Regarding Steven Johnson's
"Emergence"

Is the nature of strategy not dependent on the hardware on which it runs? I suppose the existence of NP-HARD problems argues that 'algorithms' are a sort of universal truth. Turing machines and whatnot. Hmm. I want to interrogate that.

A person doesn't necessarily gain computational resources. I expect to get into the 'heuristics' part soon enough, the part I remember most clearly, but it's interesting that it's framed this way first.

Rather than gaining computational resources what does a person do? Do they commit more computational resources to the task at hand? (Is committing computational resources a difficult task in and of itself?) Do they become more efficient at allocating their computational resources to the correct places? Is this its own 'deep' task, with its own 'strategy ladder'?

QuoteSearching for a needle in a haystack is a difficult problem (in the sense of being resource intensive) but it's not the kind of problem that requires cleverness and creativity, the kind of problem that rewards life-long learning and can support a large, long-term community of serious, dedicated players. Those are the features we are interested in explaining.

QuoteWe can frame d as the capacity for a game system to allow for a ranked population of strategies that provide partial/approximate solutions. [..] a game that requires a great deal of computational resources to play perfectly, and also allows for many intermediary strategies along the way.

'Computational resources' in humans involves some interesting brain developments. What are those developments? That's what I'm really interested in, myself!

Quote[..] consistent under any conditions and would remain true for any intelligent, problem-solving process, whether human, non-human, or mechanical.

Attempting to discover a property does not adhere to my world view at the moment (more on that sometime, somewhere); I'll likely read this paper from the perspective that depth must be a phenomenal experience despite what is said here.

QuoteWe aim to develop a precise definition of d [the proposed formal depth property] that is psychology-independent. It should not make special reference to how humans learn or what humans find interesting or challenging[.]

I'm not sure about this. Can 'heuristics' be separated from 'how humans learn'?

QuoteDepth is often referred to by game developers and in scholarly research but to our knowledge no attempts have been undertaken to make a thorough and rigorous investigation into the property to which is refers. The purpose of this paper is to lay the groundwork for such an investigation. We are attempting to establish a foundation, clarify the important questions, and suggest directions for further study. We are not at this time proposing final answers to the central question.

Very reasonable. I like this introduction.

I read this paper years ago, before newforum, but my thought pattern has been brought back to it by Splatoon 3 (See: Salmon Run Next Wave).

My remembered image of this paper:
It presents a spectrum of how decisionmaking occurs, either through raw search or heuristics, and 'depth in strategic games' requires a balance of both.

My new Salmon Run-fuelled picture:
Heuristics and raw search can never be applied directly to an even moderately complex game system, but are rather applied to the player's model.

I'm going to root around in the paper to see if this is addressed at all. Is there terminology I can harvest?

(See: Depth in Strategic Games)

I felt strangely exhausted by Salmon Run : it seemed like a futile effort, struggling to fight bosses, collect eggs, and whatnot. The end goal was not in sight. Then there was a shift. One wave on Gone Fission Hydroplant it struck my once-tired brain that if we just killed each boss before they had a chance to pile on more, the usual chaos of Salmon Run would be reduced to a simple boss rush... kill one after the other.

This tweaked my mental model.

my attempts at answers

1. Errands and collectibles are useful when developing a game in order to draw the player's attention to things!

2. It's a double-edged sword: The effect of using a specific signpost to draw the player's attention to things means that they see the rest of the world as negative space by default.

3. There are many strategies! A few ways to draw the player's attention to things:
- Visual tricks like they employ in Half-Life 2
- Moving entities that you want to chase (e.g. frogs in Proteus)
- Moving entities that you want to run away from?
- Unpleasant, costly, or dangerous gameplay features that drive the player *away* from the negative space, rather than towards a positive space

4. This is a tricky question! What is design and what isn't? If we're considering a scenario where we do not solve the "design problems," what does that mean? Is it a game where the player's attention is never directed intentionally? Or is it a game where the player's attention is never directed by 'gameplay elements' or 'gameplay'? What is the difference between 'compelling text' and 'compulsory instructions'? I'm not sure this question has an answer in the abstract.

Quote from: 8:03As a tourist in Venice, I don't have to go to the Bridge of Sighs, or St. Mark's Basilica, I can wander the backstreets and alleyways without fear of collectibles rewarding me. Are there brave games that do the same? Let me wander, and find my own meaning?

I'm so tempted to give in to this. I think I must have watched this video. It's a compelling mindset, a beautiful question: Why have pointless busywork gameplay when a place is in itself enough?

When I explore the backstreets and alleyways of a real place I know I am exploring a real place, a place that belongs to people, a place that has or once had a purpose. I've lost that sense in videogame places. Maybe it's gameplay that poisoned me, the resulting gameplay-sense what keeps me from enjoying exploration. Maybe I perceive a videogame place without gameplay to be pointless primarily because my experiences have conditioned me to look for gameplay in videogames.

But without gameplay what am I exploring? Exploration, exploration, relies on movement through space. Exploration is gameplay. Turning pages is gameplay. Seen this way the quote from the last post may read, "Why replace one form of gameplay with another?"

Through that lens, we can ask: what is the purpose of exploration, and what is the purpose of errands?

Exploration is something that the player does. Running errands is also something that the player does. What mechanics enable each of them?

Collectibles are a simple game mechanic that fuels a simple player activity. Exploration is much more ephemeral: What drives a player to explore? Given a task, a player will likely perform that task. Errands are a way to push the player through the world, to give an implicit promise to them that they are doing the right thing by exploring. Errands, collectibles, are exploration gamified.

Rephrasing the original question, "Why replace genuine exploration with a bunch of errands?", I get this:

"Why do game developers use {errands [and collectibles]} to encourage non-genuine exploration, rather than {other methods} to encourage genuine exploration?"

I am intentionally framing this question in a way that draws attention to the leading and incomplete nature of the original: it implies errands and genuine exploration are necessarily opposing and also, I think, that the method for achieving genuine exploration is relatively trivial: don't give the player errands. But the true nature of the beast is much more complicated. We need a new question, or several.

- What design problems do errands and collectibles solve, in the game design context of a player moving through a space?
- What impact do errands and collectibles have on the feeling of moving through a space?
- What other methods could be used to solve the same design problems?
- Must those design problems be solved? What happens if they are left unsolved? (i.e., What makes them problems in the first place?)

Quote from: 7:40Why replace genuine exploration with a bunch of errands?

Quote from: 4:43Technology empowers us to visit places that do not exist. Places that cannot exist. But we do not celebrate this enough. Critics and players often denigrate virtual environments with demands for purpose, the developer god must corrupt places with mechanics, poison them with meaning, proof of intelligent design must be demonstrated through challenges or collectibles. The journey itself is never enough.