Mental States in Gamer Mastery

Learning State While in the learning state of mind your objective should be to concentrate on learning and experimentation. You should play to win, and take matches seriously, but not be afraid to try different strategies for the purpose of learning. In this state you aim to maximize your learning, not your win-percentage. Feel free to think about your moves, what would have happened if you took another route, what you are going to try in the next matchup and so on. It is only beneficial to...

 Developing Child's Understanding of Games

During the first stage, beginning around age 5, the child does not yet understand there are fixed rules to the game. Children of this age will play Marbles in an improvisational way, possessing a vague notion of rules but not yet understanding the idea of fixed rules. In the second stage, around ages 8 to 10, the child comes to know that there are rules, and will regard these rules with a near religious reverence. The rules are felt to have their own implicit authority, which cannot be quest...

 The Volumetric Approach to History

You will be thinking that we are coming to the end of this book: we’ve dealt with eight centuries, so there are only two to go. You may be surprised to learn, therefore, that in historical terms we are not even halfway. The reason for this discrepancy is that history is not time, and time is not history. History is not the study of the past per se; it is about people in the past. Time, separated from humanity, is purely a matter for scientists and star-gazers. If a previously unknown uninha...

 Old CRPGs are Unplayable for Modern Gamers

They had five days to play (Ultima IV), and I asked them to make as much progress as they could in that time. When we gathered to debrief in class, a few students explained how they’d overcome some of their difficulties, but the vast majority was utterly flummoxed by the game. As one of them put it, “I’d say for gamers of our generation, an RPG like Ultima IV is boring and pretty much unplayable.” After removing the arrow from my chest, I asked them to explain why. It mostly came dow...

 The Singularity of the Human Species

The singularity of the human species, 1 the study and defence of which form the plan of this work, stands out principally in the actual characteristics of what we shall call in these pages the Noosphere (or thinking envelope) of the earth. But just because, forming a true singularity (and not a simple irregularity) in evolutionary matter, humanity is born not by an accident but from the prolonged play of the forces of cosmogenesis, its roots must theoretically be recognisable (as in fact they...

 Ways to Tackle a Problem

If a problem seems familiar, try reasoning by Analogy.  If you solved a similar one in the past, and can adapt to thedifferences, you may be able to re-use that solution.  If the problem still seems too hard, divide it into several parts.  Every difference you recognize may suggest a separate subproblem to solve. If it seems unfamiliar, change how you’re describing it. Find a different description that highlights more relevant information. If you get too many ideas, then focus on ...

 MySpace Destroyed History

MySpace, in a rush to relaunch and rebrand itself, made inaccessible the blogs of all of its users. There could be no movement to preserve this record of the past, as it happened so suddenly. Millions of contributions, critical records of events of a decade or so ago, lost in the blink of an eye. It’s similar to the destruction of something like Penn station: a website that was run by user-generated content, that was a central hub of Internet traffic, and that meant something to multiple mi...

 Violence Must be Considered Proportionally When Compared ...

In absolute numbers, of course, civilized societies are matchless in the destruction they have wreaked. But should we look at absolute numbers, or at relative numbers, calculated as a proportion of the populations? The choice confronts us with the moral imponderable of whether it is worse for 50 percent of a population of one hundred to be killed or 1 percent of a population of one billion. In one frame of mind, one could say that a person who is tortured or killed suffers to the same degree ...

 The Past is a Brutally Foreign Place

If the past is a foreign country, it is a shockingly violent one. It is easy to forget how dangerous life used to be, how deeply brutality was once woven into the fabric of daily existence. Cultural memory pacifies the past, leaving us with pale souvenirs whose bloody origins have been bleached away. A woman donning a cross seldom reflects that this instrument of torture was a common punishment in the ancient world; nor does a person who speaks of a whipping boy ponder the old practice of flo...

 The Wormcam

It was possible now to look back into time and read off a complete DNA sequence from any moment in an individual’s life. And it was possible to download a copy of that person’s mind and, by putting the two together, regenerated body and downloaded mind, to restore her … We live on Mars, the moons of the outer planets, and we’re heading for the stars. There have even been experiments to download human minds into the quantum foam … We intend to restore all human souls, back to the beg...