to bring this into play in a number of ways.  Multiverser, for example, meets it on several levels.  In the surprise system (which uses intuition checks to determine surprise) there is focus on reasonable expectations coupled with precautions.  A character is not surprised to find exactly what he expects to find.  If the character looks at the pass and says, There’s bound to be an ambush up there, so everyone keep your eyes open for it, he may still be attacked, but he’s less likely to be surprised.  Thus if a player character has just done something that indicates readiness for an event of the sort that happens, he is deemed to have had his attention heightened at that moment.  Drawing a weapon before opening a door, if it’s not standard operating procedure, suggests that the character is expecting trouble behind the door and is ready for it.  That’s a higher level of attention.

  Multiverser, like many games, also provides the possibility of skills in heightened awareness.  Although there are many variations of every skill in the game, at least some of these are the sort that one uses in anticipation of trouble, that is, the character approaching the situation says, “I’m going to focus my attention fully on the current situation, using my trained awareness.”

  But there is another kind of heightened awareness, something as natural but in a very different mode, of which we should be aware in our games and our characters.

  The Sentinel (hero in something of an attenuated superhero television show who had incredibly heightened sensory abilities) had more than just heightened perceptions.  It is relatively easy to create a character who can more clearly see that at which he is looking, who can discriminate the odors when he purposefully sniffs the air, who can taste the ingredients or unravel the sounds or feel the breeze.  We must stop and reflect at those moments, to determine what might be present for such a character to sense which others would miss.  Is there a faint smell of sweat in the air from the recent presence of the villain?  Can he see the slight discoloration of that patch on the wall?  Are there any sounds he could have noticed?  But let the player ask what his character perceives with this improved sense, and we can provide the answer.  What is more difficult is creating the character who is actually more aware of his surroundings, even if his senses are no better than ours; the one who automatically notices what the rest of us will only perceive when we observe.  Father Brown, Hercule Poirot, Detective Columbo solve their cases by seeing what everyone else around them misses, not so much because they’re looking for it but because they notice things.  That is the nature of this other awareness, the ability to know what’s happening when you’re not paying attention.  That is the one that is difficult to do in a game setting, as the referee must find a way to give such information to the affected player without either making it obvious that this was important or letting the other players know what they’re characters missed.  I have some ideas about this.  You could give the player a lot of information that is not significant and let him ferret out the important bits from it.  You could, as G. K. Chesterton often did, provide the clues in the context of someone else’s incorrect interpretation, or in an indirect way which underplays their significance.  But these are very difficult to do in play, and more difficult to give to the right player when it is his character who is supposed to be the sleuth.

  I’m open to suggestions.

  Next week, something different.

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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.