Tag Archives: cognitive

Levels of Separation

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Under the right state of mind, or way of looking and thinking about things, sometimes I find it difficult to enjoy certain games. A number of diverting past-times are particularly well designed, capable of creating an immersive experience that, even if just for a brief moment, leave the one experiencing them unable to differentiate between their obvious fictional basis and their potential real world basis.

Case in point (and this is going back a little while now), but when Halo 4 was first released, I did a marathon run through. It took me awhile ’cause I like deliberating, taking my time, checking over everything, and basically just wasting time. No big deal, usually, except that this was one of the first video game titles that I played from beginning to end while high.

For the record, I enjoy a little weed from time to time. Mind you, I’m a ridiculously easy bake, and I can easily make $10 worth last me an entire month. I know tonnes of people who can’t even make that much last them half a day. So.

I don’t need much, and since I use so little, I develop almost no tolerance over time whatsoever. This helps keep it affordable. Usually, when I’m out, I’m out and it’s no big deal. Life goes on. I manage. However, I enjoy having some on hand for specific uses. I find that it really does help lubricate the cognitive machinery, and allows me to think of things with greater depth, or from unusual angles, or whatever. I’m not really sure what exactly it does do, but the TL;DR version is that it really helps me out in the creativity department.

We’ve all heard that before one time or another.

As much as I know from first hand experience the truth of that, there are instances of pot use which have other, unintended effects, such as while gaming. It helps me achieve a heightened degree of focus. Textures seem more vivid. Progression seems slower, allowing me time to take more details in as I go along. Events that happen in game seem more believable. Encounters with enemies seem much less like targets presenting themselves on a screen (to which I respond by pushing buttons in order to dispatch) and more like legitimate contact with some sort of supposedly hostile alien life form.

And of course they’re hostile! Don’t you seeing them firing at you? A voice of reason in my head might insist, if there were voices in my head. Testing that hypothesis is silly. I’ve played countless FPS titles before, not the least of which were prior titles in the same bloody Halo series. I know when the game is presenting me enemies and when it is presenting me with friendlies (or, more rarely neutrals).

As a gamer, my instincts are automatic. There is absolutely no moral imperative to question what it is that I do in the name of fun. If ever I found myself in doubt, all I would have to do is fail to return fire in response to being fired upon. The character that I play, the iconic Master Chief, drops in defeat. Dead. I restart from a previous check point, losing progress made.

Sounds awful! How dare those moving polygonal meshes execute scripts which generate coded beams of colour which just so happen to inconvenience my ability to get from various, vaguely similar A-to-B points in a rapid fashion! THEY MUST ALL BE DESTROYED!!!

And, because I’m just a gamer playing a completely fictional character in a completely fictional, computer-generated universe, pitted again completely non-sentient, computer-controlled AI, why on Earth shouldn’t I just enjoy the strongly implied acts of violence I’m evidently encouraged to carry out?

You see how describing it with alternative language sheds a different light on what a gaming experience can sometimes feel like? At almost no time do I ever question my actions playing First Person Shooters while not baked (I’d say ‘sober’, but it seems that alcohol only emphasizes the ‘okay-ness’ of simulated violence, so…). However, while baked, I find myself questioning everything.

The fact of the matter is that I have almost no understanding of what I’m really doing. I believe there are companies which hire artists (something I want to be!), programmers, designers, creative directors, and tonnes and tonnes more besides who spend ridiculous hours and funding to put a game together for the eventual enjoyment of gamers.

I don’t write code. I wouldn’t be able to interpret a block of C++ to save my life. And with the rate that technology is advancing (careening steadily closer and closer to Turing-approved AI), how do I know that I’m not actually playing a role in the deliberate destruction of a variety of under-credited artificial life forms, hmm? It wouldn’t be a stretch to attribute the tag ‘alien’ to such life forms, would it?

That’ll be a blog for another day.

For now, the point is to provide a basic commentary on what makes a game a game. If a game turned out to be a real and truly violent activity on some poorly-understood (likely informational) level, then I, among countless other well meaning gamers, would be guilty of cold-coded murder on multiple counts. If, however, a game is just a game, well then… Have fun! As for me, the lesson I think I’ve learned is to really limit how often I play games baked in order to still be able to enjoy them as they were intended to be. Otherwise, the layers of separation feel like they become stripped away, the experience becomes uncomfortably raw, and the immersion at times feels all too real.

Window

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So I’m an over thinker. Most of the time, I don’t even realizing when I’m over thinking. It’s been my natural state for long enough that it takes a substantially over charged level of over thinking before I feel lost in the swirling inertia for some time, as is often the case right before trying to go to sleep, and even then.

Speaking of sleep, I’m pretty sure that, for the first 20 minutes or so of laying my head down, I am fully conscious of the random and rapid fluttering of my eyes’ lenses. At first, they’ll twitch to the rhythm of something I’m listening to, especially if it’s something catchy and it’s my first time hearing it, as tends to be the case when I’m trying out new stations to on jango. My guess is that there’s a underlying level of sensitivity that comes with listening to something new but not completely unfamiliar.

In the case of a song, if it’s in the same genre as others I listen to, my brain is already expecting to hear certain patterns. Even in borderline sleep, my nerves are all but raw from synthesizing what I know to expect against what I am actually currently experiencing, ready to judge whether I’m liking the new presentation or not. This period and level of automatic active listening and pattern recognition/prediction doesn’t last for very long, so I’m not losing sleep over it.

It’s also in this state of borderline sleeping that I sometimes imagine what’s going on in my brain as though I were looking at it from within on a micrometer scale, in which case, I imagine a light show the likes of which I realize I can never, ever be capable of fully imagining in the first place. It’s simply beyond the scope of my human comprehension. The firing of billions of neurons as they respond to stimuli that was passed along to them by their neighbouring neurons via synapses, making and reforming connections by the thousands at almost every instant… Unreal.

It’s exactly that process that I can’t help picturing even as certain seemingly major new connections feel as though they’re being initially formed.

I feel as though I have ridiculously frequently ‘eureka’ moments resulting from this almost-passive ability to mentally keep my finger on the pulse on my own thought processes. And before anyone goes concluding that I’m full of myself, I should clarify. What I experience in my head, when in hyper over thinking states like this, often borders on absolute chaos. So, unless chaos is the same thing as genius, then I’m just a thinker, feeler and a dreamer, as many of us are, and nothing more.

Nonetheless, I’m occasionally compelled to believe that I sometimes come a lot closer to something more. Whether that belief is based on anything factual rather than pure myth is a debate for another time. As I lay with my head on the pillow, eyes closed, loads of images appear in my head, fluctuating and morphing into different forms, sometimes very quickly, and often accompanied by equally ever changing thoughts, feelings, things that I “know”, and lots more besides. They all take on new expressions within a fluid milieu of pure potential. Makes me wish I had a better knack for visual arts. I would paint the most peculiar things.

Anyways, it’s in this state that my brain very rapidly makes all these new connections, new associations between things that, only moments ago when I was awake, I would have considered to be separate entities in every way. When the implications of some of these new associations occurs to me, I can get very excited, like I’ve hit upon some lost secret of the ancient shamanic world, or some message from beings from the future, or some hidden inner truth, or something, doesn’t matter what, ’cause regardless, it always feels profound.

The problem invariably arises when I try to retrace my thoughts to see how I arrived at my latest, hastily formed new epiphanies. More often than not, I fail to connect all of the dots the same way twice. My thoughts have a tendency to accomplish their most robust evolution while the rest of my brain is accomplishing it’s best impression of a very tired and soon to be sleeping person. Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyways) that, in this state, my focus begins to breakdown, missing steps and stages, leaving me with an incomplete record of events with which to later reconstruct entire world-shattering revelations.

All it can take to derail the spark of discovery is for one element within the chain, the list of ingredients, the compilation process, to derive from something I can’t identify a reasonably sound source for in the morning. When this happens, coupled with the missing steps mentioned above, the entire logic of my oh so grand insight suddenly looks ridiculously absurd and baseless.

But still, for what it’s worth, there’s a lot that I can do with the incomplete material my brain serves up. Yes, there will be holes, sometimes even blatant ones, but it can still be art. I can still create entire fictional worlds from some of these cognitive tid bits. Stories can still be told, and go on to live in other people’s heads, where they can be shared again and again.

In this way, I can set off a single light in response to what light was given to me, and from that, it can emit outward, becoming an unstopable cascade of waving, pulsating lights in the minds of others all resonating with one another.

We’re all neurons.

[edit: okay, maybe we’re a LOT more than just neurons, but the fact that neural complexity is as complex as it is is still amazing to me]