Thinking out loud about narrative units

Yesterday, I touched on narrative units in writing, and how I found games a lot easier on that front than prose. I'm going to try to poke at that idea a little more here. To reiterate the nature of this blog: this is intended to be a messy thought sketch where I'm thinking on the page and trying to move closer to a thought, rather than something declarative and pre-baked.

I'm reasonably certain I got the term 'narrative units' from Hannah Nicklin's Writing for Games, which is singularly fantastic. Without checking back, I can't be sure, and I might have come across it somewhere previous to that, but credit where it's almost definitely due as it's super helpful in exploring this concept.

So narrative units are a slightly squishy concept, but I'd define them as the divisible pieces of writing or narrative that constitute 'a work'. What constitutes a 'unit' to me varies depending on the precise depth in which you're looking and your current frame of reference. There are a few larger categories which occur to me offhand:

Dramatic units like scenes, acts, even broader plot beats.

Form-specific units like storylets, comic pages and panels, audiologs, barks, in-game lore texts, chapters.

Atomic units like lines of dialogue, words, sentences, paragraphs.

Dramatic units I think are broadly applicable everywhere. They're fairly high-level, and refer to more generalised narrative concepts that will apply most of the time regardless of the form in which you're working.

'Form' is another word I've been using heavily since reading Nicklin's book. I think it's usefully more specific than 'medium', though, looking back to refresh my memory, it's more malleable:

‘Form’ might feel a little woolly as a definitional term at this point. Sometimes I’ve used it to describe what I’ve also called’ structure’ (the form a story takes), and also the formal expectations of the medium and of genre. That’s okay though, because ‘form’ is a word that simply means the ‘shape’ of something - the shape we design or a set of expectations about how things are usually shaped.

The meaning of 'form’ is modified by context – structural form, media form, genre form. I’ve touched on ‘form-driven design/storytelling’ as a kind of approach too – using the shape of structure, genre, or medium to underline or contrast with the content. Elements of form in games are ways the storytelling is shaped by the writer, the design, the gameplay, and by the player. These elements include:

So, to clarify, I'm currently using the word 'form' to distinguish between, say, video games, interactive fiction, TV, novels, etc. -- what are often called 'mediums'. I'm already coming to regret this terminology, but that's for me to fix in a future post.

I'm now finding the need to distinguish slightly between form and... it's hard to put a term on it. There's a difference between a dialogue-based format vs prose-based one. Dialogue-based formats fit within a bunch of different forms -- (parts of) video games where words are written for VO, text-only dialogue (that's still not prose per se), theatrical scripts, film scripts, audio drama, etc. Those are different forms with a common format. Prose is also not a form per se. The forms could be personal essay, novel, short-story, video games that use in-game prose in some way, and so on -- each with their own affordances -- but there is still a commonality of prose behind them. Maybe this is where 'medium' is useful, in the physical sense of 'an intervening substance'. Yes, that feels right.

The form-specific units are usually key, because they bridge the gap between the more generalised dramatic units and the specific shape of the form you're working in. You could break a story entirely in dramatic units before even thinking about the form-specific ones. You might have an entire story worked out before even settling on a form through which to tell it! But there's then an additional breaking step to map the general dramatic units onto the form-specific ones.

The atomic units are more, for me, about the execution of very specific things. Pacing and flow within a scene. Just the right-feeling word choice. Rhythm and prosody. They're still connected to everything else, but they're a more granular part of the writing process.

All of the different units have stuff in common. The key things are that they generally seek to convey specific information (you could call this 'purpose' more broadly or 'content') and achieve specific effects for the audience. Whenever I'm struggling or need to force myself to be more specific, those are the two elements I fall back on for a given unit ('What is the actual purpose of this scene and how do I want it to make them feel.' 'What does this specific sentence need to convey to set up the next bit. What tone do I want it to set?'). That's the same when breaking the story in a dramatic context or when doing it for the form-specific units. But also at the atomic level -- when it's not working intuitively, interrogating the content and the effect work well for me.

(I would love to give some specific examples here, but it's 28 degrees in my office and I've been steaming like a ham all day.)

To the point from yesterday that inspired this post: I think with prose specifically, I have a fairly loose grasp on what the form-specific units are. Pages feel less meaningful in this context; chapters certainly are meaningful but are also too macro to stand alone for my purposes. Scenes could just stand as a form-specific unit rather than a dramatic one, but again that feels like muddying the distinctions a bit.

With games, the form-specific units are often very visible and legible (storylets! audiologs! barks!) -- often to the player directly, and certainly to the developer. With prose, I think they're less so.

Something for me to interrogate further, then, is the idea of something like 'sequences' or 'blocks' which represent a form-specific unit in prose as a thinking tool when writing and revising, to enable clarity of purpose and effect.

Write fast

A small correction from yesterday's post. I said 'not everything has to be optimised'. Olivia rightly yelled 'GEORGE ARE YOU OKAY'. I apologise for the error. What I meant to say was 'things should be optimised to their optimal point of optimisation and no further'

One thing I have to hold myself to when writing is: forward momentum. When I'm at the writing stage, no matter my reservations, it's better to keep trying to turn out a first draft and fix the problems later than tinker with the materials to try to 'get it right' first time. Usually, it's better for me to keep on truckin' and get through a rough version of everything so I can see how it all fits together and finesse the wrong bits. This works best when there's sufficient iteration time for big rewrites as well as just revision. (But also: one of the ways to make more time for rewriting is to write the first bit as fast and scrappily as you need.)

I find, though, that I have a tendency to 'figure out what's wrong' with the fundamentals while drafting, leading me to want to go back and work those out those kinks midway through. That's generally a false economy. Those things can almost always be fixed between drafts. In fact, they're often more easily fixed between drafts than in-flight. Sometimes, they might not turn out to be an issue at all -- or else my understanding of the issue will shift. So: better to press on, you can't polish a blank page, etc. etc.

Except, that's not always the case. Sometimes, there is something major wrong in the fundamentals that needs fixing to enable you to write better and more fluidly, and the correct thing is to pause and backstep through the process.

Which is immensely frustrating, because that means my brain is constantly trying to trick me into believing that this is one of those times when that's necessary (when it almost always isn't). And I can't shut that off by saying 'that's never the right thing to do', because... sometimes it is. It's the variable reinforcement problem.

Still, this almost always holds true for me, and there doesn't need to be a perfect answer. It's gratifying to recognise a problem before turning out a bunch of words that bakes in whatever assumptions might be shaky, but that sort of draft is rarely entirely wasted effort, either.

I'm better at writing first fast and scrappy in games stuff, I think because the narrative units tend to be more tightly defined at the point of drafting. Writing for (or in) a little box in a CMS makes it much easier for me to define function and effect, and just do that bad, then better, then decent. Prose shares some general narrative units (paragraphs, scenes, sentences, etc.), but for me the connective tissue of those tends to be much less crisp when drafting. That's partly a positive affordance of the form, one of the things that makes prose prose and lets you do all those lovely prosey things, and partly something that I find makes it harder for me to be as clear and intentional early on. Perhaps that's something to poke at more in future.

(There's a further distinction between 'prose as artistic form' and 'prose as medium'. 'Prose' can be a tool deployed in other context, like games, or the end in and of itself. Maybe this is where my thinking about narrative units needs to happen. The fundamental atomic units of prose (words, sentences, paragraphs) plus the general narrative units that apply to basically every form (like scenes) are not actually the narrative units of a prose-first form like a short story or novel. Pages don't quite apply there in the same way as a more formalist medium like comics, so... what is the shape of those prosey units?)

The best 20%

• The Pareto Principle, or the 80:20 rule, states that (approximately) 80% of the outputs come from 20% of the inputs.
• I don't think it technically qualifies as a decision razor, but it's certainly a useful organising/prioritisting/clarifying heuristic to apply in lots of contexts.
• I've used this in the past when thinking about clients. I read somewhere that applied this as: 80% of your good-value returns probably come from 20% of your clients; 80% of your headaches and problems probably come from 20% of your clients. They may overlap, but they probably don't, sigificantly. So, focus on that 'good' 20% and try to find more clients like them; try to fire, eliminate, or otherwise mitigate the 'bad' 20%.
• In practice in the sort of work I do, there's not the same commoditisable approach, volume, or breadth to clients BUT it was still illumunating to undertake the exercise of figuring out where those 80% of desirable outputs came from, and what linked those clients together, and turn them into more generalised 'rules' for evaluating new contracts.
• Other end of the value spectrum, but: I recently did the same thing to the email newsletters I subscribed to. I added a bunch, wasn't reading them as much, etc. etc.
• Generally: I had an abundance of them and too little time to actually read.
• So I worked through which ~20% were most valuable/interesting to me, and unsubscribed from basically anything else.
• Some others stuck around that wouldn't have made that cut, but they usually had some specific, seperate value, or otherwise were so infrequent or irregular to not be worth counting.
• I now have fewer things to read and enjoy them more.
• I've now done the same thing with my backlog of side projects.
• I can actually quantify roughly how much time I'll have to invest in side projects for the rest of the year and hold that up against my rough estimates for all the things I want to pursue that are non-day-job work.
• The Pareto Principle provided a useful and clear lens to think about what actually mattered most to me in terms of what is exciting to work on and which best supports my goals.
• There's a trap in thinking you can do it all (you can't! there will always be more new things generated vs your time to actually invest in doing them).
• (My reading list is a good model for this. I eliminate things from there with abandon when it gets too full. Because it's always going to fill up faster than I read things. I either have to reconcile myself to a long, unusuable reading list, or find another way things get cleared off the list without guilt.)
• But there's a further trap in thinking you have to fill all the time you have. Cutting everything but that ~20% technically leaves me with a time surplus for the year. BUT obviously the answer isn't to back-fill it with other backlogged projects. Beyond the usual 'things will take longer than I have estimated' angle, it's better instead to leave room for more projects that are like that 20% in terms of what they offer.
• Just because something matches your desires and goals a bit, that doesn't mean it's inherently worth doing. There's an opportunity cost to pursuing it at the expense of something better or more diverse.
• The main catch I can see to this approach (which certainly doesn't apply to everything) is the risk of things starting to look the same. If I'm eliminating everything outside of that initial 20% (be that clients, projects, or newsletters) and using that to inform my selection criteria for new things, it risks losing the sense of serendipity and novelty from something that doesn't 'look right'.
• (c.f. Taleb's 'Look the Part' test. When choosing between two things of seemingly equal appropriateness, choose the one that least looks 'the part'.)
• But in practice I'm not overly worried by this. Life isn't perfect, not everything has to be optimised, and my standards for excluding things that don't match just aren't that good to exclude all possibility of new things. They're going to leak in, and that's good. The leaks can let the interesting in. (And the annoying. Almost certainly they'll let the annoying in, too.)

No such thing as a nut

'There's no such thing as a fish.' So goes the podcast name. The same is true for other things, like seagulls and panthers.

I mean, it's obviously nonsense intuitively, but the slightly pedantic-but-interesting point underlying it is that there is no singular thing in our established animal taxonomies that constitutes a 'fish' or a 'seagull'.

It reminds me of the smart-arse point that peanuts aren't really nuts. Sure, that's true, in that in the botanical domain, 'nut' has a specific meaning to which peanuts do not conform (from memory, they are 'legumes' in this context, but don't quote me on that). But in the naming and referencing of things, we draw a distinction between what constitutes a 'botanical nut' and a 'culninary nut'. And it's usually perfectly clear what we're talking about when we refer to these things outside of specialised domains. ('I told you I was allergic to nuts!'/'Yes, but peanuts are legumes!') Intelligence is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is about knowing not to put one in a fruit salad.

It's all about frames of reference -- the context in which we're referring to a thing. And, perhaps more broadly, the idea that there's some perfect taxonomy that correctly captures and refers to all things, and language is failing when it doesn't adhere to that specific taxonomy, regardless of context. Whereas context is just a huge part of how we communicate, and language without context is worth a whole hell of a lot less.

I'm tired and don't have the time or brain to fully draw connections here -- but this is something that ties up with various things in Ways of Being, and Can draw the lines so neatly as we like them -- the idea of maps and models overtaking a more generalised reality.

Emotional Bids

Emotional bids. First some caveats/context: this is something I've referenced a bunch over the years in conversation and found a very helpful little mental shorthand. I can't, however, remember the original source where I came across this (maybe a podcast like Hidden Brain? I don't know), and looking it up now mostly points me to lots of pop-psych sites the general look and layout of which tend to make me highly skeptical about what they contain. So: take anything that sounds definitive about human nature or makes broad and definitive pronouncements with a heavy dose of sodium.

BUT I have found them a genuinely useful concept to distil, so I'm going to talk about them anyway.

• An emotional bid is when somebody in a relationship says or does something that is seeking some kind of reaction for reasons of emotional reassurance.
• (I'm using 'relationship' encompassingly, though it's even more obvious in romantic relationships)
• They might not know they are doing it for this reason.
• They might be doing it for other reasons as well.
• But at some level it disguises/encodes a sort of emotional 'ping' that's looking for some reciprocal interaction.
• Asking someone to tell you about their day would be one example. Maybe they do actually care about the vagaries of your day, maybe they don't; it's an excuse to solicit some emotionally nourishing interaction.
• Another, flipped example might be my saying something about my day which isn't meaningful/substantial by itself, but is intended to elicit further questions/interactions.
• There are lots of things that can fit into this general definition.
• The original source (and see the above caveats here) referred to recognising and responding to emotional bids as being a very clear predictor for a strong, lasting relationship.
• Crucially, this doesn't necessarily mean responding to them positively and necessarily engaging on the hinted terms. Yes, that's obviously better, but the ability to recognise the bid and turn it down ('I can't talk about that right now' or even something less direct) still indicated a level of awareness of the other person's emotional needs and interiority (acknowledging, consciously or not, the reason behind the surface action.)
• They are, essentially, emotional 'hooks' that offer the chance for someone to see and recognise your emotional needs when they are not plainly stated.
• This is where I've found most interesting to see -- examples between other people where it's clear from the outside that someone is making some form of emotional outreach, looking for a response, and the other person just misses it altogether for one reason or another.
• I find it really notionally close to when you see two people juuusstt talking past each other and not getting why, because someone's missed some piece of important context, or because they're actually just not... hearing what each other is saying clearly?
• There's probably some interesting technique to be drawn from this around writing good scenes between people. So much of that comes down to understanding or creating subtext anyway, or reasons for there to be subtext or omission.
• I realise after writing all this out that I've actually mentioned this exact concept before, back in What are we really talking about. Still, I think I've added more info/detail here rather than just treading the same ground.
• But it's a good time to reiterate that, actually -- so much of this type of communication (all communication, really) comes down to skills for really hearing what the other person is saying and being aware enough of their interior state to figure out what you're both really getting at!

No post tomorrow as I’m: not here.

Ceci n'est pas une post

No post today, as I am sick. Updates will resume tomorrow, or else next week.

Peak–end rule

People tend to remember two moments of an event/sequence of time more than others: the most intense point, and the end. This is the Peak–end rule (pleasingly and correctly with an en dash rather than a hyphen).

I stumbled across this recently in: The way we view free time is making us less happy. The advice there is to 'hack' this rule by, when you're on holiday, for instance, scheduling something intense in the middle and nice at the end, with the intent of enhancing your memory of the event (not to remember it more vividly, per se, but to remember more of it (by stacking time between peak and end) and trying to couch those things positively).

I've no idea if this actually works, but I intend to try it -- and the structure of the rule itself fits with my memory of various past events (though, actually, not necessarily with a singular peak event if there are several that operated slightly differently but were still notably 'peaks').

The 'end' part of this rule put me in mind of recency bias, and a quick survey of the relevant Wikipedia pages tipped me onto: the recency effect/serial-position effect, the Von Restorff effect and leveling and sharpening, which all seem fairly congruent with the peak–end rule.

Head Empty

I slept very poorly and have (un)surprisingly little enough brainpower to assemble thoughts for this blog. (Dear god, that sentence was perversely hard to write, that's how bad things are.)

I've also flipped into one of my lower-energy modes, which arrive periodically and lead me to want to do as little as possible for a short while. I'm generally, to say the least, a bit overfixated on work and work-adjacent things. It's got a lot worse over the years as the work I do has aligned more and more with the things that I enjoy doing. That alignment is, undoubtedly, a good thing. But it comes with flipsides.

There's also the sting in the tail that most of the things I enjoy as leisure (reading, playing games, watching films and TV) have overlapped more and more with things I do for work. And it's hard to get my brain out of that analytical mode, or to read or play things with reference to the things I'm working on or want to work on. In terms of being better at my craft, that's really useful! But in terms of being a more rounded human who enjoys his downtime, it generally sucks. This has also worsened during the pandemic, as my main escape hatches (fighting people in white pyjamas and moving heavy things around) have been largely closed off to me.

I'm also in a low-noise state at the moment (Going low noise), which is very welcome. I think one of the strongest recommendations I have for other people regarding the somewhat weird habits I sustain is this conscious dialling up and down of outside noise (Noisedialling). I'm not checking the news. I'm only occasionally on Twitter, and even then see almost exclusively original posts from people I actually know. It's nice.

Something from Orbital Operations a while back that stuck with me:

I needed to completely empty my head the other day, disconnect the front of my brain and let all the loops and intrusions out, so I spent some hours clicking around on the tv. Not something I usualyl [sic] do, but I need to to a force-reset. This is how I discovered Karate Combat, which is like MMA except you apparently get to do an attempted murder. Very odd.

I definitely hit these points from time. Where I just feel I need to do a memory dump. I haven't quite found my mechanism for that yet, but suspect it will come in the form of 'comfort games' that I have played to death and which offer me engaging but low-effort play with familiar patterns (Subnautica, Oxygen Not Included, XCOM 2, Doom (2016)).

Corpus Corporate

Dear friend Jack shared a reference to 'egregore' with me the other day, which is a word I think I lost about seven years ago. There's been this concept-shaped hole in my memory around a specific term for 'collective thought manifesting an entity', but it's long slipped me by. It's not necessarily the same thing as a Pratchettian belief model, but it certainly rhymes with it.

(Compare tulpa.)

Jack shared it via this tweet in particular: https://twitter.com/arachnocapital2/status/1551364109970526208. Corporations are, most certainly, organisms in their own right.

Charles Stross:

Corporations do not share our priorities. They are hive organisms constructed out of teeming workers who join or leave the collective: those who participate within it subordinate their goals to that of the collective, which pursues the three corporate objectives of growth, profitability, and pain avoidance. (The sources of pain a corporate organism seeks to avoid are lawsuits, prosecution, and a drop in shareholder value.) —Invaders from Mars

I was going to write a whole thing here about my current thoughts, but it turns out I wrote a full-on essay on this back in 2018, so I'm just going to link to that:

The Cthulhu Corporation, alt/thought/process ed. 87

It runs longer than these shards tend to, and some of the specifics/examples are a shade out of date now, but still fundamentally sums this up and is worth your time if this topic interests you.

James Bridle does talk about this in Ways of Being -- once we start expanding our definition of intelligence (as we damn well should), how can we regard a corporation as anything else?

BUT IT ALSO reminds me of something recently from Dan Hon, talking about a paper titled 'If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious'. That's here: https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s12e20-dan-really-are-you-even-reading-what-youre/, under the heading 'Materialism'.

Anyway, this was going to be a simple one, and in fact it's involved double the normal time I spent on these digging into the archives and cross-referencing stuff. But that itself has been interesting.

Being Creative Uphill

Some days, you've just got to make stuff even when you don't want to. I think this is the big difference that separates amateur and professional creative work.

Crucially, I'm adopting a distinction between 'professional' and 'amateur' which is not intended as a value judgement, but one that represents focus and key considerations. 'Professional', to me, means someone deriving a notable part of their income from the relevant work, who therefore have to bring some commercial considerations to how they go about it. That might be in terms of the actual output, e.g. 'this game needs to make money', or it can be about their direct relationship with the work, e.g. 'this is how I make my living; I need to produce work in a manner that supports that', or anything else along those lines.

(For me, it's both. I get paid for my work, and that matters to me, because that enables me to keep doing it. That was different as a freelancer than salaried in-house, but similar in each case. Many of the things I work on have their own commercial sensibilities which impact process and approach. There are things I work on that don't really conform to either of these; it's a range.)

A key difference to, say, writing for a living is that sometimes you just don't wanna. Or: your find your brain and/or body in a place that's not maximally conduicive to solving narrative problems or actually sitting down and getting down a bunch of words. This can be the case in any job. It's one of the reasons that I value structure and process so much (both narrative-specific, but also in how I work more generally): because they help me break things down into manageable chunks and push myself forward when I have to work 'uphill'.

(This is true in a different way of non-professional or not-for-hire work of course. I'm not suggesting that creative work is anything other than well, work, often hard. Doing it for yourself can sometimes be harder in that the lack of extrinsic pressure can make self-motivation more difficult. But the relationship between work and circumstances is, necessarily, different.)

When I find myself in this position, I'm grateful for being so structured -- that I think Narrative is process and process narrative, to refer back to a previous post. Or to have ways that remind me How to Write When You Can't.

Distance and Intimacy in Text Communication

A small one today: I'm just really appreciative of messaging services with emoji 'React' features. For anyone not familiar/not sure what I'm referring to (though I feel they're fairly ubiquitous now with their arrival on WhatsApp): I mean the ability to tap on an existing message and stick a little emoji on it.

There's a functional utility to it, in that you can e.g. give a light-but-specific signal without advancing or cluttering the main chat. But it also affords two extra effects of note, I think, both of which I'm particularly appreciative.

The first one is just a pure, playfully expressiveness. It almost feels like a little metalinguistic joke sometimes -- finding a weirdly apt or unexpected emoji to respond with. (Although at what point are we just communicating in two parallel languages, using pictograms to mark up another one with things or emotions? I know at least one Discord server that has its own specific emergent mini-lexicon, and I'm sure that's not unique.)

The other is that... sometimes it's hard to know what to say? In many ways, I thrive on text-driven communication. I'm a writer, after all -- it's a space where my brain lives a huge portion of the time. I think it's easy to see the ways that text communication is less emotional, intimate, and personal than in-person interactions. But there are elements that run the other way: it can feel bare, raw; there's no microexpressions, noncommital noises, physical touches or gestures to hide behind. Trying to replicate them in words can work, but also risks feeling trite or dismissive at best. Which often leads people (I'm people) to say nothing. Not because they don't care, but because it's hard to find something to say which is substantive enough to show you really are engaged with this and thinking about it... without, say, derailing the conversation, coming off as flippant, or just asking inane questions.

Reacts actually help a lot with that. They're less committal than words without being meaningless or overly vague. They can communicate something specific, even if it's not bound to an exact semantic space. I find myself using 🙃 a lot, because, isn't that a vibe? Sometimes, they can just show that you're listening.

(I am someone who overthinks written communication in ways that can be very stressful to me, but which are also probably perversely helpful for my job. Reacts and emojis generally can sometimes soften this significantly. I like them.)

'Can draw the lines so neatly as we like them'

Taxonomies are immensely valuable in helping us categorise things and form mental shorthands to understand reality. They can also be immensely misleading and constraining when we forget what they're actually for.

Taxonomies -- literally 'the arrangement of names' -- gives us frameworks, lenses, boxes into which to sort things. (They are also a tool, per yesterday's post, by which the state can more effectively control the world -- which is both a desirable and undesirable thing.) But, also per yesterday, taxonomies are not themselves the world. The map is not the territory

This legibility disaster pattern repeats itself across many domains. Scott gives us dozens of examples spanning urban planning, agriculture, census-taking, more. The failure follows a Procrustean pattern:

1. Make a map to accomplish systemic goal

2. Reality is too complex and refuses to fit into map

3. Remake reality in the image of map

4. Systemic collapse

–Soulbinding Like A State

The more we treat taxonomies like they are the territory, the more we err into decisions (personal and systemic) that push towards systemic collapse. The more we become averse to the messy complexity that is life itself, the more we cleave towards simple solutions as seeming more appealing (because complexity is hard; but It's Complicated).

This all sounds very governance- and systems-focused, but consider how this applies to, say, gender or sexuality. Taxonomies ('labels') are useful for specific things, but when we treat them like they are reality rather than a handy abstraction of it, we run into serious problems. Also, we must also remember that taxomies are inevitably created by people. Lots of these are just those that we happen to have inherited from previous people, often startlingly recently. And because they have been part of our milieu growing up, we treat them as if they are somehow foundational parts of reality itself.

I think this also impacts the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. The taxonomies and labels that we accept tend to limit our imagination -- or our ability to really listen to the story someone else tells about themselves, instead tripping over its representation in simple terms. See: New Deep Narratives: we need new stories of what it means to be human, which I linked back in Imaginations of Politics and Governance.

It's also representative of how we view and engage with the world more broadly. James Bridle talks about this cogently and interestingly in Ways of Being.

(I actually wrote a poem last month, largely by accident, and inspired by my reaction to a few things, Ways of Being being one of them. I'm still figuring out what to do with it, so it's not available anywhere yet. But this post's title is drawn from it.)

Legibility of life

Lots worth thinking about in this piece: Soulbinding Like A State, which I came across via Sentiers. Much of it folds neatly in with a bunch of thinking about governance and politics, but I wanted to call out one thing that ran a bit tangential to that:

Scott details a pattern of disaster that repeatedly manifests around legibility. His opening example is from the late-18th century discipline of “scientific forestry”.

A natural forest is illegible. A tangle of plants. This is inconvenient from the standpoint of harvesting lumber. How do you quantify yield? Can you even make a meaningful map of this mess? Much easier to clear the forest and plant a legible “scientific” forest. Uniform rows of trees that produce good lumber. Now we can count the trees, make a map, track sustainable yield.

Illegible natural forest vs legible “scientific” forest (Scott, 1998, “Seeing Like a State” pp. 16-17)

What’s missing from our map? Everything else. The forest has been made legible to lumber production. In the process, the entire ecological web of trees, shrubs, birds, bugs, moss, soil microbiota are stripped away. They didn’t fit into our map.

By the second generation of planting, there is a noticeable decline in forest health. Within one century: Waldsterben, forest death, ecological collapse.

This is what I was angling at in The Bretton Oak, and connects back with the concept of externalities. Something like that tree is only legible to the state (in this case, the local council) through the specific vectors through which the state sees reality. Trees -- most non-human life, actually -- is not treated as having any intrinsic value. That is not visible to the state. (And, it must be said, the same problem applies to how the state sees human lives as well, too much of the time time.)

The state sees -- saw -- the Bretton Oak only in the ways through which a state can see. In this case, in terms of the (purported, possibly under-investigated!) damage it might have on human dwellings, and in terms of its own budgetary considerations. The life of the tree -- one which had lived, richly, for six centuries -- is an externality, invisible to the state. It does not meaningfully factor in to the calculation of how the state should act.

This is what I was trying to convey when I said:

And in this is the perfidy of the thing. I truly don't believe that anyone is sat there, twirling a moustache as their plan to kill a six-hundred-year old being comes to fruition. This is not just the outcome of individual decisions, but systems.

And what does that say about our systems? This is practically the definition of an externality problem -- the existence of the tree is not something neatly recognised by any of the human systems at work here, and it is the being in the loop that has no agency nor any 'standing' or material power. By the same token, destroying it -- killing it -- doesn't come with any real, manifest penalty in the contexts of those systems. So, through that lens, it makes complete sense that this is the outcome -- it's one that's essentially all upside with no downside from the point of view of the system -- and the blame is spread thinly, with everyone thinking like they've made the 'correct' proximal decision based on the situation that was presented to them.

(The Bretton Oak)

This is also an illustration of how systemic harms can operate without necessarily the animus of any of the people involved in the chain of decisions. No one involved in making this happen has to regard the destruction of the tree as a good thing or desirable outcome in order for it to happen. Nor does the existence of these systemic mechanisms absolve them of their contributions.

The Epistemic IKEA Effect

The Epistemic IKEA Effect posits that people derive more value of out ideas or worldviews that they've assembled themselves. This is riffing on the idea of the IKEA Effect more generally, which states that people attach more (intrinsic) value to something that they have made themselves.

This paper, the IKEA effect and the production of epistemic goods is a really interesting read (I'll admit to skimming a bunch of it when it gets into the weeds with more formal logic arguments). To paraphrase:

• People ascribe more (intrinsic) value to things they have made themselves; IKEA furniture is a common example of this.
• This is perfectly rational -- the piece of furniture is more meaningful to those people because of the effort they have invested in constructing it!
• It's only irrational when people mistake that intrinsic value that it has for them as a form of extrinsic value that will necessarily be meaningful for others. Or, notably, where they think the intrisic value that exists for them makes it equal to or better to the extrinsic value imparted by the work of a master artisan, when anyone else is going to judge them largely on that extrinsic value (as exhibited through, say, the beauty and craft of the piece).
• The paper relates this to an epistemic context. People ascribe more value to ideas/beliefs/thoughts that they have 'assembled' themselves.
• Which would include investing your time in reading about something, 'doing your own research' (cough), or even conspiracy theories.
• As with the original version of the effect, this isn't necessarily irrational or fallacious. It does have meaning and additional value for those people.
• But it becomes significant -- and irrational -- when people regard that intrisic value coming from their own investment of intellectual work as being the equal or better of extrinsic value from, say, someone who is an expert in vaccines talking about vaccines.
• I'm not going to pretend that it's always going to be that straightforward and that all experts are clearly delineated and always agree -- nor does the perspective of domain experts always solely matter at the expense of all else. But, let's be honest, in most practical situations, the word of an expert matters far more than someone who has done their own research.
• But, still, the point where this becomes irrational or becomes a kind of cognitive bias is where people conflate intrinsic and extrinsic value and treat them as if they're equally weighted and relevant outside of their own heads.

The paper had two interesting suggestions for engaging with epistemic issues like this. It referred to an existing phenomenon I found interesting, called the illusion of explanatory depth -- which basically amounts to asking people to explain something in detail and so forcing them to grapple with the limits of their own understanding of the thing in question. But it also introduces the idea of inviting people to do their own intellectual work when trying to, say, debunk a conspiracy theorist, because of the Epistemic IKEA Effect meaning they will ascribe more value to something in which they have invested their own intellectual labour. (Not that that's a straightforward or simple a thing, but still: interesting).

This Twitter thread, where I came across this originally, had some further interesting insights: https://twitter.com/neuro_skeptic/status/1548338935574589446.

Experimenting with Obsidian PKM

I've started experimenting with Obsidian as a Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) system. Fragemented thoughts:

(Lots of this bullet-point format this week, but my brain is fragged from the heat and this helps.)

• I used to be a heavy Evernote user, but dropped off it years ago, mostly due to portability issues and feeling the app wasn't really developing positively.
• I've avoided centralising my 'personal knowledge' aka 'notes about stuff' since then. I've been happy with my workflow, which mostly hinges on using .txt files placed maximally locally to where they're being used (e.g. inside the relevant project folder) or in a couple of 'general use' folders, like one that essentially forms a scratch notebook.
• What these notes represent is generally:
  • Scrappy, project-specific things (when notes turn into output, I generally format-shift to something else, but it's a loose, more easily manipulable starting point, somewhat equivalent to starting in a paper notebook)
  • Lots of regularly accessed but unconnected notes like a journal, reading list, and so forth
  • Scrappy bits of random notes that are useful only temporary
  • Stuff I like and want to store to look back on at some nebulous future date, such as:
    • poems
    • recipes
    • quotes and articles
    • ideas for gifts for me and others
• .txt files + Dropbox + text editor on phone has been pretty hard to beat as a stripped-back toolset for me.
• But they've been very siloed off from one another, with a bunch of 'legacy' notes like poems being in, for instance, OneNote where I rarely think to look at them
• Obsidian provides structure and gets everything in one place, while working with Markdown files which will remain ultimately portable.
• I am unconvinced I want this structure or will benefit from it enough to justify changing well-established workflows, but I have enough interest to try.
• Actually, the nudge to organise things benefits me either way, even if I ultimately ditch Obsidian

Specific points of interest from using it so far:

• I think what I actually want is something that scans the contents of notes and suggests serendipitous links rather than forcing me to do more work to impose taxonomy. But also, if such a tool existed, I also wouldn't want to use it.
• Visualisation of connections between notes is actually really interesting for this blog. Here's what that looks like:

• It's already had me form a few serendipitous connections when drafting posts this week. Also, it's pretty.
• I find finding this connections/building out a view of where these thoughts connect over time to be a really interesting prospect; cf Generative Entropy (see, there's one now).
• It'll be more work to get linkages working for my archived blog drafts, since those don't use the same link format as what I post on the blog. Might still be worth it.
• Small annoyance: .md files break a lot of keyboard/typing support features on my phone's text editor, because it treats it as code, not text.

Imaginations of Politics and Governance

Some convergence in recent reading has me thinking about politics and governance. Apt in the UK now (though whenever is it not?), although we feel very far away from anything even functional, let alone actually good that serves people at large.

Bit of a scrapbook post, this one, mostly collating interesting quotes.

# 3 Design Principles for Protopian Governance is a good read. Particularly:

Governance is the capacity of humans to weave their individual streams-of-action into coordinated wholes, so that actions form chains that are coordinated across time and space, in a manner increasing the likelihood of desirable results and decreasing the likelihood of undesirable results.

...

Governance includes the coordination of human communicative actions that determine which results are desirable and undesirable.

My friend, the philosopher Magnus Vinding, suggests in his new book, Reasoned Politics, that “politics” has two layers: a values layer (establishing what we want and why) and an empirical layer (establishing what is true about getting where we want, so as to inform policy and action). I think that works well: governance, in a comprehensive sense, is about coordinated actions, including establishing the values from which we govern and agree to be governed.

I also keep finding myself referring back to Hannah Nicklin's definition of politics (from Writing for Games):

This is a commonly used way to distinguish between ‘big P’ political systems (voting, writing to your representative in government, attending a rally) and ‘small p’ politics (the interplay of power and actions between people and communities).

(emphasis mine)

I think both of these throw into focus (for me, at least) how wonky and useless our definition of 'politics' tends to be. It tends to collapse primarily into the big-P version. Another definition I read somewhere once:

Politics is what we do to try to keep from killing one another.

This is one of the reasons it sounds so ridiculous when people accuse others of 'making something political' or 'bringing politics into games'. It just fundamentally misunderstands... well, a lot of things. But largely what politics is and is for and why it's not something undesirable.

The '3 Design Principles' post also touches on sortition, which James Bridle talks about in Ways of Being. That's the sort of thing that, in principle, gives me stronger hopes for the future. But I don't see a clear path of how we get from here to there. Another quote, this one from Bridle:

Any technological question at sufficient scale becomes one of politics.

And two other bites for you:

New Deep Narratives: we need new stories of what it means to be human

Why we need a public internet and how to get one

If this post has a point, and I'm not sure that it does: it's to keep thinking about and imagining alternatives to where we are, and to remember that our reality is not inevitable.

Forcing Out Ideas

I read this Twitter thread and also this piece called 'The Creativity Faucet' on the same thing. (Both via Jack.) I have opinions.

• Short version for those not clicking through: it's an analogy for creative idea generation as a 'backed up' pipe. You have to pump through the 'wastewater' to get to the good stuff, and that's just about getting lots of things pumped out in volume. You can't selectively only pump out the good stuff.
• It rhymes with the old 10,000 hours chestnut, that you need to log 10,000 hours of a discipline to become anything approaching an expert in it.
• I think there is a version of this that is true, and the thread/post actually do describe this, but then conflate it with a bunch of other stuff.
• True bit first: It is a mistake to try to put yourself in a place where you're only churning out good ideas. I don't feel like this is actually that insightful a point, given how many creative workflows and apparatus are engineered specifically around this.
• A prominent example is writers' rooms -- they're not meant to be about sharing 'good ideas', just sharing 'ideas' and then using the room as a development space to make them better. The quality of the original idea is somewhat less important that the ways in which it gets hammered out. (And a writers' room that is closing off 'bad' ideas and not getting people externalising stuff quickly probably isn't fit for purpose.)
• Likewise, a technique I use a lot is as described in the thread -- if I need a small number of good ideas, the best method for me is forcing myself to churn out of a LOT of quality-neutral ideas.
• Say I needed 10 interesting item descriptions that a blacksmith might sell you. I'd give myself... say 15 minutes? maybe? to write down 100 ideas. That forces me to just write down whatever the hell I can think of, because I only have 10s per idea. Most will be utter shite. Some will be great. More will be 'almost there' and I can adapt them or stick two ideas together.
• (The time factor here is important -- having too little time to do the thing forces you to abandon any sense of quality control for the first draft. It's a volume game.)
• So -- so far, so true. The issue I take with the way it's framed is that it presents idea generation as the greatest differentiator of creativity. Which is just not true!!

  One of the most valuable writing skills is the ability to generate novel ideas.

• Sure, in some contexts. But as is said often and loudly, ideas by themselves are only worth so much (which isn't much). Execution is key. Doing it at all, for one; doing it well, for another.
• I think that's the factor it misses about, say, Neil Gaiman's career. Sure! The man has good ideas! But that feels like a very small piece of the overall puzzle.

  [Neil Gaiman and Ed Sheeran are] among, say, 25 people in the world who repeatedly generate blockbusters.

• I think this also ignores the fact that at a certain point, fame and audience make this self-sustaining. I find it a bit tenuous to make assertions about the quality of the creative craft of people like Sheeran and Gaiman based on their sales figures. Which isn't intended in itself as a comment on either's craft either -- my point is that, at a certain threshold, you're going to sell massively whether your ideas and execution are dogshit or not, so it doesn't really tell us anything.
• Bringing it back to 10,000 hours as well: I think what both miss also is the idea of deliberate practice. The 'forcing through' of volume is a useful tool in the toolbox, but it needs to be supported by other craft work. If what you take away from it is that you just to write lots without caring about the quality of the output... well, that's about half a useful lesson.
• The useful half is that if you're not investing your sense of validity in quality of your output, you will be happier and healthier as a creative, which is something worth cultivating.
• Plus, if you do something a lot over time, you will get better at it even if you don't think too hard.
• But I think where you are actually committed to getting better at something, deliberate practice is so important. And that means: evaluating your work and process, reflecting on those things, and developing focus areas within the craft and finding means for working on them.
• Which can and should include doing the thing lots.
• But doing it without the elements of deliberate practice will get you somewhere, but not as far and far more slowly.

Anyway, I'm probably being needless ornery on this whole thing. There is something actually actionably useful in there, I just dislike a framing that focuses on the ideas as the important bit. 'Where do you get your ideas' is a long-standing cliché of a boring, unproductive question for artists for a reason.

(Ironically, this blog slightly undermines my own point by its own existence. But only slightly.)

Feelings about Numbers

Here's a Reddit thread with a DM talking about how they've not tracked monster hitpoints for ages. They say they've actually just been making it up on the spot in response to some 'softer' mechanical considerations and doing what comes naturally to the fight's narrative. I came across this via a Twitter thread, which also has some interesting thoughts on the topic.

This makes a lot of sense to me. I've written previously on here about the tools I think D&D* equips its players with and doesn't vs fiction-first TTRPGs. (A Chain of Thoughts on Fiction-First TTRPGs vs D&D & Fiction-First TTRPGs.) Some loosely ordered thoughts:

• I ran a Monster of the Week game a few weeks back, and anecdotally found it much easier to turn out a really satisfying final battle with little prep and no on-the-spot maths vs D&D.
• Obviously those two games have many more general differences that factor in to that.
• I wrote a Twitter thread last year about boss monster design in D&D. On the one hand, I actively enjoyed that calibration process and it lead to something very tailored for the group and produced a battle with a good narrative 'shape'. On the other, it was still a bunch of work.
• The thread gets into the topic of game balance in D&D, which I know is a somewhat vexed issue. Personally, this has never been a huge issue at the tables I've run or played at. Not that there haven't been issues of balance in either direction, but they've been things that actually haven't mattered in their presentation, or that we've felt equipped to deal with as a set of concrete, specific problems (much easier to address vs systemically).
• Reading that thread back shows me the ways in which its hitting the same point -- a lot of the design I'm doing in there isn't about arbitrary difficulty numbers as much as specific narrative or pacing or feeling effects. Which I think is 100% right. Those are the things people remember, and they are artefacts of how the crunchy mechanical numbers work (I guess c.f. Layers of Ruleson that).
• It reminds me also of pseudo-randomness in games. I'm going from memory here, but e.g. the experience of missing multiple 95% to-hit chance shots in XCOM feels disproportionately terrible and unfair relative to how probability actually works. So, the system nudges things slightly, and temporarily increases the chances of hitting (in a way not surfaced to the player) if this happens repeatedly.
• I'm sure there are other examples of this style of randomness, where it works like people think it should feel rather than how regular probability feels.
• I think if you asked most people if they wanted this or 'real' unbiased probability in their games, they'd pick the latter. And maybe awareness of it would make it feel less bad. But I think they'd have more fun in the first case [where that was deemed necessary to include by the designers to make the game play better. Sort of by definition.]
• And that doesn't seem remotely like a bad thing to me if it makes the game feel better. Obviously not the right thing in all instances, and it depends on what people are getting out of those games, but: a big part of a game designer or game master's job is to make the game feel good in the right ways.
• Which doesn't actually mean 'giving the players what they want', possibly ever. It's about figuring out what the players think they want, then what they actually want, and finding ways to deliver that.
• Compare that with always giving players the narrative outcome they want. Sometimes that's great, and I think a lot of people would tell you that's what they want. But the best outcomes are those where you don't get what you want, but something else that's surprising but stil feels earned within the game itself.

Thinking by Mail

After a long fallow period, I've been voraciously consuming my backlog of email newsletters over the past few days. They've always been a really useful and important part of my 'process', if it can really be called that, in terms of getting breadth and exposure to a bunch of different ideas, people's work, and cool stuff to fill my brain with. Both directly in what people write but also as a connecting ground to other articles, sites, ideas, etc. I find the curation work that other people do here incredibly valuable.

For reasons that are fairly tedious but that I'm nonetheless going to recount here, I haven't really been reading them of late (despite signing up to a glut more of them a month or so back!). The reasons:

• They go, perhaps obviously, to my email
• I've always treated them as part of my email-handling process, trying to read a few each time I do that
• (This was flawed anyway, I think, but we'll come back to that)
• I've been progressively narrowing my non-day-job email handling, so now I only actually check it a couple of times a week
• Making that process leaner has been vary good!
• But the leaner that process became, the less I got out of the newsletters -- I'd go to read them less often, and because that was also time-boxed, I didn't feel like I had the space to read gainfully -- my brain was in 'solve problems, tick off tasks' mode, not 'receptive to ideas' mode
• But: dilemma! I try to stay out of my inbox when not checking emails
• And I can't be arsed to do the work to port a tangled mess of email rules elsewhere

I did say it was tedious. Anyway, it turns out the solution was to stick a shortcut on my phone that just launches directly into the newsletter folder. Another benefit to this is that it puts those newsletters in my reach as a replacement habit for social media. When I'm in low noise state, I find myself reaching for my phone a lot for that nebulous something -- the little dopamine bump to move me onto the next thing that's hard to get without letting in social media. Bite-sized interesting things are a perfect replacement for that.

Here are some of my favourite newsletters right now:

Sentiers via which I get SO MANY interesting things to read
The Whippet which is pretty new to me, but I really, really like
Things That Caught My Attention Dan Hon writes a startling volume of really interesting, smart stuff on technology x society (for want of a better word) and digital change
Orbital Operations which often has thoughts on writing process, tools, and tools/systems more generally
Cartoon Gravity which I enjoy particularly for insight into a different creative process

Theoretical Armatures

More links to TTRPG theory. Two posts both worth you're time if you're interested in this area:

Five Faces of the GM: Age of Ravens

Ben Lehman's Introduction to Forge Theory

Got some thoughts sparked by both:

Five Faces of the GM

This one was a little uncanny to me for how squarely it pinpointed the skills I (also) think are crucial to good GMing. Also those skills that (to briefly toot my own horn: toot!) I'm particularly proud of in my own GMing.

To illustrate the uncanniness: I read a section out loud to Olivia, saying 'I feel weirdly specifically perceived by this article', and proceeded to expound on what I'd read out and how that works for me personally. Only to then return to reading and find the next paragraph to be startlingly close to word-for-word what I'd just said.

Anyway, good piece, and a good articulation of some of what I also think of as the transferable soft skills of GMing.

Forge Theory

This was really interesting. I love structures and models for approaching and thinking about... well, most things if I'm honest.

But this was doubly interesting for me because: well, when it comes to writing and narrative craft, I often melt my own brain trying to hold some big metastructure of all my various tools, approaches, and heuristics in my head. I have an almost obsessive fear of 'forgetting how to do a particular thing'. Which is obviously nonsense, but is something I encounter a lot.

Seeing this forge theory model of the game structures (and compare with the three layers article I linked the other day) made me reflect on how these deep models of how things break down are really useful and empowering to inform thinking and action, and are especially valuable if you need to really interrogate something in depth and think critically about it. You already have a good sense of the dynamics and factors underpinning any proximal event to work back towards. But you can't live in that layer all the time because it would be debilitatingly, distractingly complex.

What clicked for me was the idea of these big models as a sort of armature -- something really sturdy to underpin the moment-to-moment work you're doing, and something you can peel back towards and rely on if things really need it. But it's the underlying structure, not the entire thing in and of itself.