Malone on Curiosity

One of the more interesting emotional behaviours associated with videogames is curiosity – that powerful drive to seek out new and interesting information. Yet there is very little written on the subject, unless you count Nicole Lazzaro’s “Easy Fun” key. Or at least – so I thought. Super-heroic Only a Game fixture zenBen (whose blog can be found here), however, has given me nothing short of three papers on the subject of curiosity in the last fortnight. I can scarcely keep up with his deep academic pockets! One of these papers we will come to shortly in another context; for today, I want to talk about two papers by Thomas W. Malone, one from 1980 and the other from 1981.

Malone was conducting research into games as tools for learning – now a very popular topic, but at the time, videogames were far from spectacularly impressive. To put this in context, the most advanced coin-op videogames at this time were Asteroids (Atari) and Pac-man (Namco/Midway). Nonetheless, Malone’s papers make for fascinating reading, and contain numerous ideas still pertinent to the games industry. In fact, what is most disturbing to me is that Malone’s papers aren’t cited more often, or indeed, required reading for game designers.

The papers are packed full of little observations which remain as poignant today as ever. For instance, in the 1980 paper Malone notes in the context of the way the game communicates success and failure to the player:

...performance feedback should be presented in a way that minimized the possibility of self-esteem damage.

This is a lesson that a staggering number of videogames have never learned! Most players are easily discouraged, and yet a macho, conqueror-style ethos is still quite prevalent, with failure being met with abuse and ridicule (even in an otherwise charming game such as Katamari Damacy – although at least in this case a touch of humour offsets the problem).

The most salient line in the 1980 paper states succinctly what should have been the mantra for the videogames industry for the past twenty five years:

If computer game designers can create many different kinds of fantasies for different kinds of people, their games are likely to have much broader appeal.

The same idea is re-iterated in the later paper:

...fantasies can be very important in creating intrinsically motivating environments but that, unless the fantasies are carefully chosen to appeal to the target audience, they may actually make the environment less interesting rather than more.

This is a claim I have been making with ever-increasing force in recent years, and it stuns me to read that someone else could make this observation back when the industry was in its infancy. How does Malone reach his conclusion? By analysing the components of a videogame and the response that players have to the game with different elements removed. He finds that the inherent fantasy of the game (the setting, or the focus of the mimicry) is the single largest factor in player’s enjoying a game – a fact that remains as valid today as it was in 1980.

The discussion of curiosity is mainly in the 1980 paper (although it is summarised in the later piece), and is presented in a pre-existing psychological framework:

Curiosity is the motivation to learn, independent of any goal-seeking or fantasy-fulfilment. Computer games can evoke a learner’s curiosity by providing environments that have an optimal level of informational complexity (Berlyne, 1965; Piaget, 1952). In other words, the environments should be neither too complicated nor too simple with respect to the learner’s existing knowledge. They should be novel and surprising, but not completely incomprehensible.

This observation ties up with recent research into a neurobiological mechanism for interest (or curiosity) by Biederman and Vessel, but we will review this work at another time when we begin to dig into the biology of play more explicitly.

Malone divides curiosity into two variants: sensory curiosity, which is about maintaining interest in the senses (and matches up with Biederman and Vessel), and cognitive curiosity, which is more about the semantic content of information. For example, one picks up a National Geographic because the photo on the cover is intriguing – this is sensory curiosity. One picks up a newspaper because of a surprising headline – this is cognitive curiosity.

The idea of sensory curiosity is not enormously explored beyond the basic statement, although there is some discussion about the work of Jerry Mander’s 1978 work on television and TV commercials in particular. The discussion here focuses on “technical events” – that is, camera cuts, zooms and other changes which apparently serve to keep the viewer’s interest solely on the level of sensory interest. I believe there is considerable more work to be conducted in exploring sensory curiosity in videogames.

On the subject of cognitive curiosity, Malone makes an interesting (although intuited and therefore essentially unsupported) claim:

...people are motivated to bring to all their cognitive structures three of the characteristics of well-formed scientific theories: completeness, consistency and parsimony. According to this theory, the way to engage learners’ curiosity is to present just enough information to make their existing knowledge seem incomplete, inconsistent, or unparsimonious.

This idea strikes me as worthy of further investigation, and even suggests something concerning the nature of science itself. Since until recent centuries “science” meant “domain of knowledge”, perhaps the element that has allowed what we now term “science” (i.e. empirical research)  to gain so much ground is that its mechanisms produce statements that are cognitively pleasing. The alternative interpretation – that we aim for cognitively balanced statements because of the influence of science – seems somehow less plausible, but there is room for inquiry in either case.

There is much to explore in the context of videogames in terms of these three conditions: each suggests a way to sustain the interest of players. By comparison, Lazzaro’s work highlights three aspects of curiosity that can be leveraged: ambiguity, incompleteness and detail. ‘Ambiguity’ seems to match Malone’s ‘inconsistency’ to some extent, ‘incompleteness’ matches ‘incompleteness’ perfectly, while Lazzaro’s ‘detail’ seems to match Malone’s sensory curiosity. Only Malone’s ‘unparsimonious’ (that is to say, ideas that violate the principle of Occam’s razor that knowledge should be succinct) seems unmatched in this comparison. I’m uncertain to what extent players are interested in parsimonious game rules, or to be more precise, while I’m certain some players are interested in developing parsimonious knowledge, it’s unclear how one leverages the absence of parsimony to provoke curiosity.

One aspect of how Malone suggests making use of player curiosity is particularly intriguing. In the 1981 paper, he includes the following bullet point under the subheading of curiosity:

Does the interface use randomness in a way that adds variety without making tools unreliable?

This matches up to our exploration of the use of luck in videogames – the landscape function that I have suggested is one of the modern expressions of Caillois’ alea (games of chance and fate) in videogames. Malone is suggesting that randomness is useful in games because it can provoke curiosity – and on examination, it seems he is on to something here. It is undeniable that the benefit of randomly generating content in a videogame is that the chance-fuelled combinations will produce something intriguing, memorable or simply bizarre. Malone even lists randomness as one of four factors most strongly correlated with a game’s popularity (the other three being explicit goals, score-keeping, and audio effects – but since he was working in 1980 it is important to remember just how crude the games used in his studies would have been).

The idea that an uncertain outcome can fuel a player’s interest is one of the most fascinating elements of the Malone papers, and suggests a link between chance and curiosity in videogames. Malone notes:

Randomness and humor, if used carefully, can also help make an environment optimally complex.

And also:

...if randomness is used in a way that makes tools unreliable it will almost certainly be frustrating rather than enjoyable.

Malone’s observations that uncertain outcomes are inherently part of the draw of videogames warrant further investigation. It seems to me that there are games where the outcome is not really uncertain – in most RPGs, you know you’re going to level up, you just don’t know how, for instance – but even in these cases there is always a level of uncertainty at work. Consider how a player who has mastered a particular game produces a new uncertainty by adding a higher level goal (in speed runs, for instance) – thus restoring uncertainty to the situation.

Perhaps in uncertainty we have a definitive link between chance and curiosity, something which will expand the emotions associated with chance in games (namely the excitement of an unknown outcome, the fiero of winning against the odds, and the sadness of failure) and potentially suggest to us a whole new avenue of exploration in videogame design.

Although the games which were the subjects of Malone’s papers have aged terribly in the intervening decades, Malone’s work has not. I heartily recommend both these papers as a fascinating and oddly fresh perspective on the play of videogames.

The opening image is a Jon Bertelli print entitled Curiosity, which is available for purchase here. As ever, no copyright infringement is intended and I will take the image down if asked.

The papers referred to in this post are as follows:

Malone, Thomas W., “What makes things fun to learn? Heuristics for designing instructional computer games”, ACM, 1980.

Malone, Thomas W., “Heuristics for designing enjoyable user interfaces: Lessons from computer games”, ACM, 1981.

Comments

[zenBen]

"the most advanced coin-op videogames at this time were Asteroids (Atari) and Pac-man (Namco/Midway)."

And yet we're still all using Pacman for research purposes. Which brings me to one of the reasons why I thought that your DGD types could be discovered in logs of Pacman games - Malone's work extracts so much insight from such massively simple games! I might have gone a step too far though - identifying player preference is really hard.

"it’s unclear how one leverages the absence of parsimony to provoke curiosity."

Think of a scholar looking at a palimpsest...one comes to a game with at least some actionable intent, and usually this is met with some barrier to action (except maybe in 'Burn the Rope' ;D ) - if the barrier to action is over-stimulation, an 'over-full' environment perhaps, I could imagine this stimulating curiostity to discover the relevant - parsimonious - stimulus.

"Perhaps in uncertainty we have a definitive link between chance and curiosity, something which will expand the emotions associated with chance in games (namely the excitement of an unknown outcome, the fiero of winning against the odds, and the sadness of failure) and potentially suggest to us a whole new avenue of exploration in videogame design."

There is a natural extension of Malone's ideas in the work of Matthias Rauterburg, whom I'm sure I've mentioned before (he's also in my long paper). This again focuses more on the cognitive than the emotional. These papers helped to lead me to the idea of looking at how player's process information as a sort of metric of Challenge - again, maybe I'm running ahead of myself (especially as I haven't been able to start this work yet!).

[Chris]

zenBen: "identifying player preference is really hard."

It is! Half the problem is that people don't type like, say, postage stamps... they don't fit into neat classes. Instead, you find "signals" that are expressed to differing degrees and you have to find ways to match those signals to people's behaviour.

But I am hopeful that DGD2 will be a somewhat better typing tool than DGD1 since I am getting closer to what is "under the hood". I will not be at all surprised to find I am completely wrong, though! :)

"if the barrier to action is over-stimulation, an 'over-full' environment perhaps, I could imagine this stimulating curiostity to discover the relevant - parsimonious - stimulus."

Well what I'm finding is that many players facing an "over-full" environment become overwhelmed and become turned off. Optimal information complexity has to be a mid point - too much information is, by definition, too much. ;)

There's definitely more work to do here, but how remains somewhat a mystery.

Best wishes!

[zenBen]

""if the barrier to action is over-stimulation, an 'over-full' environment perhaps, I could imagine this stimulating curiostity to discover the relevant - parsimonious - stimulus."

Well what I'm finding is that many players facing an "over-full" environment become overwhelmed and become turned off"

I had meant to add, but forgot to, that implementing what I said there is possibly the finest line you can tread in game design. And its a line that changes for every player.

[Chris]

"...its a line that changes for every player."

And that, in a nutshell, is what makes player modelling so challenging! :)

Best wishes!

[translucy]

Good catch, Chris and zenBen!

"three of the characteristics of well-formed scientific theories: completeness, consistency and parsimony..."

Yet, I would argue that this "trinity" actually is: completeness, consistency and *plausibility* (as defined by e.g. Merriam-Webster: "appearing worthy of belief "). In general, I see parsimony as a "natural" consequence of the daily process of myself accepting some fact as *being credible enough as to invest my scarce resources (mostly my time) into it*.

"This idea strikes me as worthy of further investigation, and even suggests something concerning the nature of science itself."

Yes, indeed. I find it quite useful to combine this view on the process of *how an actor forms her motivations* with Arendt's view on the process of action and its consequences. For me, the result is a practical (and ‘parsimonious’:-) theory of scientific as well as technological action.

"I’m uncertain to what extent players are interested in parsimonious game rules, or to be more precise, while I’m certain some players are interested in developing parsimonious knowledge, it’s unclear how one leverages the absence of parsimony to provoke curiosity."

Again, I would replace 'parsimonious' with 'plausible' in the above sense - *something worthy a player's time*.

For me a good current example is the interface of the wii fitness / balance board system where 'plausibility' is key to me - in a weird 'self-experimentation' set-up tarheting the fitness / well being of my own body - experienced on the one hand by myself and on the other hand measured by the machine - guess this warrants a separate thread, though...

[Chris]

translucy: hello! Haven't heard from you in a while... hope all is well with you!

I confess to still having problems with the notion of parsimony, probably because this is an expression of Occam's Razor, which I have always distrusted. (To hint at why, consider that the simplest explanation is rarely 'best', for instance, an imp propelling an arrow is arguably a simpler and more parsimonious explanation than relativistic momentum mechanics - they both invent concepts for explanatory purposes - what makes the latter hold up is not parsimony but better descriptive power, and greater compatibility with the prevailing paradigm).

I'm somewhat uncertain about plausibility as a factor, since what is plausible depends upon one's belief system. But then, one can make broad-stroke assessments about a player's beliefs and leverage them - I certainly did when working on puzzles for adventure games. And people's beliefs about fictional worlds are different from their real world beliefs, too, which can be helpful.

I shall mull this further. :)

In general, though, I think I could get more ground out of plausibility (even with my many caveats) than parsimony - thanks for the alternative perspective!

[zenBen]

I think the two terms indicate the same thing, that is, a measure (tending to reduce) of the capacity for interpretation and further investigation within a scientific position.
The mapping between the terms can be derived if one considers such a position as a belief...parsimony makes out like it is an absolute measure, but is just a way of measuring how much more there is to say about this belief. This view would also reduce the amount of explanation (thus conforming to the more obvious meaning) because so often a thing which can be stated verbosely one way can be expressed more succintly another way. So if a complete explanation is long-winded, there may still be more to say about the subject in looking for a optimised explanation.
Meanwhile plausibilty admits the belief factor of the scientific position, and measures how much uncertainty is inherent in this belief.
But both indicate in the end what there is left to say about the position. There is a final caveat, which is that what is left to say is measured only among those who share (or can be made to share) the belief system.

"an imp propelling an arrow is arguably a simpler and more parsimonious explanation than relativistic momentum mechanics"

I would argue back. The imp is not an answer, in that it only passes the question on to - what propels the imp? It is not parsimonious or plausible because there is just as much to inquire about (well, a lot more actually) once the 'explanation' is forwarded as before. By contrast a well formed mechanical system must be based on axiomatic logic, so the plausibility goes all the way down to the most basic level possible for rational argument.

[translucy]

zenBen, I think boh our views on the correspondence between 'parsimony' and 'plausibility' could be regarded as economical arguments: especially from our contemporary perspective (with all the techno-scientific machinery we find at our disposal) using the toolbox of physics plus mathematics seems a lot more economical for generating explanations and predictions than invoking 'myth-type' narratives about imps and the like for every phenomenon we come about.

Needless to say that there are (or have been) very long lasting 'primitve' ways to deal with the same task - 'primitive' people and there 'naive-mythical' world explanations that rely mostly on the logic provided by those narratives as the basic building block. But the economy of this way of life (and the way the individual was forced to use her limited life time) was of course totally different form ours.

So to me the interesting meta-question is if the transition from 'primitive myth' to 'formal logic/science' was actually triggered by economical needs faced by the early farmers / town dwellers.

[zenBen]

"So to me the interesting meta-question is if the transition from 'primitive myth' to 'formal logic/science' was actually triggered by economical needs faced by the early farmers / town dwellers."

I would look to the industrial revolution as the watershed of which you speak. It may seem that the world was scientific for centuries before this event (from the Copernican revolution I'd say), but most historians of the time were not interested in anthropology and so the views of the people you mention (farmers/traders = ordinary people) are not really recorded. As far as I can tell anyway!

[Chris]

zenBen: "So if a complete explanation is long-winded, there may still be more to say about the subject in looking for a optimised explanation."

I like this claim, but when I read Einstein's General Relativity, I see something long-winded yet not enormously in need of an optimised explanation. The only problem with GR is that it is a view at a particular scale that doesn't apply at another scale (quantum, for instance). Thus, I continue to doubt the claimed benefits of simplicity, while not doubting the desire to find simplicity. :)

The imp, of course, invites the argument. >:)

"The imp is not an answer, in that it only passes the question on to - what propels the imp? It is not parsimonious or plausible because there is just as much to inquire about (well, a lot more actually) once the 'explanation' is forwarded as before."

Ah, well I must disagree with you here. It's only implausible and unparsimonious if you don't believe in imps. If you do, then how it works is quite simply the imp's business and not yours. :) Similarly, quarks are implausible if you don't believe in subatomic particles (and there must have been people with such beliefs at one time even if there isn't now). So how can you tell what part of your mechanism for testing plausibility to trust, if it can be subject to change?

Whether or not the imp is an answer depends on what you are trying to *do*. If you want to make better arrows, well, then you might argue that you need to be able to model the flight of the arrow and thus require better descriptions. But what if your goal is not technological (and remember that there are other such goals!) What if your goal is, say, to make people cautious about using arrows? Couldn't one argue that with this goal, the imp might be a superior explanation in some sense?

"So to me the interesting meta-question is if the transition from 'primitive myth' to 'formal logic/science' was actually triggered by economical needs faced by the early farmers / town dwellers."

I don't believe this was the case. I rather suspect the move towards formal logic/materialistic science came through the scholarly community, accelerated in part by astronomy and other tool-based observational sciences, and was constrained to the ivory towers for quite some time.

What brought it to the masses was arguably medicine - when the ivory towers could come back to the communities and save the lives of cattle and people. That transformed the prevailing worldview.

But since one does not need the whole of society to operate the scientific and technological mechanisms, I query the need for materialistic beliefs to be necessarily granted any special status here.

Specifically: if so-called "primative" societies are able to persist in ecological harmony for thousands of years, can we really say that their belief systems are flawed simply because they don't match beliefs we may have? Isn't there at least some sense in which those beliefs might be judged beneficially?

Something to ponder, anyway. :)

Best wishes!

[Chris]

zenBen: you must have posted as I was finishing writing my comment - there's four minutes between our time stamps. :)

The industrial revolution is another good bet here... I wonder if the medical benefits kicked in before the industrial revolution did? Jenner's smallpox vaccine was 1797, and that's about the onset of the industrial revolution - it seems these events may have been contemporaneous. :)

Best wishes!

[zenBen]

"It's only implausible and unparsimonious if you don't believe in imps... Similarly, quarks are implausible if you don't believe in subatomic particles...
Whether or not the imp is an answer depends on what you are trying to *do*. "

Absolutely, sure. Ok, so we have a goal-oriented modifier on the measures of plausibility/parsimony (plausimony? parsibility is too much like a coding term).
What then is the ultimate goal of acquiring knowledge? I mean, yes yes there will probably always be an overriding motivation like benefiting mankind, or killing men, but if we set these things aside as being separate issues, then what is the ultimate goal of acquiring knowledge in and of itself?

Oops I'm outta time. Was gonna finish that but maybe its worth waiting for an answer before I go on...

[translucy]

"plausimony"

I like that one!

"What then is the ultimate goal of acquiring knowledge?"

one word answer (excellent weather out there...): homeostasis

[zenBen]

Homeostasis?

We acquire knowledge in order to maintain our current state of being? Or we acquire knowledge in order to simply maintain?

I think the former statement self-evidently does not match the facts, and I've previously argued that we are a naturally expansionist species, so I feel some agreement with the latter statement.

This would be homeostatic non-homeostasis.

I was going to say that the ultimate goal of acquiring knowledge is itself - it is autotelic. Yet of course there is always always an underlying requirement to survive, so even the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge's sake can be viewed as part of a greater drive for growth and evolution in the species. And that admits that there is some value of the knowledge, even if the value is not known. So knowledge for knowledge's sake can be thought of as an ultimate goal...

Can we agree that plausimony, as a principle, relates to the common denominator principle behind knowledge acquisition, which could be thought of as knowledge for knowledge's sake? And therefore some knowledge which best explains reality only in relation to some other goal is not truly plausimonious?

[translucy]

"...This would be homeostatic non-homeostasis."

To me the term "homeostasis" seems to be a bit misleading if only understood from its greek components - if one translates the term as 'self-regulation' the reflexive concept behind this metaphor becomes clearer: the initial creation (and continuous maintenance) of the 'self' is prerequisite to the use of this metaphor. So to me homeostasis includes at least in reference concepts such as adaptation, evolution, self-organization, life,...

The German Wikipedia tells us that Maturana and Varela argued to replace 'homeostasis' by 'homeodynamics' which to me seems more suited for my broader usage of this term beyond its origins in physiology. (Though even in physiology one has to willfully neglect the slower underlying dynamics to see a metabolism in 'steady-state')

"Can we agree that plausimony, as a principle, relates to the common denominator principle behind knowledge acquisition, which could be thought of as knowledge for knowledge's sake? And therefore some knowledge which best explains reality only in relation to some other goal is not truly plausimonious?"

I agree to both statements if one puts 'knowledge' into quotes. I wonder if the 'knowledge' we commonly refer to is in fact only a side product of the constant process of seeking and 'plausimony' is actually the leading factor?

In fact some people would try to take 'self-organization' as the leading metaphor and then see 'knowledge' as one consequence 'emerging' from 'complex systems'.

People interested in thermodynamics and Shannon's ideas may add some form of 'local entropy minimization' goal where we just inserted 'plausimony as the common goal... oh well ;-)

[translucy]

Ups, that was meant to read:
"... a side product of the constant process of seeking 'plausimony' and 'plausimony' is actually the leading factor?"

[zenBen]

"So to me homeostasis includes at least in reference concepts such as adaptation, evolution, self-organization, life,..."

I came across homeostasis first in the context of Ashby and Stafford Beer, and cybernetic systems. So I have a similar concept of it. However I think that knowledge-based approaches to self-regulation tend not to be static, but expansionary. This is clear from the trends that occur when means of storage and retrieval of knowledge improve. A single example that comes to mind is the flowering of music after a universal notation system was invented around the 13th century or so.
So the human species, compared to a self-regulatory organism, is like a smart fat man on a desert island. Self-regulates to a degree like any organism, but on the larger scale his own ingenuity is in danger of defeat from his gluttony.

"wonder if the 'knowledge' we commonly refer to is in fact only a side product of the constant process of seeking 'plausimony' and 'plausimony' is actually the leading factor"

Actually this strikes a chord. Firstly reminds me of Robert Pirsig's ideas on Quality as a sort of 'leading edge' of thought, and the products of thought like the furrow that this leading edge turns as it ploughs through the fallow field of sensory input.
Secondly it is a lot like the idea of Flow, and Biederman's infovores...saying that we get a chemical kick out of novel but interpretable input.

On this view, I think feel safe saying that 'plausimony' relates to a measure of how little interpretation and further investigation is left within a scientific position. I think that similarly to the imp and the arrow, 'plausimony' in this view depends entirely on whether the 'seeker' knows there is more left to seek! So again, we need the caveat: how much or little interpretation and further investigation is left, can be measured only among those who share (or can be made to share) the same belief system.

[caller#6]

I hope I'm not just getting underfoot, but I think "elegance" works better than "parsimony" if you want something you can leverage. What better goal to pursue than an elegant solution? I mean, as long as it's only a game.

[translucy]

zenBen: yes, I also see the similarity between Plausimony, Quality and Flow. Can you point me to an explanantion of "infovores"?

"This is clear from the trends that occur when means of storage and retrieval of knowledge improve. A single example that comes to mind is the flowering of music after a universal notation system was invented around the 13th century or so.
So the human species, compared to a self-regulatory organism, is like a smart fat man on a desert island."

Your observation certainly is accurate for western societies since the renaissance - the expansionist impulse you observe seems to be tightly connected to the avalanche of devices, instruments, and formalized, standardized (production) processes established and sustained by these societies.

I would call this 'instrumental knowledge' where indeed knowledge created using a new device/instrument relies heavily on all the knowledge created with all the devices/instruments prior to this - hence the close similarity we always (on a metaphorical level) like to find between our models of evolution and 'scientific evolution', genes and 'memes' and so forth.

Yet, to me it is hard to tell whether this way of literally 'expanding knowledge' is already the general description given the vast difference between western societies and non-western societies. Those may or may not have tried to expand but at a vastly slower speed so that natural processes may have actually overtaken the human directed processes (maybe that's a good definition of being in 'harmony with nature': move at the same speed).

caller#6: elegance certainly adds the concept of aesthetic value to the equation (above, completeness, consistency, parsimony, plausibility). The aesthetic experience during a game seems even harder to generalize than the former concepts but Chris and zenBen surely know a lot more about that...

Certainly the aesthetic values need to be shared among the observers/players as much as the elements of the belief system for a meaningful debate to take place about a game experience.

[Chris]

Phew! Too much here for me to wade in, but interesting reading! A few quick thoughts...

I can't see myself using "plausimony" outside of these comments, but it was a neat neologism for this purpose. :) I'd be more likely to use a term like "elegance" (as caller #6 suggests), but like translucy I fear this brings in an aesthetic element.

Is there an aesthetic element to knowledge acquisition? I think perhaps that there is. The Victorian scientists found elegance in their clockwork universe - but it was the imp of their era.

What if there is no such thing as truly culturally neutral knowledge, and knowledge acquisition always involves an aesthetic element?

That's all I have time for now, alas. Have fun!

[zenBen]

At first, I thought: aesthetics has no place in a generic concept of knowledge! A fact is a fact.

But an equally simple (and thus plausimonious :D) argument is that knowledge must be known, and therefore there must be a person to know it. We are creatures that exist in an aesthetic universe of our own creation - emotion, affect, interpretation of sense data are all vital parts of our cognitive processes. Emotion in particular is not just a 'colouring' on our cognition, but an underpinning.

All the science fiction tropes about the universal language of mathematics - I wonder if that is really true. Once the maths becomes sufficiently expressive to describe anything significant, it seems to take on the interpretative aspects of its author.

Therefore I think that 'elegance' might at first look like a non-plausimonious term, since it introduces this extra metric of aesthetics...but then again it might be just the term we're looking for, since it involves in its metric, an element of thinking that just might be indispensible in any concept of knowledge.

[Chris]

zenBen: lovely train of thought here. I have little to add but my assent. :)

If mathematics did not involve an interpretive (aesthetic) element, we would not be inundated with dozens of different interpretations for quantum mechanics. The mathematics may remain the same, but what the equations *mean* to us? That is a different matter!

Best wishes!

[Rickard Elimää]

You wrote in an article on Gamasutra about uncertainty and how it creates curiosity, and that article made me read about Thomas M. Malaby and his four continuances: stochastic, social, performative and semiotic.

Another person who writes about uncertainties is Marc LeBlanc. I have made collection of both their lists in this post.

According to this theory, the way to engage learners’ curiosity is to present just enough information to make their existing knowledge seem incomplete, inconsistent, or unparsimonious.

If I compare incomplete, inconsistent and unparsimonious to both LeBlanc's and Malaby's uncertainties, I would come up with something as the following.

Incomplete: incomplete information (LeBlanc)
Inconsistent: [no comparison?]
Unparsimonious: Semiotic contingency (Malaby) and complexity (LeBlanc)

I read the comments above, but it seems like you're talking about the game text being sparse. While that can be true, I think it can also be about drowning the participants in information that they need sort it out first, or see how it works while playing it. Compare this to a puzzle that has two pieces and a puzzle that has a thousand pieces.

I would be glad to read more about inconsistence and unparsimonious. Those two categories intrigues me.

[Chris]

Hi Rickard! Thanks for your comment - and the link to further discussion! This is an interesting angle to pursue, and I'm not familiar with LeBlanc at all outside of his work at Looking Glass... Do you have links to his relevant material?

I'm swamped until the Summer, alas, and am really struggling to get adequate blogging time but I would like to return to the Malone and contextualise it with other work. There are things I started here that I never finished...

All the best,

Chris.