Long enough ago that the world has since become a very different place, I took a psychology class. I actually took several psychology classes, but this was the first. One of the subjects covered concerned the concepts of discrimination and generalization, which prove to be central to the way we as humans perceive and understand the world around us.
If by some chance you either never had that psychology class, or it has been as long ago as mine and you have forgotten more than you learned in it, understanding these cognitive tasks is important for what follows.
Generalization is the process by which we recognize similarities between objects or ideas in our world. As I mentioned long ago in Left Hand, every person’s left hand is unique. In theory, you could learn what a person’s left hand looks like so well that you could identify that person from a photo of their hand. Certainly fingerprints rely on the fact that every left hand is different from every other left hand in the world. However, we call all of them hands, and indeed we call them left hands. In using those terms, we recognize that there are similarities between all these objects that enable us to generalize them into a category. To use a more extreme example, we believe that every frozen water crystal is unique; however, when they pour out of the sky and bury us neck deep in drifts, clogging our roads and blocking our walkways, shutting down schools and services, we don’t look out the window and speak of billions of unique objects piled on the ground. We just call them all snow, and satisfy ourselves that we have sufficiently identified them.
However, those who grew up on Sesame Street and those of us who viewed it through the eyes of our children know that one of these things is not like the other. That is, the other side of generalization is discrimination. Fragments of shattered glass are not snowflakes, feet are not hands, and psychology is not rocket science. As important as is the ability to generalize many slightly different objects into categories such as ducks, role playing games, and boring professors, it is equally important that we are able to discriminate, to know that Rover is not a duck, pinochle is not a role playing game, and that cute English teacher on whom you had a crush in eighth grade was not a boring professor. (Well, you didn’t think so, anyway.) We recognize that things are alike, but also that things are different.
This concept returned in a different guise years later (but still years ago) in law school. It is the core concept of a precedence-based common law system such as ours that the attorneys practice discrimination and generalization. It’s called distinguishing a case or applying a case, but it’s really the same thing. One attorney says that this case in which the defendant shot his wife Betsy is exactly like another case a hundred years ago in which a man discharged his gun and killed his dear Betsy, and as that man went unpunished this man should also. The other attorney points out that in that case Betsy was the man’s horse, and it’s not at all like this situation. All cases are the same, in that one person claims to have been wronged by another; all cases are different in the details. Discrimination and generalization, in this case in the form of distinguishing and applying previous court decisions, is a two pronged process of recognizing which details matter enough to require that this case be treated like that one or differently from that one.
At some level all things are alike. All objects are made of matter; all objects and energies are made of quarks. At the same time, above the molecular level all things are different, no two objects being so completely identical that we cannot distinguish them by some detail. Even quarks come in several flavors.
It is not surprising then that as I wrote Multiverser this concept of discrimination and generalization found a place within it. The game offers hundreds of named skills, ranging from putting out fires to changing the world with a thought. The referee is given significant leeway within the game to apply his own cognitive abilities in this area, deciding for example whether doing a one hundred eighty degree skid turn in a Jaguar ought to be its own skill, or whether it should be something any driver could attempt in any vehicle, or whether it is somewhere between those end points. In each case, the referee is called upon to determine whether this is a new skill (discrimination) or a new application of an already familiar skill (generalization). Is this enough like that to be the same thing, or is it different enough to be something else?
As we end each quarter, we do a free quarterly article which looks back at the last dozen articles. (We last did this in Pens, a light consideration of how writing serves as an extended memory device.) With each article, I ask myself how it is different from all those I wrote before–nearing two hundred now as we approach the end of the fourth year. Each week is supposed to be something different. Are we repeating the same ground, putting old ideas under new titles just to meet publishing deadlines, or are we genuinely writing, as our tagline says, something different each week? Looking back over the past quarter, it’s worth asking afresh.
- Anniversary started our quarter, because it happened to be published on my own wedding anniversary. It suggested that even the most curmudgeonly among us have days that mean something, for better or worse. We all have our own holidays. In that sense, it was a bit like the earlier article Celebrations, but that the older article was more about public holidays on which everyone celebrates, and what sorts of things we celebrate collectively.
- Spelunking was an entry in our series on adventure design. Some worlds exist purely to explore; what happens in them is incidental to the wonder simply of being there. Of course, the series had several other entries, including the quest-based concepts of Flag Captures, Treasure Hunt, and Scavenger Hunts, and the earlier Antagonists, but while all of those were about creating the basis for some sort of plot-driven story, this was focused on a world without a story.
- Foreshadowed dealt with a staple of fantasy literature and the problems it presents to role playing games, the idea of a prophecy or fate in which the characters are entangled, and how that can play out in the world without someone railroading everything. This problem had been considered before, in Prophecy, with some solid ideas about making and fulfilling specific predictions within the game world. Foreshadowed was focused on less specific omens, premonitions, impressions. Similarly, Auspicious suggested how to build the fulfillment of auspicious omens into the mechanics of a game, but that had nothing to do with specific predictions.
- Fish Pond explored the idea that how powerful we think we are has a lot to do with the world around us, the people to whom we compare ourselves. The closest I recall coming to this idea previously was when Comparisons discussed what it means for one weapon to be better than another; but that was a very different discussion related more to game mechanics and what makes something better or worse.
- When we decided to talk about Character we were venturing into an area that had been addressed many times from many angles. As far back as the second quarter of the series we asked Who?, noting the unreality of someone having such specific knowledge of their own strengths and weaknesses. Knowing looked again at the oddity of the character knowing about himself what the player knows about the character. Characterization suggested ways to distinguish characters from each other through nuances of performance in play; Clones offered the suggestion of using people you know or characters from other sources as game characters. CharGen and Negative Points were both about the process of creating a character, the former showing how character generation systems act as limiters to keep characters within the bounds of game expectations, the latter looking at means of patching problems in both randomized and point-based systems. Romanian considered the problems involved in obscure skills and how to decide when characters should have these. It is a subject well covered; yet Character did take it somewhere new, showing that the character is not truly that which appears on the character sheet. A character sheet is only information about the character; the character exists in the shared imagined space far more completely than even a notebook could define.
- Perceptions considered the idea that disabilities and abilities were not always so easy to distinguish, that sometimes what a character cannot do empowers him. Previously, Can’t had examined the degree to which our characters, like us, are often defined by what we cannot do; this one, though, was more about how the negatives are positives. Again, Disabilities got close to this, but was more about compensating, what people do to overcome their flaws.
- Legacy spoke of character motivation. Not surprisingly, we addressed this before. In fact, Motivation was the title of an entry which considered why player characters were part of the team, what brought them to the adventure and kept them involved in it. Objectives described using character motivations as a source for in-game conflict. Perhaps closer to the mark, McGuffin discussed how to design the object of a quest, that one thing everyone in the story wants. In this case, though, Legacy was considering the degree to which we are motivated to leave our imprint on the world, to have done something memorable that will change the future after we are gone, a very different sort of character motivation.
- Advances looked at the future. Science fiction themes came up sporadically in many articles; Transmats was specifically focused on a future technology. This new article, though, gave a core idea for running a game all about advancing technology and its impact on the lives of people.
- Cold was about dangers that did not appear so dangerous. Of previous articles, only Plague approached the same ideas, and it did so entirely within the context of the disease whose cause is unknown.
- Escape is another adventure design approach; we just discussed those in relation to Spelunking. This was more like Antagonists than any of the others, but was about fleeing from pursuit rather than interfering with the plans of the villain.
- Avery Brooks called my attention to Flying Cars, a technology he and I had long expected would become part of our lives long before now. Like Advances, it spoke about the future; but it spoke more about the future that doesn’t happen and what impedes it.
- Finally, Happy considered whether imagining ourselves to be someone else suggests that we are discontented with who we are. It is very much a consideration of why we play. In one sense it is similar to Flirting, which was about what we gain from being someone else, but that was much more about discovering our own identities through our play, and this about reasons to explore what it’s like to be someone else when we know ourselves and are happy with who we are.
I had been considering how to apply these concepts of discrimination and generalization to other areas of game design and play; I think, though, that the extensions should be obvious at this point. In all situations, we are always considering how this is like what has gone before, and how it is different. Making that thought process conscious can focus it, and point us toward new and better ideas.
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.
