Re: Happiness

I am trying to steer away from the the word "desire" because I think that it might be too player-dependent. I want to define it in terms of only things that can exists in an interaction. So a 'desire' might be replaced by 'goal', but a goal has some implication of purpose and the ultimate result.

Can a person be satisfied and unhappy?

Can a person be happy and unsatisfied?

In my definition, the neutral state of an individual is happy, because there will be zero demand to meet. So there is a meaning that happiness requires no stimulus.

I am not sure how to represent this meaning in the definition.

Suppose you are a sponge. Your natural dimensions are 1"x3"x5". Let's define this natural state as your happy state. When you are squeezed or stretched, you are not in your natural state. You are unhappy. In this case, your happiness can be physically measured by measuring your dimensions. This measurement is based on facts.

I am trying to take this concept a step further, where your happy state is not when your dimensions meet your natural state, but when your dimensions meet your the size you want. For example, suppose you think that 1"x3"x5" is too small and you want to be 2"x3"x5" instead. The moment you are convinced that 235 is good for you, you will not feel happy until your natural state becomes 235. This does not include the case where you stretch yourself to fill a 235 volume. You must acquire more spongee matter so that your natural state becomes 235. If you think that 135 has always been good, then you will be happy now. So happiness is a matter of whether your natural state matches that mental state. No stimulus, no effort is required when it is already met.

A sponge could have a goal to become 235 by next year. It could calculate that its daily increase in spongee matter is dV. Then, this sponge has a mental timeline that shows approximately how big it should be as time passes. During the year, although the sponge had not met its ultimate goal (of being 235), it could be meeting the daily progress and be happy. The examples shows that happiness is not necessarily the goal. You could have an ambitious goal, an ambitious desire, but you don't need to wait till that ambition is satisfied before you feel happy if you know that you are where you should be relative to that goal.

Procrastinators are happy most of the time because the reassure themselves that there is enough time left to get more sponge.

Happiness Participant recognizes that the progress toward a goal is met.

Re: Fun, Amusement, Thrill

Fun Participant uses a zone of safety to explore an event that would be too threatening to explore otherwise.

Quote:

From what I've read about laughter in adults it is based on the sudden surprising recognition of a pattern. Surprise is related to danger, and pattern recognition is related to relaxation after determining something isn't dangerous, but I'm not sure fun can be directly equated to mock-danger. What about the fun that a child has playing with a doll or fingerpainting? Where is the danger? But if you want to talk specifically about the enjoyment of acting with a source of danger, that's fine, I would just use the word Thrill. The type of fun specific to laughter could probably be termed Amusement. The fingerpainting is a more purely visceral/aesthetic pleasure, while playing with the doll is self-expression.

Unknowns are threats. They remain as threats until they become known or are dismissed or forgotten. Suppose I hand you a survey, the survey is a threat simply because it is an unknown. Learning can be fun when the learner can understand the material (thus expands the zone of safety). Learning is not fun when the learner cannot keep up (too much unknown too threatening). Fun is had between the bondary of known and unknown, within some sense of safety (or comfort).

I think an interaction that evokes amusement differs from the current definition of fun in that amusement comes with an expanded zone of safety.

For example, kids are playing a snake. They know that the snake would bite if they get too close, but they have fun getting close to it, because it is by my definition fun. This is not mock danger. They are play with real danger. The definition includes the case of mock danger however. In this example, the zone of safety is the boys' knowledge of their reaction time, their physical readiness, and the physical space available to dodge the snake. They have fun because they have the impression that the situation is under control. If a bigger boy now tie up a boy and just drag the boy to the snake, it won't be fun anymore because the boy lost the zone of safety and all there is left is the threat. But if the bigger boy is a trusted brother then it could be fun again because the brother would pull the boy away in time when the snake tries to bite.

In this construct, amusement would be evoked when:

Amusement Participant gets a threat and a zone of safety that contains the threat at the same time.

I don't use the word thrill usually. When I look at the word thrill now, it seems like the intensified version of fun. If I were to distinguish between activities that are thrilling versus fun. I would choose:

Examples of thrilling activities
o Roller coaster
o Horror movies
o Free fall

Examples of fun activities
o Balancing on a curb (when you fall you land on the pavement 10 cm below)
o Patting a new dog (patting a dog you already know feels a little different)
o Popping packing bubbles

Popping packing bubbles is fun because the pop is not instant. There is a discrete moment when you pop them one by one. That moment is the unknown. It is fun because I don't know when exactly it is going to pop. So it is always a surprise.

When I look at the list above, I think that the difference between my view of "thrill" and "fun" lies in whether the participant have control over the amount of threat.

Thrill Participant commits to temporarily explore a threat outside zone of safety.

Temporary commitment means that when the participant engages, it assumes that the interaction is only temporary. They expect that the threat would either be resolved or stop by itself if not resolved. This is different from survival situations where the threat is not expected to disengage on its own. If the threat is within the zone of safety, it would be "fun", so that part is necessary to distinguish between "fun" and "thrill".

What is the feeling you get when you commit to permanently engage a threat outside your zone of safety? This feeling necessarily implies that you have no hope that the threat could be resolved by yourself, by itself, or by anyone.

[Edited by - Wai on February 19, 2009 12:24:11 AM]

Re: Relational Chemistry

Chemistry Participant gets a force from an agent that changes with the agent's perceived identity of the participant agent.


Re: Reassurance, Recognition

Quote:

Congratulating the player for being smart (my definition of reassurance) is not at all the same thing as telling the player not to worry about failing.

I think that when the player is confident, congratulating the player has no reassuring effect. Do you mean the case when the player is inconfident, but he can't verbalize the situation where his performance would fail him?

Suppose you are ordering something very important and you want it deliver by next Monday. You call the vendor and they say that everything is going well and that you will get it on Monday. You feel reassured.

Suppose you have just won in the state spelling bee. People congratulate you. You feel better about your position in the national spelling bee championship. You feel reassured.

Suppose you have just won the national spelling bee championship. People congratulate you. I think that in this case, you feel recognition instead of reassurance. You would feel reassured if you plan to win it again next year but you are not confident that you can repeat your success. Otherwise, I thnk that the dominant emotion is recognition, the feeling you get when you have reached a worthly state.

Recognition Participant receives indication that an agent welcomes the state of the participant agent.

Reassurance isn't my own term, it's a psychology term. The theory is that all people always have an inner fear of inadequacy (am I smart enough? am I strong enough? am I too mean? am I too submissive? am I too greedy? am I unattractive? why don't people like me? are people only pretending to like me?). When these fears don't receive regular reassurance through praise they express themselves as Thanatos the suicidal instinct.

So, it's called reassurance to show that praise does not exist in a vacuum, it is important because it balances self-doubt. And to illustrate that people seek entertainment as a convenient packaged source of reassurance for the self-doubt they feel about their real lives. But, it would not bother me if you wanted to call it recognition or simply praise. The important thing about it within the context of the game is that it is a type of reward developers tend to neglect, yet a major motivation for players to do specific quests and try to build relationships/reputation.

Another term that should probably go along with this is Reverse Psychology, since it is a quite different but equally important source of player motivation.


BTW I apologize that I have not had time to respond to these the past few days, they are difficult to think about and I haven't felt well.

Re: Reassurance

When I was reading your latest post, I was thinking, "aren't the psychological definition my my definition the same, since we were both saying that assurance need to be absent for reassurance to be felt."

Then you mentioned the role of reassurance in motivation, and I realized that you might be talking about the case where context of reassurance is independent to the context of the threat as in this example:

A player is insecure about something (threat) in real life. The threat could be imaginary or real. It could also be the case where the player can only feel the force of the threat but cannot verbalize what the threat is:

Quote:

"Do you feel insecure?" "Yes." "Do you know what you fear about?" "I don't know."

Whether the player could verbalize the threat is unimportant. Now the player is allowed to play a game. In the game when the player makes progress, the game congratulates the player.

Quote:

Game: "You're awesome!" Player: "(Wow, I am awesome!)"

The player feel empowered instead of insecure. Now you take the game away and wait a few days. Real life sets in and let's say the player feels insecure again.

While the player is playing the game and during the moment after, the player felt empowered. The game did not provide any real help about the threat. After playing the game, while he felt empowered and the moment after, he still did not know what it was that he felt insecure about. But this did not change the description that while he felt empowered, he felt that he standing threat is not as threatening (he didn't know what it is but did not care what it is at that moment, so the threat is not perceived as a threat.)

I didn't think of it this way. I have been saying threat assume that it is a force in the game. But since the definition did not restrict the threat to be something in the game, it could be outsourced. So if the participant is already threated before playing the game, a game could evoke reassurance by providing other type of victory/confirmation even if it is contextually different from that of the threat.


I agree that the topic is kind of hard, and I expected it to be one of those threads that can only get updated once a week. When you introduced three terms at once, I was thinking "it would probably be better one by one."

The next two topics are relationship and reverse psychology. Relationship as in the form of surrogate relation. I suppose that is what you meant as a motivation. It fills a gap in the player's real life. We will be talking about the necessary and minimum interaction for a player to find such a substitude from a game.

Ah yes, that's exactly what I was thinking of with reassurance, a threat that exists first outside the game, although it may be echoed inside the game. And yes the player may not know what the threat is, but it doesn't matter as long as playing the game makes them temporarily feel more confident.

I would like to make one comment on Prejudice. Do you think it is prejudice for the Giraffe to own a swing that only holds 20kg? Many people think it is prejudice to own a store which is not accessible by wheelchairs.

I don't think that it is a case of prejudice in the context.

In the original context, there is no mention of whether the Giraffe is selling a service or is subjected to any law. But suppose we change the context such that the Giraffe is selling a service, I still don't think that the Giraffe is prejudice, but discrimination.

Under the current set of definition, prejudice is a judgement based on non-knownledge. Discrimination does not imply non-knowledge, it is just unfair treatment based on protected classes. Discrimination can not be defined without defining protected classes. This is a case of discrimination that is not a form of prejudice:

Quote:

Fox says: "I don't want to hire rabbits because when my other fox employees see them they would keep drooling and stop working."

Suppose Fox is speaking the true, then this is not a case of prejudice. In places with discrimination laws where species is a protected class, the fox cannot use this reason to reject rabbit's employment application. Back in the swing example:

Quote:

Giraffe says: "I cannot accommodate passengers more than 20kg -- I would sprain my neck."

! !

Re: Surrogate Relation

This experience is what a player feels when a fictional relation takes the place of a missing relation in real life. There are different types of relations to be replaced. The goal of the definition regarding these terms is to highlight the minimal interaction required to evoke the experience of such relationship. Format:

X-Y Relationship
Define a minimal interaction where the participant feels an X-Y relation where the participant takes role X.

Two agents can simiultaneously have multiple relationships with each other. In that case we would analysis a composite relationship by individual layers of roles.

I am starting with one specific relation. Any one reading this could discuss this relation or start another one of interest.


Male-Female Evolutional Spousal Relationship

This is the relationship where the participant takes the role of a male and the other member of the relationship takes the role of a female. This describes the relationship that is evolved along the path from primate to homo sapien. It is not a form of idealized relationship but more of a genetic/biological relationship.

This relationship evolved along side the practice when men leave the home base to hunt, leaving the women behind. It was a time when hunting involves great risk. Men who had no offsprings or no wives bearing a child had little reason to take such a risk. Hunters were married men who had spread their seeds. They were courages because their had already met the evolutionary purpose of their lives (to reproduce). For this mechanism to work, the male needs to know that the spouse does not cheat. The fact that most relations of this type has one member from each sex comes from maximizing the number of cooperative hunters in a tribe.

In summary, this relationship has the following characteristics:

o The male takes risk in order to provide for his offsprings knowing that his spouse would continue to take care of the offsprings in case he dies.

In a non-geneder specific description, the male is taking the role of a risk taker, the female takes the role of a trusted keeper of a joint investment. Risk taking was the reason that this relationship evolved, but probably not a necessary component of the relationship. It would be refined later.


RiskTaker-Keeper Spousal Relationship -

Participant engages threat outside safety to gain safety for a plan jointly conceived and maintained by a committed agent.


Keeper-RiskTaker Spousal Relationship -

Participant maintains a plan and serves the committed agent that jointly conceived it.


In terms of its implementation using interaction, the difficult part is in letting the participant and the spouse agent jointly conceive a plan, and to show that the spouse agent is committed to the plan. So a relevant emotion to define is commitment. The following attempt is marked with a * because it is not about the case when the participant feels that he is committed to something, but the case when he feels that an agent is committed to something.


Commitment*

Agent engages threat to keep a goal that assist a benefited agent despite the agent's option to adopt another goal to assist another agent.


Geometric Shapes and Commitment:

In this game stage you are a circle and you start the game with a friendly npc triangle next to you. For you and the triangle to advance to the next stage, you must swallow the triangle inside yourself. The stage begins with 6 triangles and 4 circles.

Once the game starts, you observe that the of the circles is special in that it could freely travel between the two stages to pick up triangles. Not long after, the other two normal circles had crossed the border. On your side, there is only you (a circle), the triangle you started with, and that special circle that could freely pass.

When the special circle tries to swallow the last triangle, the triangle resists. (The reason is that if it got carried that you cannot pass the border.) Time is running out and the two stages will be separated. The special circle passes the border to the safe side as you try to swallow the triangle so that you and the triangle can both get to the next stage.

Excitement

This is what you get when your brain heats up and it gets itchy, you want to scratch you but you cannot because it is inside your head. Your heart is racing and you want to find something to scratch, to grab, it doesn't help and you feel like shouting. This feeling usually comes when you have figured out something new that is big, you know that it is very good but you can't yet imagine how good it is. Is there a more specific word for this feeling or is this a description of excitement in general?

What about...

Excitement - When you get passionate about something.