Tuesday (Heuristic developed and applied)

Heuristic Developed

In a paper called “The Affect Heuristic”, Slovic et al. (2007) proposed that “images, marked by positive and negative affective feelings, guide judgment and decision making.” For each object and event encountered, people “consult or refer to an ‘affect pool’ containing all the positive and negative tags consciously or unconsciously associated with the representations” (1335).

Building on the work done by Robert Zajonc (1968) and Winkielman et al. (1997), Slovic et al. (2007) include “controlled exposure” as an influence on how an image will affect people (1336). Changing this slightly to work within the realm of a heuristic, I am proposing the first aspect be a familiarity with the artifact. Having seen or interacted with an artifact before influences the degree of how much a person is affected by it.

Describing the work of Hsee (1996a,b, 1998), Slovic et al. (2007) introduce the concept of “evaluability to describe the interplay between the precision of an affective impression and its meaning or importance for judgment and decision making” (1337; original emphasis). In action, it is the “weight of a stimulus attribute in an evaluative judgment or choice is proportional to the ease or precision with which the value of that attribute (or a comparison on the attribute across alternatives) can be mapped into an affective impression” (1340). For the inclusion within a heuristic, I switch this to evaluative knowledge. Having experienced the artifact before or not influences affects how a person understands an object and associated judgements.

Cataloging the work done on gambling and assumed probabilities, Slovic et al. (2007) list a fourth aspect of their research as a collision between affect and knowledge of outcomes. Slovic et al. (2007) write, “When the quantities or outcomes to which these probabilities apply are affectively pallid, probabilities carry much more weight in judgments and decisions. However, just the opposite occurs when the outcomes have precise and strong affective meanings — variations in probability carry too little weight” (1340). Changed for a heuristic, this becomes affective assumed outcome. Through having a strong affective meaning tied to an event or object, the probability of the outcome does not matter as much.

Developed, then, the completed affective heuristic becomes:

• Familiarity
• Evaluative knowledge
• Affective assumed outcome

Heuristic Applied

I have played the video game Journey for the PS3 many times. Developed by Thatgamecompany, it represents for many (including myself) one of the clearest implementations of Csíkszentmihályian Flow, purposely avoiding many of the immersion-breaking aspects of other games like long cut-scenes or lack of control during places. The game is designed and presented in such a way to illustrate the journey both down into a dark space and the triumphant rise back out, too, demonstrating a direct encoding of the monomyth.

Approached from the affective heuristic, I have a large degree of familiarity with the game. Having completed it many times, I am knowledgeable of its environments and puzzle aspects. However, because when played online it will pair you with another random player (whom you cannot direct communicate with), the game also includes an unpredictable element. While I am familiar with the mechanics, I am unfamiliar with whatever actions another player may take.

My ability to judge the game also comes from these extended experiences. My evaluative knowledge, therefore, is increased. I can make choices within and about the game based on my previous experiences and positive associations. However, having those positive feelings also affective me in negative ways. By being overly positive, I might overlook choices within and about the game.

This also plays into my understanding of the probabilities within the game. My overly positive feelings on the game color my interpretation of the events and chances of things happening. There is a distance between an objective understanding and my emotional one.

Wednesday (Heuristics Reviewed)

Maury’s  (Comment link)

Ashley’s (Comment link)

Works Cited:

Slovic, Paul, Finucane, Melissa L., Peters, Ellen, and MacGregor, Donald G. The Affect Heuristic. European Journal of Operational Research. European Journal of Operational Research 177 (2007) pp. 1333–1352 doi:10.1016/j.ejor.2005.04.006

While I’ve been reading book on and off over the last few weeks, I’ve also been working on a workshop designed around teaching the HTML5 game framework Phaser. Principally (and hopefully), it is in compliance with both my role as the Site Administer for the Media Park and as an assignment for this class. Fundamentally, since it is about teaching technology — writing in digital spaces –, it should be killing the digital bird with two, er, digital stones.

However, time is the mind killer. And the thing I seem to have the very least of. Initially, the workshop was going to start tomorrow (24 Feb 2015), but I’ve had to push it back another week because I’ve fallen behind in basically everything across the board. Not fun at all.

So, in summary, and to write some words here, I was looking forward to the workshop until I had to do all these other things like lots of readings for my various classes. Probably the workshop, which will have started by the time of the next post, will be going in full motion soon, though. At least I hope so, anyway. Maybe it won’t. We’ll see. Or we won’t, I guess. One of those will happen for me.

(Be sure to click on the window to give it input focus.)

Summer’s

Being a collage of different images, the role of juxtaposition comes to mind. So too does the collision of cultural assumptions, as I try to decode both the center outward and the whole as an image itself. That is, viewing the “man” outwards, there could be the argument of “white man” being the center around the outer diversity of people.

On the other hand, the incorporation of “protest” images versus the centered “man” could be a relationship in itself, too. Are they “against” each other? Or are they all part of the same culture, competing against each other for discourse space?

Charlie’s

Commercialization of the promise of health. Okay, maybe that’s unfair. By including “popular” images of fitness here, that’s what comes to my mind immediately.

Then there is the inclusion of feminine images. Is this a promotion of positive feminine imagery? Or a case against the commercialization of the female body?

Chvonne’s

Exclusion of history that is inconvenient for primary white audiences? That’s what came to mind for me, looking at the narrowing down and thus “left out” category of Black History. It’s a category of answers people — white, college people in the picture — did not want to answer.

My own:

Ha, well, it was a rather complicated mess, no? While I did make some claims of some sort, maybe, it was mostly a game made as a mess with the argument that simple arguments are hard when it comes to games. And also nostalgia too. That was in there with the GameBoy inspired art, layout, and style.

Daniel Johnson & Janet Wiles (2003) Effective affective user interface design in games, Ergonomics, 46:13-14, 1332-1345, DOI: 10.1080/00140130310001610865

Building on the concept of Flow (Csikszentmihalyi 1992), Johnson and Wiles (2003) explored the connection between Flow and the interface design of video games. Drawing on Csikszentmihalyi’s (1992) studies on how workers were able to achieve euphoric states when task difficulty was matched with their skill level, they link how games, with their repetitive tasks, fit this same model of difficulty-to-skill proportionality. Johnson and Wiles (2003) note the explicit relationship of the “concept of flow as an explanation for the positive affect games generate in a user” (p. 1334).

In an attempt to bridge both “leisure applications” (games) and other software programs, Johnson and Wiles (2003) suggest developing a heuristic to evaluate how games affect players toward Flow states and how it might be applied in other settings (p. 1335). Translating Nielsen and Molich 1990 and Nielsen 1994 works for video games, they suggest the categories of

visibility of system status, match between the system and the real world, user control and freedom, consistency and standards, error prevention, recognition rather than recall, flexibility and efficiency of use, aesthetic and minimalist design, the need to help users recognise, diagnose and recover from errors, and the need to include help and documentation. (p. 1335)

Positioning human computer interfaces as interfering with progression with Flow state, Johnson and Wiles (2003) argue “focus on, and lack of distraction from, the major task [in a game] contributes to the facilitation of flow. Immersion in the game is promoted when all distractions are removed” (p. 1336). Through reducing the number of interface elements on the screen, the probability of achieving a Flow likelihood can be increased, they conclude.

Many commons elements of game design like loading screens and movies increase the likelihood of players becoming distracted or making errors, Johnson and Wiles (2003) suggest. Any time the player is pulled away from their immersion through accidental actions or unexpected in-game triggers, they note, the HCI breaks down, leaving the player in an unanticipated state. This is also true of a greater increase in the amount of expected input and the differences between cross-system controller schemes.

“Logic, emotion, credibility: these old-fashioned notions of persuasion take a back seat to the mere attention given to an interface itself. A person, organization, or institution can make their digital interface and prose style flatter the audience’s attention with the primary goal of creating a cool place to inhabit. This sense of a cool place is not only the main goal; a site can bank on coolness as the best bet at persuasion towards their goals.”

The interface rules. By appealing to the narcissism right behind the surface, an interface can hook users. If it is sticky, this is even better. Locking the user down and appearing to be cool is all that is needed to maintain the user’s attention. Just be cool. Everyone be cool.

“If there are any threads that run through the ever-changing notion of cool, they may be narcissism, ironic detachment, and hedonism in the name of a private rebellion that constantly accounts for its place within the social.”

We want what we want. If we can get it through a cool site, cool. If not, well, there are other places we can go for what we want. And what we want is ever changing. Give it to us now, or we go somewhere else for what we want. And we do want it. Now.

“Cool is the negotiating process of constantly heralding one’s individuality but only by comparing one’s self to both similarly and dissimilarly minded people (all the while acting like none of your actions matter that much or will have any intended effects beyond the individual ). The contradiction, of course, is that one’s sense of cool must necessarily come from other people despite cool’s focus on private rebellion. This is why it’s not so cool to define cool. Cool’s contradictions are socially useful ones and a deep analysis of its workings betrays the value of detached impassivity.”

Cool is a performance, man. We shout and yell at times, yeah, but it’s all part of the act that is our cool, our motion. Don’t harsh our cool and we won’t harsh yours, you know? We just want to be left alone. Unless we don’t. And then we do. You know? It’s all an act, man, just get on the stage with us and all.

“Itutu has a strong focus on helping others and lacks the hedonistic pleasures that mark today’s cool; nonetheless, the focus on presenting a calm and secure self in the face of adversity could be a foundation for cool.”

Fear is the mind killer.

“Pountain and Robins (2000) argued that “one way this nihilism expressed itself was through the cultivation of revenge fantasies” (p. 99). If large scale political action wasn’t possible, then individuals like Taxi Driver‘s Travis Bickle or Dirty Harry‘s Harry Callahan could coolly (violently) take the law into their own hands (giving an interesting new spin to cool’s brand of individual defiance).

“Rice works from Gregory Ulmer’s critique of the topoi as serving print culture’s need for expectation and fixed–places of argument (paragraphs, tables, footnotes, etc.). He adopts chora (originally from Plato) to update the topoi for a digital age where “choral writing organizes any manner of information by means of the writer’s specific position in the time and space of culture” (Ulmer, 1994, p. 33).”

Tables? Paragraphs? Footnotes? Style and markup.

“Juxtaposition takes potential meanings of individual signifiers and forces us to fashion new meanings from viewing them in close proximity. Juxtaposition is the cool rebellion against normalized meaning in favor of the often concealed intentions of a composer and the preferred interpretations of the individual subject.”

“Information is subjectively observed difference amongst a sea of potential sameness that causes the observer to note relevance or application. This highlights the importance of subjectivity to information; it’s not information if it makes no difference to the observer. Further, this implies that information is never static or pre-defined.”

So writes Hayles, too.

“Remember, as Shannon (Shannon & Weaver, 1949) suggested, information is not about meaning; rather, information is primarily concerned with the mere possibility of selection from choices.”

Useless
More useless
Super useless

 

 

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Comments:

Chvonne’s “Reading, Thinking, & Reflecting 11/10 (link)

I could definitely relate to the point she made about how Pepper’s approach to writing about cool was one the best ways to do it. Trying to walk the path of being academic without seemingly writing or speaking down to people who aren’t is one I take pretty often. Especially within the indie game dev scene, this can mean the difference between being “real” or seemingly like you are trying to crash into the scene without taking the time to prove yourself. (It’s a very product-focused scene. You have to show you can make interesting games, even if they aren’t always finished or polished.)

Summer’s “Lighting Up Classical Rhet_Reading notes for November 10th” (link)

The colors, Duke, the colors.

But, on a more serious note, I think leaning towards a “cool threshold” is something to consider. About how trying for the cool-factor, as Pepper highlights from the thetruth site, can actually hurt the overall message in different ways.

Media spreads, sure. But what does this mean for users? What do they do?

How do people participate?

First, people lurk. Drawing from Jean Lave and Etiene Wenger, Jenkins, Ford, and Green, make the connection between new users within a community and those watching it from the sidelines to learn the rhetorical and social rules. It is through this activity, write Lave and Wenger, that “legitimate peripheral participation” happens and new comers are are able to first observe (lurk) and then more toward more active participants (158). They must first see what happens from the outside before they can be made part of the community.

Once inside, we “participate in something, that is, participation is organized in and through social collectives and connectivities” (163). In quoting Daniel Dayan, Jenkins, Ford, and Green, record: “A public is not simply a spectacular in plural, a sum of spectators, an addition. It is a coherent entity whose nature if collective; an ensemble characterized by shared sociability, shared identity and some sense of that identity” (2005, 46). We act within a social sphere through a performance that reenforces our social links and echoes our consensus beliefs. By becoming part of a community, we agree with their overlapping ideologies and act, to some degree, as part of that collective in the process.

To maintain these links, we act through three ‘C’s: curation, conversation, and circulation (171). We maintain collections of content as part of our community interactions. Be it part of utterances as embedded through a specific image shared or video played, we build a communal set of iconography that represents the thoughts of the community at the moment. And we talk about this content, creating or reenforcing social bonds through our conversation and discourse. By participating in a community, we become part of its information workflow: we maintain its imagery, embed its ideas, and circulate its feeds.

Jenkins, Ford, and Green place the community of users and their actions above their commercial value. Instead of being merely selling points, they see “that audience members are more than data, that their collective discussions and deliberations — and their active involvement in appraising and circulating content — are generative” (179). People, and their participation, are at the heart of the how spreadable media works: without the people, there are no social networks and no fertile soil for media content to thrive.

It is this empowering that raises participation into the fundamental source of understanding spreadable media. Write Jenkins, Ford, and Green, “In a world where everyday citizens may help select and circulate media content, playing active roles in building links between dispersed communities, there are new ways of working around the entrenched interests of traditional gatekeepers and in allegiance with others who may spread their content” (288). Instead of being based on the content or the ways it may be repressed, Spreadable Media holds an emphasis on the people and their actions — media is only spread through them!