closer to humanity

My friend Caterina recently characterized our work as symbol manipulation.

My interpretation of this is that our daily work is pretty abstract – we create software that provides a proxy by which we hope people can experience emotions that are hopefully authentic and translate to moments of humanity. (Enough of these moments of humanity and we have something…)

I found myself in technology quite accidentally. I was a philosophy & cognitive psychology student who wanted to experiment with concepts of identity formation, community building, world myths. The big question I was trying to answer was how much is malleable? what is the relationship between our biological and our cognitive systems?

(Much of my daily work right now focuses on this quite a bit – what kind of relationship do we want our players to have with each other? How do we facilitate that (or do we?) in the systems that we’re building? What’s the player relationship to the world narrative in a social game?)

I can see clearly now that what I was trying to do all those years was understand my own world better. I built up all these frameworks, used all of this language, to try to describe the world. Because to understand, to describe – maybe that led to mastery of some kind.

Nowadays, I’ve become much more interested in the individual experiences than the frameworks. I find symbol manipulation to be too abstract, too proxy. I want my life to be less filtered, less named, less tagged. I want to be closer to humanity, closer to other people. “I had long since decided to concentrate on the phenomena, and not worry about the theories.”

Yep, it will be interesting to see how this affects my work.

All software creators are like gods – we create rule sets in our own images, our software inherits our value systems, our ethics.

Personally, I’m thrilled. Without frameworks and filters and tags, the world is infinitely larger. I’m no longer constrained by my own brain. The brain hacking now happens through art, music, dance, movement. I’ve been hosting vagabonds and travelers through couchsurfing.org, a fantastic community that brings new worlds to my apartment every week.

Elise Boulding, an inspiration

I hadn’t heard of Elise before I read the obituary in the NY Times today. But now I feel comforted, invigorated that there are these everyday heroes out there that I don’t yet know about. The world is much bigger and more exciting than I even imagine sometimes.

I especially liked these parts of her bio:

“And that was when I realized that there was no safe place on earth,” she said. “And I knew that I had found my life’s mission.”

‘She came late to academia and a life of letters, receiving her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1969 only after rearing five children. Her experience as a mother and a homemaker, she often said, informed much of her work.’

I love hearing the life stories of other people who are following unconventional paths. Often the ’shoulds’ are so loud and deafening that it takes significant effort to break free. But there’s frequently no choice. All the other folks out there are great inspiration for me. I’m just beginning, myself. There’s a lot left to build and discover!

happiness

This is what’s on my mind recently:

We’ve* grown up assuming that happiness and fulfillment were rights, rather than luxuries. We’ve been optimizing for some sort of idealized state. (Let’s keep moving up and onwards!)

The truth is we’re very fortunate to live in the time and place that we live in, with the tools we have.

The answer to lasting, sustainable happiness is actually quite simple. Whatever happens, whenever you feel like you might be faced with something seemingly insurmountable, you can choose to make it happy, regardless of the externalities. We’re human and it’s hard to always remember this. But this is my daily practice. If there’s anything I want to be a ninja expert at, it’s this.

* gross generalization.

Random stuff in my brain

I’m heading off for the Austin Game Developers Conference this afternoon.  I’ll be there through Friday evening, if anyone wants to meet up.

I realized recently that I speak mostly in conclusions. That is to say, I am really bad at exposing my thought processes to other folks.  It’s one of the reasons why I blog so infrequently.  I only feel comfortable blogging fully formed thoughts – ones that have relatively well tested hypotheses.  But so much of relationship formation and bonding – the good stuff – happens in the in-between spaces.  I decided I need to actively work on exposing these thought processes.  

So I guess I’ll try posting more casually to my blog. I don’t have a lot of faith in this yet, but I suppose it’s the kind of thing that takes practice.  =)

I had a very enjoyable conversation yesterday with Byron Reeves.  Byron’s the Director of Stanford’s Language and Information Program.  In his spare time, he does a lot of consulting and startup work in the area of virtual worlds and virtual economies.  He told me about some fMRI work he’s done, studying people’s brains while they play World of Warcraft.  And the difference in people’s brain responses depending on whether you tell them the other characters they are interacting with are other people or NPCs (computer AI.) 

One of the companies he’s working with is Seriosity.   They are basically creating a platform to allow companies to create virtual economies by assigning currency values to different types of interaction and communication.  They are coming up with all sorts of very interesting, unique data about how virtual currencies drive behavior and group dynamics. 

Anyways, a few random thoughts have been percolating in my brain:

- What does it do to a [company's] culture if all interaction can be boiled down to some quantitative representation?

- Isn’t a company’s culture really just some expression of a collective utility function?

- And, has anyone done any studies measuring what type of correlation exists between the rate of change of a [group|country's] economic growth and the rate of change of its language? I guess I’m curious if various Chinese dialects are changing more quickly than languages in more static socioeconomic conditions.  I feel this must be true to some extent, but I wonder to what degree.