[MUD-Dev] Better Combat (long)

[Koster, Raph]

Douglas Goodall wrote:

> A bit off topic, but there was an Idea back when fractals became
> popular that art of all kinds exist on the boundary between order
> and chaos. I want to say this is called the K2 boundary and has
> something to do with the point on a bifurcation chart where it
> becomes complex. But google isn't giving me any support, so
> perhaps I'm misremembering it. Someone even analyzed the
> information density (predictability) of "classical" composers to
> find out which one was closest to this boundary. It turned out to
> be Mozart.

> Unfortunately, it's an Idea, not a Theory. Like all Ideas
> (memetics, rule of 250, "tipping point" marketing, to name a few
> that have been mentioned in this forum) it has the power to
> explain, but not the power to predict.

> For instance, Mozart is near the order/chaos boundary, but most
> music is not. The notes/beat of most songs are too
> ordered/repetitive/self-similar while the sound of modern pop
> music is much closer to chaos/noise than Mozart. Some modern music
> is much closer to the K2 boundary (jazz and fusion, for instance),
> but they were never as popular as the repetitive stuff.

> Color me old, but this combination of repetition and noise makes
> modern music simultaneously dull and unpleasant, much like the
> majority of computer games. Perhaps "art" near the K2 boundary
> only seems superior to elitists like myself.

In short--yes.

This is not a new observation. We can observe a gradual move towards
increased formalism and complexity in the development of almost any
art form (sorry, Dave, but I'm a multidisciplinarian throug hand
through). It typically is accompanied by a parallel loss of
audience, as the general public tends not to want to be challenged
in that way.

That is not a statement denigrating the general public, mind you. By
that comment, I mean basically "everyone." Each person has a
cognitive sweet spot. We have tastes. Material that is below or
above our target range is not appealing--it's either boring or too
much work.

Jazz loses me right after bebop. It loses most people, frankly--as
if bebop itself hadn't already lost most of them, actually. Ornette
Coleman strikes me as mostly noise. I recognize intellectually that
there are patterns in Coleman's work, that there are formal
explorations of interest. But by and large, I don't want to engage
in the effort.

Over time, I've come to like bebop more, and for that matter so has
the general public. What once was new, weird, shocking, and outre is
now more accepted. The general "reading level" of the public has
risen for bebop, and many of its idioms are now in more general
currency. Right now, I've got Terence Blanchard's homage to Billie
Holiday playing, and it feels fine. But there's jazz out there that
will still turn me off. I am not sufficiently initiated, nor do I
want to bother. General culture will probably keep up its pattern of
initiating me without my noticing, until at some point I'll hear the
music and it won't sound odd. I'll grok it.

The same observations can be made about John Cage, about twelve-tone
serialism, about Mondrian or Picasso, about James Joyce or John
Ashbery. The cultural forces behind this are fascinating, because at
the same time that the art recedes away from comprehensibility by
the average person by demanding an overly high level of insider
knowledge of the medium, we also see a rise in "priesthoods" of
people who use their knowledge as a social signaling mechanism--I've
done it a dozen times in this post, as you did in calling yourself
elitist.

The typical reaction to this Apollonian approach tends to be a burst
of Dionysian creativity. Someone sculpts Laocoon, we go from baroque
to rococo, and the Romanesque gives way to the Gothic. The pendulum
swings, and pop returns, and people "get it" again.

Given that games (in the formal sense) are formal mathematical
constructs, I think there's an interesting question to be had
there. The gamer crowd today is one such priesthood, discoursing
ably about level design and whether or not socialization requires
downtime. They are initiates. The rest of the world is playing
Popcap games. Will we follow the same path, and find that the
priesthood is rendered extinct just as the French Academy of Art was
rendered irrelevant by Impressionism? Is the overcomplication of
games what will doom them to an increasingly smaller market?

We see the young coming up with far greater knowledge of games than
we had, mostly--and we're probably mostly from the first generation
of kids who grew up with them. It's got greater cultural
penetration, and they have greater fluency in the basic vocabulary
of it. The result has been the adoption of game tropes in other
media, as is to be expected. But it also suggests that the games
that those kids create will likely be ones we can't play anymore
than our parents can manage Quake. Given that games are
fundamentally formal constructs and not, generally, communicative
media (unlike other art forms, which are generally communications
*mediated* by formal constructs) that may mean that videogaming may
be headed down the path trod by chess and go--towards elites and no
mass acceptance.

Online worlds are just as subject to this as the rest of games,
except insofar as they provide scope greater than mathematical
puzzle solving.

-Raph
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