04 NOV 2018 by ideonexus
The Immersive Fallacy
According to the immersive fallacy, this reality is so complete that ideally the frame falls away so that the player truly believes that he or she is part of an imaginary world.
[...]
In the case of play, we know that metacommunication is always in operation. A teen kissing another teen in Spin the Bottle or a Gran Turismo player driving a virtual race car each understands that their play references other realities. But the very thing that makes their activity play is that they also know th... 1 
notes
notesThe false idea that a "suspension of disbelief" is needed to enjoy a work of art or game.
04 NOV 2018 by ideonexus
Five Elements of Game Experience
Visual scanning: visual perception, especially scanning the entire screen at once.
Auditory discriminations: listening for game events and signals.
Motor responses: physical actions a player takes with the game controls.
Concentration: intense focus on play.
Perceptual patterns of learning: coming to know the structure of the game itself.
1 notes
notes29 SEP 2017 by ideonexus
It’s Okay to “Forget” What You Read
What we get from books is not just a collection of names, dates and events stored in our minds like files in a computer. Books also change, via our mental models, the very reality that we perceive.
You can think of mental models as psychological lenses that color and shape what we see. Some of this is genetic or cultural (Americans focus on very different parts of a picture than the Japanese do), but much of our perception is also shaped by experience — and experience includes the book...
1 23 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
A Sonata as Teacher
Music makes things in our minds, but afterward most of them fade away. What remains? In one old story about Mozart, the wonder child hears a lengthy contrapuntal mass and then writes down the entire score. I do not believe such tales, for history documents so few of them that they seem to be mere legend, though by that argument Mozart also would seem to be legend. Most people do not even remember the themes of an evening's concert. Yet, when the tunes are played again, they are recognized. So... 1 notes
notes30 JUN 2013 by ideonexus
Our Collective Memory
Taken globally, the set of traces that we leave in the world does without doubt add up to something. It is through operations on sets of traces that I understand an event that I take part in. Tolstoy wrote about the foot soldier in the Napoleonic wars. The soldier he describes cannot have the experience of the war he is waging nor the battle he is fighting because the only “global” traces of the war are inscriptions—notably, maps and statistics. There is no scalable observation that mov... 1 notes
notesNo one soldier experiences a War. They experience details from their microcosm encounter with the war. The war itself is a collective memory experienced only in history books.
11 MAY 2013 by ideonexus
Reading is a Shortcut to Wisdom
The problem with being too busy to read is that you learn by experience (or by your men’s
experience), i.e. the hard way. By reading, you learn through others’ experiences, generally a
better way to do business, especially in our line of work where the consequences of
incompetence are so final for young men.
[...]
Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face NOTHING new under the sun.
For all the “4th Generation of War” intellectuals running around today saying tha... 1 notes
notesWithout reading, all we have is experience to give us wisdom, but that experience in war comes at too high a price. Through reading we can gain the wisdom without having to sacrifice the soldiers.
27 APR 2013 by ideonexus
Molyneux's problem
I shall here insert a problem of that very ingenious and studious promoter of real knowledge, the learned and worthy Mr. Molyneux, which he was pleased to send me in a letter some months since; and it is this:- "Suppose a man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a cube and a sphere of the same metal, and nighly of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt one and the other, which is the cube, which the sphere. Suppose then the cube and sphere placed on...A blind person, familiar with a cube and sphere by touch, is made to see. Without touching the objects, would they be able to distinguish them by sight?
21 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
Superstition is Based on Personal Experience
Almost every major systematic error which has deluded men for thousands of years relied on practical experience. Horoscopes, incantations, oracles, magic, witchcraft, the cures of witch doctors and of medical practitioners before the advent of modern medicine, were all firmly established through the centuries in the eyes of the public by their supposed practical successes. The scientific method was devised precisely for the purpose of elucidating the nature of things under more carefully cont... 1 notes
notesAstrology and other pseudosciences are believed because they appear to work in the real world, it is up to experiment to disprove them.
28 APR 2012 by ideonexus
Experience is Experiment
The lessons of science should be experimental also. The sight of a planet through a telescope is worth all the course on astronomy; the shock of the electric spark in the elbow outvalues all theories; the taste of the nitrous oxide, the firing of an artificial volcano, are better than volumes of chemistry. 1 notes
notesEmerson describes the importance of feeling electric shocks, fake volcanoes, tasting NO, etc.
31 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Science Takes Us Beyond Our Experience
The aim of scientific thought, then, is to apply past experience to new circumstances; the instrument is an observed uniformity in the course of events. By the use of this instrument it gives us information transcending our experience, it enables us to infer things that we have not seen from things that we have seen; and the evidence for the truth of that information depends on our supposing that the uniformity holds good beyond our experience. Folksonomies: inference experience
Folksonomies: inference experience
1 notes
notesThe act of inference is positing behaviors and laws onto things we have no experience of yet.
