Dimensions of Challenge

Every challenge forces us to bring to bear some combination of skills. In many recreational challenges, that combination tends to zero in on particular skills. The primary challenge for a competitor in a ski race is a matter of physical strength and coordination, but other skills such as reading snow, judging distances, and gauging speeds are also vital.

Most recreational challenges are centered on particular mental skills. It is true that physical sports require superb musculature, but in very few sports running and weightlifting, for example is musculature the primary factor in success. In most sports, the precise control of that musculature is more important to success. Thus, we can characterize most challenges by the nature of the mental challenge they offer us. Here are some categories.

Cerebellar Challenges

The cerebellum sits at the base of the brain; the spinal cord enters it. In engineering terms, you could call the cerebellum the control module for motor functions. High-level brain decisions are passed to the cerebellum, which breaks each command down into smaller, precisely timed commands to trigger particular muscle bundles. These commands go down the brain stem to the spinal cord and thence to the muscles in the body (see Figure 4.1).

4.1. The brain.

There are only a few sports that are exclusively cerebellar in nature; the discus, shot-put, and javelin are three. Such sports don't involve much sensory input; they don't require accuracy of aim. The goal is to throw the projectile as far as possible. The thrower can do the job almost with his eyes closed; it's a pure motor-control challenge.

Sensorimotor Challenges

Most cerebellar challenges include a sensory element. You don't just trigger muscles in some predetermined sequence; you must use your senses (most often vision) to direct and control the muscular activity. A simple example of this is throwing a projectile to hit a target. As it happens, the task of accurately throwing an object is not easily handled by neurons. Consider, for example, the mechanics of throwing a balled-up sheet of paper into a wastebasket. The timing of muscle activity, and especially the release of the ball, must be accurate to within about a millisecond. Unfortunately, a single neuron takes a few milliseconds to fire. It's like timing an eyeblink with a stopwatch the event being timed is faster than the timer. So how do we do it? The trick is achieved by applying large numbers of neurons and using their average value. Statistically, the average time of firing of a hundred neurons is ten times more precise than the timing of a single neuron. Throw enough neurons at the problem, and you can get as much precision as you desire.

And that's what the human brain does. It applies huge numbers of neurons to the task and thereby attains high precision in throwing. In fact, the ability to accurately throw a projectile is the one area of physical action in which human capability bests any other creature on the planet. So the next time somebody tries to humble you with tales of a hawk's visual acuity, a cat's reflexes, a bat's echolocation, or a cheetah's speed, retort by asking, "Yeah, but can they shoot baskets?"

I can't think of any sensorimotor challenges that are explicitly aural; as far as I can recall, all sensorimotor challenges require the integration of visual information with motor response. At its simplest form, we can call this "hand-eye coordination," but in many such challenges, it's not just the hands that are responding. Indeed, here we arrive at one of the most striking distinctions between sports and videogames. In all sensorimotor-challenging sports, even those relying primarily on manual activity, the entire body is involved in the task. Even the trivial task of tossing the paper ball into the wastebasket requires the player to rotate his chair, lean his body, twist his neck, and position his arms. Yet the videogame player seems to work best with most of his body immobile; even the upper arms move but little. It's all in the thumbs.

Pushing the Pathways Down

The neural pathways utilized in such sensorimotor challenges are complex. Preprocessed visual data passes from the retina to the visual cortex at the back of the brain, where it is further processed into visually meaningful components such as walls, floor, targets, and so forth. From there it travels to the cerebral cortex, where it undergoes high-level processing. In other words, the cerebral cortex recalls the rules of the game and its goals, integrates the information from the visual cortex, decides what to do about the situation, and passes those decisions down to the cerebellum, which translates them into muscle action (see Figure 4.2).

4.2. Information flow in the brain when first learning a videogame.

As you might imagine, all this processing is quite time-consuming and so the beginning player can be slow and clumsy. The difference between a beginner and a skilled player is that the skilled player has learned to build shorter, faster neural pathways from the visual cortex to the cerebellum (see Figure 4.3).

4.3. Shortened pathways for information flow yield faster responses and more successful play.

By moving the pathways lower into the brain, the player reduces the amount of processing required to react to events in the game or sport. Decision-making is no longer conscious or deliberate. It is often described as "instinctive." The player sees, and the player acts without conscious thought. There's still plenty of mental processing going on, but it's faster because it is no longer part of the elaborate (shall I say bureaucratic?) structure of conscious thought.

It is one of the wonders of the human brain that we can learn so readily. Any process that we concentrate on repetitively can develop its own custom neural pathways that render its operation faster and smoother, requiring less mental effort. In effect, whenever we learn a task, we reduce the amount of conscious effort required to carry it out. When I first began to use a keyboard, I had to concentrate on the locations of the keys. After literally millions of keystrokes, my brain has burned that information into its neural pathways. I think of a word, my fingers move, and the word appears on the screen. All the mental computations go on in a deeper, lower level of mental processing beneath my conscious awareness.

Even more striking is the ability of the brain to learn different tasks with different degrees of facility. Typing on a keyboard is now a subconscious process for me, while the particulars of my word processor are a little less familiar; some of the commands take a fraction of a second of thought to recall. Commands that I use rarely demand my full attention to recall. My brain's organization of its knowledge is an elegantly proportioned and optimized system; the more often I perform a task, the more deeply it is driven into my subconscious and the faster my execution of the task is.

This ability to drive task execution deeper and deeper can be taken to dramatic extremes. There's no reason why a player cannot learn a task this well (see Figure 4.4).

4.4. Information flow in the brain of an expert player.

In such a case, the player is able to attain extremely high levels of performance because the neural pathways are much shorter and lower in the processing hierarchy of the brain. This extreme degree of proficiency is most difficult to attain in sports, because the exercise of these pathways necessarily entails lots of exhausting muscle activity. You can only practice your sport so many hours a day before your aching muscles put a stop to your exercise.

But what if we could invent a sport that didn't involve so much exhausting muscular activity? What if all that mental activity could still be going on, but it used only muscles that didn't require lots of strength, muscles that are used for lots and lots of low-power activity? These muscles wouldn't tire, and so the player could go for hours and hours, attaining previously unheard-of levels of proficiency. This, it would seem, would be the ultimate exercise of this learning capability, and it would surely be an exciting sport, wouldn't it?

Technology has in fact provided us with just such a sport: the videogame. A kid can sit in front of a videogame for hours, working his fingers frantically but never tiring. In the process, he can push those neural pathways down so deep in his brain that his game-reflexes become inhumanly quick. The parent watching a kid playing such a videogame has difficulty keeping up with the action on the screen, so fast are the kid's reflexes. It's truly mind-boggling.

Of course, no videogame is ever mastered; no matter how good the kid is, there's always something new to learn, some reflex that can be made sharper and quicker. So the kid never relaxes.

Oftentimes when I am engaged in a friendly telephone conversation, I will perform light housework: putting things away, sorting socks, that kind of thing. I hate housework because it's so mindless; telephone-time is the ideal time to do this work because I can carry out these almost subconscious tasks while engaging my conscious effort on my conversation with my friend. That's the real value of learning something so well that it takes little mental effort; we can carry out the dumb task while also performing some other more mentally challenging work.

But this is not how kids play videogames. There's always a new skill to master, so the kid devotes his entire mental resource to the learning process. All his mentation is concentrated in that low-level processing. And this causes something most curious to happen: conscious processing shuts down. Parents can readily attest to this phenomenon; calling the kid to dinner yields a muttered acknowledgement and no action. A kid can start playing a videogame at eight in the evening and still be there at midnight, unaware of the passage of time. "Johnny, there's a lion loose in the room" will elicit an "Okay, Mom" and nothing more. Some parents report that only physically interposing themselves between player and screen can break the kid's trance.

Altered States of Consciousness

It's not quite correct to refer to this phenomenon as a loss of consciousness; it's really an altered state of consciousness. And just as the hippies of the 60s were entranced (literally) by drug-induced altered states of consciousness, so too are kids today entranced (literally) by videogame-induced altered states of consciousness.

This alarming analogy gains strength with deeper consideration. There are several particulars in which the analogy between videogame and drugs rings true.

First is the element of pleasure. We are programmed to learn, and successful learning is intrinsically pleasurable. Just as the "runner's high" is triggered by endorphins released by a certain level of exercise, there seems to be some kind of "videogamer's high" attained at a certain level of proficiency. Videogames are carefully designed to provide the player with a steady stream of learning successes; it's called the learning curve of the game. At each point in the game, the player has only to make a small improvement in his performance to earn an explicit and often dramatic reward. It's like eating popcorn; each piece is small but tastes so good that you readily move on to the next piece, until you suddenly realize that you have consumed a gallon of popcorn.

Videogamers have difficulty describing the precise nature of their pleasurable experience, although they will readily confirm just how much they enjoy the game. Perhaps this is due to the inarticulateness intrinsic to kids; perhaps it is because the experience has no parallel in the real world. They describe their state of consciousness in terms frighteningly similar to those used by drug addicts. They are "in tune with the game" or "in the groove of the game." They feel that they are united with the game; they anticipate its behavior so intimately that they almost identify with it.

Second, videogamers report the same sense of power and invulnerability that drug users experience. Drug users report the feeling that they are smarter, more creative, and able to see more deeply into the mysteries of their souls. Videogamers report similar experiences of power and invulnerability. When they are playing in a videogame high, dangers rush at them, but they flow along with the game, unwounded, untouched, and incapable of being injured.

Third is the loss of awareness of the dull, depressing world in which they live. Just as some people drink to forget, some videogamers slip out of a world of overbearing parents, demanding teachers, and dismal failure, to enter a world of simple challenges and frequent glorious success. Their loss of awareness of the world around them is no happenstance; it's an important part of the appeal of the experience.

Lastly, there is the addictive nature of videogames. As with drugs, addiction is not an inevitable outcome of use; some personalities seem more resistant to addiction, others less so. But there is no question that some kids become addicted to videogames. They partake of videogame pleasures to the detriment of other activities in their lives. Their sense of priorities is distorted in favor of the games. They are unable to stop. Let's face it: This is addiction.

There are, of course, many differences between the videogame experience and the drug experience: the absence of any outright chemical influence the large number of videogamers who do not fall victim to addiction and the greater subtlety of videogame mental effects. I am not claiming that all videogamers are no different from drug users; rather, I'm claiming that some of the more extreme videogamers share some symptoms with drug users.

It is only a matter of time before some researcher carries out a detailed study of brain activity in videogamers and compares it with brain activity in drug users. When that study is published, you do NOT want to be holding stock in any videogame company!

Spatial Reasoning

There really isn't any such thing as a pure sensorimotor challenge; a certain amount of spatial reasoning is necessarily involved. In other words, when the player sees a bad guy pop up, the player must perform a certain amount of spatial reasoning to estimate the amount of danger posed by the bad guy, the likelihood of successfully shooting him, and so forth. Some spatial reasoning is performed directly in the visual cortex in the back of the brain; some is so everyday in nature as to be easily performed in other areas; some is so specific to a game that it must be performed in the most general (and therefore slowest) manner. Much of the learning process of a fast game is a matter of moving the spatial reasoning process into lower regions of the brain.

However, some games don't rely so much on fast hand-eye coordination, and so they are able to present the player with more complex spatial problems requiring more subtle exercise of spatial reasoning. Strategy wargames, for example, require the player to analyze spatial patterns of military units, looking for weaknesses in the front lines, potential lines of advance and retreat, and so forth.

Pattern Recognition

Jim Dunion of Atari Research first demonstrated the possibilities with a delightful real-time puzzle in which the player was presented with a random pattern of colored dots that slowly dissolved into a recognizable image, such as a famous face. The player had only to recognize the image and type in its name; his score was the amount of time left before the image was fully revealed. This game had pattern recognition as its sole challenge, but pattern recognition often shows up as a secondary challenge in many games. Some shooters encourage the player to recognize particular monsters when they are far away, the better to ready an appropriate early response.

Many boardgames make strong use of pattern recognition. Chess, checkers, and Go all require lots of pattern recognition, although there's plenty of sequential reasoning mixed in as well. The board wargames also push pattern recognition hard; the player must analyze a front line to identify weak spots and strong points.

Computers have always been weaker than nervous systems at pattern recognition; the only way computers manage it now is to painstakingly convert a pattern recognition problem into a sequential reasoning problem, which can then be solved with computer power.

A pattern need not be strictly visual; it can take a more abstruse form. Upon entering a new room, a player in an RPG must quickly evaluate the tactical situation and the pattern of positions and capabilities of the hostile inhabitants of the room. If that pattern looks particularly dangerous, the player might want to retreat, but a less threatening pattern would require a completely different approach. The most abstruse expression of such pattern recognition comes in strategy wargames, where the player must evaluate the enemy's deployments to determine the best area in which to aim an attack or the most vulnerable area to defend.

Sequential Reasoning

When we string together long sequences of steps, we are engaging in sequential reasoning. Examples of such activities are mathematical calculations, writing a computer program, or planning a travel route. Most games require some sort of sequential reasoning, but chess is the exemplar of complex sequential reasoning. The typical chess player must examine many possible sequences of moves. Since this is something that computers excel in, it should come as no surprise that computers can beat people at this task.

Many computer games are designed by people who are programmers at heart, and they tend to overemphasize sequential reasoning because it comes so easily to them. Be on guard against this tendency; keep a lid on the sequential reasoning (unless, of course, your use of sequential reasoning is deliberately intrinsic to the design). Most people find highly sequential tasks, such as long calculations or memorizing complex sequences of actions, to be a tedious challenge.

Numerical Reasoning

We all have to juggle numbers in our heads. Should I buy the small jar of peanut butter or is the large jar a better buy? If Fresno is 180 miles away, can I get there before dinnertime? This kind of arithmetic or numerical reasoning is a special form of sequential reasoning, and most people find it particularly odious. Computers shine at numerical calculations, so you should never challenge your player in this dimension. Let the computer crunch the numbers for the player.

Resource Management

In many games, especially strategy games, the player must carefully marshal a limited supply of scarce resources to handle the various problems he faces. In shooters, resource management might cover only ammunition and health, but in more complex games, the player might have to juggle dozens of resources. Some degree of resource management comes easily to most people. However, as with sequential reasoning (but to a lesser degree), some games tend to overdo it. In particular, some game designers seem to design by grabbing an existing game and adding some more resource management.

Some of the best designers argue that resource management is central to game design, and if we grant them broad indulgence in the meaning of the term "resource," they're right. For example, consider a social interaction in which you must convince another player to carry out some action. You could beg and plead, promising that you'll be very appreciative if that player relents to your importunations. I suppose that you could call this the expenditure of some sort of social relationship resource, like "friendship brownie points." Indeed, the Indonesians have a word for this concept: tanagadalang. However, I find this approach to social relationships too cold for my taste; I think it's more effective, in the long run, to design social interactions in somewhat more humanistic terms than "resources."

Social Reasoning

Now here's an underdeveloped source of challenge for computer games! There's no mystery why social reasoning is so weak in computer games: Most game designers are socially incompetent geeks whose social reasoning skills are microscopic. It's pretty hard to design a game about a challenge you don't understand. Indeed, a number of game designers have angrily rejected my claims on this matter by denying that such a thing as social reasoning even exists.

Although I phrase my put-down of game designers in kinder, gentler terms, the problem at work here is quite serious: autism. Psychologists are now realizing that autism is not some single-valued disease that strikes a few unlucky souls; it is instead a broad-spectrum malady that affects millions of people to greater or lesser degrees. In its most benign form, autism expresses itself as a general reluctance to interact with others, a shyness or social clumsiness. Sound like anybody you know? How about programmers? Although most programmers are perfectly healthy, the field attracts people with social skill deficits. This explains why so much of the output of programmers is so user-intolerant. With most software, such personality traits do no more damage than to make software difficult to use, costing us billions of dollars in lost productivity and accidents. But with games, the results are really serious: It's pretty hard to entertain people when you simply can't relate to them!

The cluelessness of the game design community with regard to social reasoning is truly breathtaking. One of the perennial questions among game designers is this: "How can we entice more female players into our fold?" Answers to this question have ranged from "Put a bow on Pac-Man's head and call him Ms. Pac-Man" (seriously! Midway actually did this!) to "Give them pink BFGs (Big Guns)" (not so seriously). Game designers can't seem to come to grips with the fact that social reasoning fascinates most women. You can see it most easily in the difference between the typical "guy movie" and the typical "chick flick." The guy movie sports a hero with a huge torso, bulging arms, a big gun in one hand, and a girl whose breast measurements exceed her IQ in the other arm. The chick flick is about social relationships. Chicks go to guy movies as an act of social cooperation with their guy; guys refuse to go to chick flicks because such movies bore them out of their skulls.

Clearly, if we want to appeal to more women, we want to build games that challenge their social reasoning skills. At the moment, this looks rather difficult to do; it's so much easier to calculate the trajectory of a bullet than to figure out why Jane left John. However, I suspect that, when we do produce games with strong social challenge, we will use simplified systems of interpersonal relations that will be iconically represented; when this happens, we will likely think that it looked obvious all along.

LESSON 9

Work on social reasoning designs.