Do the languages we speak shape the way we think? Do they merely express thoughts, or do the structures in languages (without our knowledge or consent) shape the very thoughts we wish to express?

(from this Wall Street Journal article by Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky)

The answer is so obviously yes that the question is essentially rhetorical. The more interesting questions to me are ‘What’s part of our universal grammar vs what’s culturally augmented?’ ‘Where do the boundaries between cognition (unexpressed awareness) and language (expressed awareness) lie?’ ‘Could we construct a language that supercedes our cognitive frameworks (given that so much of what we might ‘know’ is never even internally expressed or known consciously)?’ and of course, the perennial question ‘Where are the boundaries between biology and cognition?’ (Always, always I’m wondering where the limits are so I can figure out where to invest my efforts in inventing, shaping & creating.)

As people who know me know, I’m passionate about brain hacking and re-architecting my own brain. The most exciting part of this is that because there’s a very blurry line between hardware (the actual physical matter) and software (the lattice network of neural connections, experience, thought) – that there’s a lot of room with which to explore and experiment! And it’s a lot of fun. There’s no better guinea pig than me for all of my wacky and interesting experiments.

Anyways, I started talking about the article with my friend Matt. He lived in Mongolia for the Peace Corps for a couple of years, and speaks Mongolian. He was describing how their relationship to time is a lot more fluid, since their culture is nomadic and people live hundreds of miles apart. And how that is all reflected in their language. We got to talking…

me: could we construct a language that supercedes our cognition?

matt: I’m of the opinion that if you can’t formulate something in words, you can’t conceive of it either, whether it seems like you’re using words to think about it or not. So given that language precedes comprehension, it seems difficult to get beyond

me: i don’t think that’s true. a lot of buddhism is about training yourself to not use words, to not grasp at labels or structure, to understand your intuitive knowledge about the world sans formalized language

me: i’ve been trying to communicate a lot more gesturally and physically than verbally lately. i want to see how that changes my relationship with the world and with other people.

matt: that still constitutes a language tho. zen buddhism is the only religion I know of that tries to get entirely beyond the idea of words and make use of prerational notions

me: i think spoken, written, formalized language is pretty reductive and i feel like i’m missing out on a lot in life by relying on it too heavily

matt: well, I think your definition of language is far too limited. but, yes, you’re right, most of western culture assumes that written language is more important, or primary to, spoken, gestural, or visual communication

me: i agree. part of the work in terms of deconstructing language is also simultaneously deconstructing ego as much as possible

matt: well, most post-structuralist discourse proceeds from the idea that you can’t remove the idea of ego from anything that you do, that any attempts to do so are suspect because they assume some level of objectivity or absolutism, but I see what you mean

me: yeah in general we are sort of fucked with regards to the limitations of this sort of experiment. but we can try our best

matt: I like to think of anything I do as eminently suspect and self-serving

me: most of these existential questions are self flagellation (or self pleasure, whatever you prefer)

matt: the more I know about these things the less important they become to me. like the more languages I learn the more I understand how much of what I know is limited by language, but I’m not really that interested in trying to get past that

me: i’m interested because i can greatly improve my quality of life by changing my cognition. and i can change my cognition by changing my relationship with language.

matt: I’m constantly doing that, everything I do each day does that. but there are certain things I have to accept as given

me: yeah in a way we don’t even need to ask the questions because we are already doing the practice

matt: right, so using language to ask if it’s possible to get beyond language to pure thought is an interesting zen koan, but not really one of the problems I feel a need to solve

me: sometimes i like talking about the practice with other people, since i learn that way.

Anyways, the experiment of relying a lot less on verbal & spoken communication has been incredibly successful so far. I feel like my relationship to the world is much broader, much more expansive, much warmer. and of course, it is highly ironic that I’m blogging this.

peace and love,
su

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.

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!

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.

The question was: What are some of the cost/benefits associated with building an app in Facebook vs building a standalone site?

So at ohai! we are supporting both on-Facebook and off-Facebook experiences. We’re seeing some interesting data so far with our first MMO, City of Eternals. When people play embedded through Facebook, their usage pattern looks something like this: 5-6 minute sessions about 8-10 times a day. So they are round tripping in and out of the game world many times a day. When people play directly at the City of Eternals site, they’ll play for 20+ minute sessions 2-3 times a day.

Here’s a screenshot of the embedded, in-canvas Facebook experience:
(click through to see the larger image)

City of Eternals embedded within Facebook

Here are screenshots of the standalone experience at CityofEternals.com:

Standalone Experience at CityofEternals.com

Screenshot #2 of standalone City of Eternals Experience

We’re doing a few things differently in the on-boarding between the embedded app and the CityofEternals.com experience, but I don’t believe they are sufficient to explain the entirety of the difference.  There are a few different hypotheses that might explain these differences more thoroughly:

• The standalone site has a theoretically better playing experience, since it’s full screen; The full screen experience leads to different types of behavioral patterns in game.

  (For example: Players might be more likely to partake in longer missions, Players might be more likely to join groups and do group activities, Players might be more likely to participate in exploratory vs discrete goal oriented behaviors, etc.)

• The full screen experience has fewer distractions, leading to a different type of relationship between user and product.

  (For example: Players might be more likely to become citizens[1] of the world we’ve built, rather than just tourists, who come in and out to complete short, discrete tasks.)

• However, you can’t discount the ‘form’ factor of being very proximate to the social context where people already naturally live, which provides benefits around higher conversion rates / lower barriers to entry

  (For example: Facebook has done an amazing job of building a site that people log into religiously – daily, multiple times per day – it’s easier to attach a new service to that existing behavior than to ask users to form a new daily relationship with a new behavior – such as going to CityofEternals.com and logging in.

  Whenever you ask someone to learn a new daily behavior, the initial pitch better be compelling – to entice people to even try it, and then the value they receive in the first 60 seconds better be outstanding, to convince them that they want to try again.  Every single second in your service is a new potential conversion point.  Whereas on Facebook, the value proposition for logging in every day and returning has already been well established.)

• People are used to playing other social games in quick bursts multiple times per day, so that’s the mindset with which they approach embedded games to begin with.

  Again, back to the principle that it’s easier to draft off of existing, established behaviors than it is to forge new ones.  (Have you tried training your cat lately?)

We’re still in our early beta days, so we’ll be collecting a lot more data to test these hypotheses over time.

Then there are the cost/benefits around business related issues:

• The standalone site has a better chance of building a strong brand relationship with customers

• With a standalone site you have more control over the user experience

• With a standalone site you have to deal with a conversion rate hit of the first ‘try’

• With a standalone site you have less optimal access to user communication flows that are already prevalent in the on-Facebook experience.

• With a standalone site, you may be subjected to less volatility in your base platform (since the Facebook APIs have some external volatility that you can’t control)

• With a standalone site, you’re going to have to work harder at facilitating daily usage patterns

[1] Citizen (noun): I use the word citizen a lot when talking about the social web. A citizen is someone who is deeply engaged; someone who has a strong emotional connection with the community and the social software they’re participating in.  Someone who is invested in the health, stability and future of the service they’re using.  There are different levels of citizenship – some may be passive participants, some may become active policy makers.  But the hallmark is some level of emotional identification with the community and environment. Our goal is to turn our users into citizens.

http://www.esquire.com/print-this/roger-ebert-0310

I love reading futureme.org. This site is all about sending yourself an email that you might receive a year from now or 10 years from now. I love getting this rare glimpse of other peoples’ internal narrators. I’ve learned so much about other peoples’ relationships with themselves and with time. And, I’ve gained a lot more respect for the importance AND triviality of time by reading all the letters people are sending to themselves.

Here are some of my favorites. Nope, I didn’t write these. I’ll save those for a later post.

What would you write to your future self?

(Hat Tip: @niniane)

(sidenote: I have a top sekret posterous blog that i love, because it’s so wonderfully lightweight. there are no expectations for how I use it. i’ll try to do that here. i think using the wordpress email submission interface will help a lot. also, i’m currently experimenting with different looks for this blog. it will be changing a little bit, frequently. let me know what you think! )

It’s a lot easier to write as a bystander. When you’re in the midst of it, weathering the infinite daily (hourly, minute by minute!) battles, you don’t have as much luxury to write. We’re building, we’re fighting for survival, we’re in the thick of it.  All that time I could spend writing, I want to use to build and push forward and evolve and iterate instead.

A thought: All of the compulsion to change, and change, and change again – how does that impact my ability to live in the present moment?

 As I’m sure many of you know, many game developers/designers toil long and hard for game studios, only to receive very little if any equity for their efforts.  It’s an inequitable system.  I was an indie game developer for many years (MUDs, Mods) but I never wanted to join the traditional studio system because of what I perceived to be very inefficient employee management practices.

 The gaming industry is at the cusp of major structural change.  Traditional retail channels have left industry power in the hands of the few who could create scale to distribute across retail efficiently.  Now with the advent of open platforms such as such as XBL/XNA and web platforms like Kongregate, MiniClip, Areae/Metaplace, Facebook, etc, there will soon be numerous channels for game devs/designers to leverage to help them build their own profitable businesses.  And also, as players become more accustomed to playing games online or purchasing via online channels, there will be more venues for building new platforms and experimenting with different business models.  More importantly, many of these new games that will emerge will be much more lightweight social games, and so entirely new genres of gameplay will emerge. 

Bottom line: the gaming industry is at the cusp of dramatic structural overhaul in the next several years.  Some of this innovation will be driven by the large game companies (XBL, EA Blueprint), but I expect a bulk of the exciting new developments to come from a crop of startups yet to emerge. 
Anyways, I am hoping that these series of events at GDC will foster innovation, creativity, and a sense of what’s possible in the gaming industry.  At the very least, I want to introduce game industry folks to the possibility of being an entrepreneur or working for a startup.
You can read more about these events at GDC Director Jamil Moledina’s blog:
http://www.gdconf.com/news/directors_cut/

or at Gamasutra:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17370
 

The first series of events takes place tomorrow, Friday February 22 – you can read about the 3 Startup Launchpad sessions here.

• Raising Venture Financing for your Startup: Tips, Tricks, and Hacks – 9:00-10:00am Room 2004 West Hall
• The 1st Annual Startup Showcase – See the 5 most exciting and innovative startups of the year – 12:00-1:00pm, Room 132 North Hall
• Lessons from the Front Lines: Startup CEOs share their insider stories – 4:00-5:00pm Room 2007 West Hall

Thanks for reading! I hope to see you there. And keep a lookout for the business plan contest we will be launching for Austin GDC in the next couple of months.