Jesse Rafalko

Public Proposal

Together We Are Beautiful

We humans are constructing and restructuring our socio-technological environment in

a manner that is fundamentally outside of our mortal breadth of comprehension. In place of

metaphorically swimming up a waterfall in attempt to permanently grasp the enormity, we

must rely on concrete artifacts and tools to stimulate global cognitive processing in order to

temporarily catch a glimmer of this reality. Training one's self with, what I have chosen to

call, 'cognitive inflation' should exercise mindfulness over this matter. Improving one's

mindfulness offers one the necessary tools to become a game designer, thus the capacity to

contribute to the construction of an increasingly game-ified reality. According to Carnegie

Mellon University researcher, Jesse Schell, the term, 'game-ified reality', suggests that all

aspects of life will include systems that “rapidly [engage] our problem solving abilities.” He

envisions this game-ification as an inevitable trend embedded within the evolution of

technology (Pavlus 44).

“The evolution of our species took hundreds of thousands of years, and then

working through interaction, evolution used, essentially, the technology creating species to

bring on the next stage, which were the first steps in technological evolution. And the first

step took tens of thousands of years—stone tools, fire, the wheel—kept accelerating. We

always used the latest generation of technology to create the next generation. The

printing press took a century to be adopted, the first computers were designed pen-on-

paper—now we use computers. And we've had a continual acceleration of this process”

(Kurzweil).

In his 2005 Ted Talk, author, inventor and futurist, Ray Kurzweil, suggests that all

technological progress is a product of evolution operating vicariously through the human

race. He expounds upon his position by referencing Moore's Law. This law suggests that the
number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed onto an integrated circuit has

doubled every two years (Wikipedia). Kurzweil observes that objects that have functioned

as transistors reach limits in how far they can be downsized. He also recognizes that the

emergence of new technologies tend to coincide nicely with existing technologies reaching

their limits. For example, he predicts that by 2022 transistors will have been shrunk to a

couple atoms in length and will have reached their limit. Presently a new technology is

emerging that changes the transistor from a flat object, into a three-dimensional molecular

circuit (Kurzweil).

A key aspect to becoming an effective designer is trying to understand the human

mind. Knowledge of how the human brain works remains deeply mysterious to science. To

many, the best method for understanding the subjectively designed reality remains

introspection. Nonetheless, science has contributed some striking research that is strikingly

beneficial for modifying preconceptions of the internal world. That is to say, exposure to

the material that science has provided to help explain our personal universal mystery may

help reformat an introspective mind to better comprehend its own mental models. Consider

this:

“A single neuron sits in a petri dish, crackling in lonely contentment. From time to time, it

spontaneously unleashes a wave of electric current that travels down its length. If you

deliver pulses of electricity to one end of the cell, the neuron may respond with extra

spikes of voltage. Bath the neuron in various neurotransmitters [chemicals which relay,

modulate, and amplify signals between neurons, such as dopamine (Wikipedia)], and you

can alter the strength and timing of its electrical waves. On its own, in its dish, the neuron

can't do much. But join together 302 neurons, and they become a nervous system that can

keep the worm Caenorhabditis elegans alive—sensing the animal's surroundings, making

decisions, and issuing commands to the worm's body. Join together 100 billion neurons—

with 100 trillion connections—and you have yourself a human brain, capable of much,
 much more” (Zimmer 59).

An effective way to study subjectivity is to study human-designed systems. Consider the

stock market, as mathematicians Danial N. Rockmore and Scott D. Pauls did:

“Both the brain and the stock market consist of lots of small units—traders, neurons—

that are organized into a large-scale network. Traders can influence one another in how

they buy and sell, and that influence can rise up to affect the entire network...When the

stock market begins to rise...individual traders may want to jump on a rally, driving the

market even higher...[Rockmore and Pauls] found that [equity superclusters] were linked

in a giant loop...[the loop] was likely the result of sector rotation...Remarkably, [neural

clusters] carry out a neurological version of sector [cycling]...They are joined together

in a loop, and waves of activity sweep through them in a cycle” (Zimmer 62-63)

Running with this wonderfully documented external reconstruction of internal

models, let us consider “How Language Shapes Thought,” an article written for Scientific

American Magazine by Lera Boroditsky. In this article, Boroditsky argues that language—a

framework of symbolic logic—shapes “the most fundamental dimensions of human

experience: space, time, causality, and relationships to others.” She goes on to describe a

number of examples, “[People] who speak languages that rely on absolute directions are

remarkably good at keeping track of where they are, even...inside unfamiliar buildings,”

and, “English speakers consider the future to be 'ahead' and the past 'behind'...English

speakers unconsciously sway their bodies forward when thinking about the future and back

when thinking about the past. But in Aymara...the past is said to be in front and the future

behind. And the Aymara speakers' body language matches their way of talking...”

(Boroditsky 64). Boroditsky continues on, arguing that the structure of language effects

what we remember and the difficulty or ease of understanding specific concepts (65). It

seems the way we speak and the ways we think and act feedback into one another.
 Jesse Schell argues in his book, The Art of Game Design, that listening is the most

important skill for a game designer. He describes five facets of listening: to your audience,

to your game, to your team, to your client, and to your self. In chapter 32, “Each Designer

has a Motivation,” Jesse Schell reaches what he considers the heart of the matter: “We

often do things, and we don't know why. Why, for instance, is game design so very

important to you? Do you know?...This kind of self-reflection [can't] come later...because

life is very short. In a blink, you will look up, and realize you don't have any time left. For

time destroys everything, takes everything away. Like Poe's raven, it mocks you, cackling

“nevermore” as it glides into the night. You can't stop it. Your only hope is to do your

important work now, while you still can. You must run like death is behind you because

death is behind you...You must figure [out your own personal theme] as soon as possible,

for once you know it, you will undergo an important creative change: your conscious and

subconscious motivations will be united, and your work will gain a passion, a focus, and an

intensity that cannot possibly be greater” (Schell 460).

Lens #100: The Lens of Your Secret Purpose

• Why am I doing this? (Schell 461)

What I am proposing with this article is that all of the nuances of human life are

perfectly reflected within the timely emergence of technology. In the very least, it seems

the information provided in this article is enough to encourage any reader to evaluate the

humanness embedded within the technological and social frameworks we exist in. And,

possibly, to imagine, within this paradigm, what it means to utilize current technologies in

order to develop new ones (ex: pen and paper was used to design the first computer; future

technologies are designed on modern computation technology). One man band, Andrew

Bird, describes feedback loops in his 2010 Ted Talk:

“...In the audio world that's when the microphone gets too close to its sound source, and
 then it gets in this self-destructive loop that creates a very unpleasant sound...And I've

been thinking about how that applies across a whole spectrum of realms, from, say, the

ecological...There seems to be a rule in nature that if you get too close to where you came

from, it gets ugly. So..., you can't feed cows their own brains, or you get mad cow

disease...and inbreeding and...autoimmune diseases...”

I believe this quasi-poetic statement acts as a criticism for introspection as a form of

expression while also serving as the thing itself. Does Bird's statement actually posses

relevance within the scope of this essay? I don't think I have the authority to answer that.

After-all, the only thing I did in this article was take scientific research and mash it up into

a linguistic framework. It is up to the user to decide how to populate the framework. My

population supports Bird's broad approach with feedback loops; my population always

questions its degree of misdirection; my population strives toward a fluid optimal design.
Bibliography

Andrew Bird's One-Man Orchestra of the Imagination. Perf. Andrew Bird. TED2010. TED,

Nov. 2010. Web. Jan. 2011.

<http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/andrew_bird_s_one_man_orchestra_of_the_imaginat

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Boroditsky, Lera. “How Language Shapes Thought.” Scientific American Feb. 2011: 63-65.

Print.

Dickey, Michele D. "Game Design and Learning: a Conjectural Analysis of How Massively

Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games (MMORPGs) Foster Intrinsic Motivation."

Educational Technology, Research and Development 55.3 (2007): 253-73. JSTOR.

Web. Nov. 2010.

Pavlus, John. "World Changing Ideas: The Game of Life." Scientific American Dec. 2010: 43-

44. Print.

Rai, Srishti. Yerkes Finds Monkeys Identify Faces. Dec. 2009. Emory Wheel. Emory

University. Jan. 2011. <http://www.emorywheel.com/detail.php?n=27788>.

Ray Kurzweil on How Technology Will Transform Us. Perf. Ray Kurzweil. TED2005. TED, Nov.

2006. Web. Jan. 2011.

<http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/ray_kurzweil_on_how_technology_will_transform_us

.html>.

Schell, Jesse. The Art of Game Design. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Burlington, MA. 2008.

Zimmer, Carl. "100 Trillion Connections." Scientific American Jan. 2011: 59-63. Print.