my mind on books

[Continuing an occasional ‘mind alphabet’ series. I recently came across several things dealing with virtual worlds, not exactly games, but related…]

• Mitch Kapor spoke at Berkeley’s I School about Second Life (podcast). Kapor believes that virtual worlds such as Second Life will become the next big “disruptive innovation” on a par with the personal computer and the Internet (topics of his two earlier talks in the series). Currently virtual worlds are in the early adopter stage, according to Kapor, comparable to the early “DOS era” of PCs.

• Also Freakonomics is running a Q&A with Second Life creator Philip Rosedale (so far all Q no A)…

• A recent book on the topic: Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun Is Changing Reality by Edward Castronova:

Virtual worlds have exploded out of online game culture and now capture the attention of millions of ordinary people: husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, workers, retirees. Devoting dozens of hours each week to massively multiplayer virtual reality environments (like World of Warcraft and Second Life), these millions are the start of an exodus into the refuge of fantasy, where they experience life under a new social, political, and economic order built around fun. Given the choice between a fantasy world and the real world, how many of us would choose reality? Exodus to the Virtual World explains the growing migration into virtual reality, and how it will change the way we live–both in fantasy worlds and in the real one.

Some books related to games, further exploring the philosophical, psychological or cultural implications:

• Gamer Theory by McKenzie Wark (with a superb site at The Future of the Book, including a networked version of the text with reader discussions.)

Ever get the feeling that life’s a game with changing rules and no clear sides, one you are compelled to play yet cannot win? Welcome to gamespace. Gamespace is where and how we live today. It is everywhere and nowhere: the main chance, the best shot, the big leagues, the only game in town. In a world thus configured, McKenzie Wark contends, digital computer games are the emergent cultural form of the times. Where others argue obsessively over violence in games, Wark approaches them as a utopian version of the world in which we actually live. Playing against the machine on a game console, we enjoy the only truly level playing field–where we get ahead on our strengths or not at all.

Gamer Theory uncovers the significance of games in the gap between the near-perfection of actual games and the highly imperfect gamespace of everyday life in the rat race of free-market society. The book depicts a world becoming an inescapable series of less and less perfect games. This world gives rise to a new persona. In place of the subject or citizen stands the gamer. As all previous such personae had their breviaries and manuals, Gamer Theory seeks to offer guidance for thinking within this new character. Neither a strategy guide nor a cheat sheet for improving one’s score or skills, the book is instead a primer in thinking about a world made over as a gamespace, recast as an imperfect copy of the game.

• Everything Bad is Good for You by Steven Berlin Johnson: “In this provocative, intelligent, and convincing endorsement of today’s mass entertainment, national bestselling author Steven Johnson argues that the pop culture we soak in every day-from “The Lord of the Rings” to “Grand Theft Auto” to “The Simpsons”-has been growing more and more sophisticated and, far from rotting our brains, is actually posing new cognitive challenges that are making our minds measurably sharper.”

• The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia by Bernard Suits (which I found via a review at Virtual Philosopher)

In the mid twentieth century the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously asserted that games are indefinable; there are no common threads that link them all. “Nonsense,” says the sensible Bernard Suits: “playing a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.” The short book Suits wrote demonstrating precisely that is as playful as it is insightful, as stimulating as it is delightful. Suits not only argues that games can be meaningfully defined; he also suggests that playing games is a central part of the ideal of human existence, so games belong at the heart of any vision of Utopia.

• Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility by James P. Carse, which begins:

There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite.

A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.

I’ve just been trying out online mind-mapping at mind42.com, with a map of some notes on ‘Smart World: Breakthrough Creativity And the New Science of Ideas‘ by Richard Ogle (The map below might take awhile to load.) It was pretty easy to start mind-mapping and adding links; it looked like images could only come from flickr or Yahoo Image Search, though. I guess I would have to upload images to flickr to get them on the mind map.

You can drag the map around with your mouse to see all the parts; there are some links to click on. Controls along the bottom will increase/decrease the size of the map, expand/collapse the nodes, etc.

I expect to be adding to the map as I go further along with the book.

So I’ve been here doing my usual amount of web surfing and book hunting but for whatever reason I didn’t come across anything that seemed “blogworthy” in the past week. These two books came to mind when I was thinking about possible reasons/excuses for the past week of non-posting:

Why? by Charles Tilly and ….

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson.

Why? comes recommended by Malcolm Gladwell. From the book description:

“Why?” is a book about the explanations we give and how we give them–a fascinating look at the way the reasons we offer every day are dictated by, and help constitute, social relationships. … Tilly demonstrates that reasons fall into four different categories:

* Convention: “I’m sorry I spilled my coffee; I’m such a klutz.”
* Narratives: “My friend betrayed me because she was jealous of my sister.”
* Technical cause-effect accounts: “A short circuit in the ignition system caused the engine rotors to fail.”
* Codes or workplace jargon: “We can’t turn over the records. We’re bound by statute 369.”

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) offers a social-psychological account of cognitive dissonance and self-justification:

Renowned social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson take a compelling look into how the brain is wired for self-justification. When we make mistakes, we must calm the cognitive dissonance that jars our feelings of self-worth. And so we create fictions that absolve us of responsibility, restoring our belief that we are smart, moral, and right—a belief that often keeps us on a course that is dumb, immoral, and wrong. Backed by years of research and delivered in lively, energetic prose, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) offers a fascinating explanation of self-deception—how it works, the harm it can cause, and how we can overcome it.

I’ve just recently started reading ‘Smart World’ by Richard Ogle and here is my first attempt at a clickable mind-map/ collage for some sources and concepts related to the book. (Clicking the image here will take you to a larger hyperlinked version.)

I have two personal “action items” as a result of reading Proust Was a Neuroscientist. The first is to read Virginia Woolf for her insights into self and consciousness.

Here is an excerpt from the chapter on Virginia Woolf (p. 182):

But how do we endure? How does the self transcend the separateness of its attentive moments? How does a process become us? For Woolf, the answer was simple: the self is an illusion. This was her final view of the self. Although she began by trying to dismantle the stodgy nineteenth-century notion of consciousness, in which the self was treated like a “piece of furniture,” she ended up realizing that the self actually existed, if only as a slight of mind. Just as a novelist creates a narrative, a person creates a sense of being. The self is simply our work of art, a fiction created by the brain in order to make sense of its own disunity. In a world made of fragments, the self is our sole “theme, recurring, half remembered, half foreseen.” If it didn’t exist, then nothing would exist. We would be a brain full of characters, hopelessly searching for an author.

My second action item – based on the chapter on Stravinsky – is to listen to “difficult” or unfamiliar music. I’m not sure if this applies to other art forms besides music, but I was fascinated by the account of Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’ as “simulated madness” that the mind later learned to listen to – explained neuroscientifically by the release of dopamine in response to surprising sounds. (“New Sounds” from WNYC is a good source for contemporary new music. For “simulated madness” – maybe watching a David Lynch film like ‘Inland Empire’ provides a similar experience?)

Lehrer writes (p. 142-143): “If the art feels difficult, it is only because our neurons are stretching to understand it. The pain flows from the growth… If not for the difficulty of the avant-garde, we would worship nothing but that which we already know.”

‘Proust Was a Neuroscientist’ at Google Books

Author Jonah Lehrer blogs at the Frontal Cortex.