I was shocked by this public service announcement — a thirty second plea for workplace safety, culminating in the narrator’s horrific workplace accident.

I don’t even work in a kitchen, but this PSA makes me want to be more careful all the time, everywhere.

Link @ You Tube.

prevent-it.ca @ Workplace Safety & Insurance Board, Ontario Canada

Stéphane Bura has posted an extensive and interesting study of player emotions in video game design. Bura presents theories, principles, speculations, and a pattern language of emotional game design, including numerous excellent graphics:

Emotion Engineering in Videogames
Toward a Scientific Approach to Understanding the Appeal of Videogames

Players don’t play to complete games, just as readers don’t read to finish books. Players play to feel emotions. Game design is experience crafting for the purpose of emotion engineering.
Game design is intrinsically hard because its output is an interactive system that is twice removed from its goal. The game designer produces rules for interaction that, with the participation of the player, generate game states that themselves induce emotions in the player.

If we can describe a given game state using a set of gameplay variables, we get the following cycle:

Interactions between the player and the game produce changes in the gameplay variables.
For instance, finding a heart container in Zelda and getting a bigger full health bar obviously changes something in the game state. We’ll explore below what this could be.

Variations or stability of these variables induce emotions in the player.
For instance, having a bigger full health bar could make him more confident.

Player’s emotions influence how he interacts with the game.
For instance, being confident might make him take more risks; pride might keep him chasing a high score; or boredom might make him stop playing altogether.

… Game design works backwards around this cycle, trying to predict player emotions from changes in the interactive system. But our knowledge of the dependencies between interaction and emotion is so sparse that most changes require testing. Testing in part requires implementing the changes, which costs time and money. Thus, in a professional setting where budget is an issue, game design innovation can quickly become a risk.

- Stéphane Bura: Link.

Via Play This Thing!

Bura has labelled his essay “(v 1.0.1)”; I take this as a good sign, that he’ll continue to develop this already impressive work.

Thought for today:

At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.

- Plato: link.

Plato @ Wikipedia.

Thought for today:

Whate’ers begun in anger ends in shame.

- Benjamin Franklin: Link.

Smart Guys Date in Parallel by Benjamin Pollack

So a few days ago, I was on the phone, whining to my dad about throwing a Fifth Annual F—— Valentine’s Day party and trying to figure out my personal life. My dad listened thoughtfully, and then began explaining to me what I was doing wrong.

The problem, he said, is that I date girls serially.

Let’s let V be potential difference between dating girls and doing something productive, I be current of love, and R be resistance to current flow. The problem with serial dating is the same as with serial circuits. If resistance starts to increase, you’re stuck: because V = IR, and R is increasing, I must decrease to hold the equality. Worse still, because P = IV, you’re just not going to have as much power with the increased resistance. Note on the above diagram that current is a lousy 214 mA, and we’re only able to get 1.93 “jewels” from our relationships. This is even worse than it seems: because there’s only one path—through all relationships—you’ll end up spending the majority of your energy on the relationship with the greatest resistance, which is exactly the opposite of what you want to do.

Worst of all, if (horror of horrors) you actually blow out one of your relationships, all current stops until you can manually patch things up. Your love life will be at least momentarily in ruins.

Now let’s examine the case where you’re dating multiple girls at once.

Even before we try the (admittedly more complicated) calculations, we can already tell the situation has significantly improved. Because we’re dating in parallel, we compensate automatically for higher resistance. Even though Lisa clearly is just not putting out, the result isn’t the massive slow-down we saw before, but instead results in conservation of energy, as you expend less effort on a mostly dead branch and focus instead on more promising branches. Whereas before, Lisa sucked the majority of our energy, now Sally and Judy do—at 16.2 and 9 jewels, respectively.

A broken circuit also no longer really fazes us. In the case that one of the relationships completely evaporates (which, let’s face it, Lisa’s not heading in a good direction), we’ve still got other branches to take up the slack. Best of all, because Lisa was high-resistance anyway, her departure barely affected net current, which decreases from 3.1 A to 2.8 A—both radically higher than net series current.

And with that simple metaphor, I suddenly felt much better about how things are going in my life right now. Dads are awesome.

[Benjamin Pollack: bit qua bit]

Via Boing Boing.

Investigating the neurophysiology of love and sex

By studying MRI brain scans of people newly in love, scientists are learning a lot about the science of love: Why love is so powerful, and why being rejected is so horribly painful.

In a group of experiments, Dr. Lucy Brown, a professor in the department of neurology and neuroscience at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, and her colleagues did MRI brain scans on college students who were in the throes of new love.

While being scanned, the students looked at a photo of their beloved. The scientists found that the caudate area of the brain — which is involved in cravings — became very active. Another area that lit up: the ventral tegmental, which produces dopamine, a powerful neurotransmitter that affects pleasure and motivation.

Dr. Brown said scientists believe that when you fall in love, the ventral tegmental floods the caudate with dopamine. The caudate then sends signals for more dopamine.

“The more dopamine you get, the more of a high you feel,” Dr. Brown says.

Love or sex? … Brains in love and brains in lust don’t look too much alike.

In studies when researchers showed erotic photos to people as they underwent brain scans, they found activity in the hypothalamus and amygdala areas of the brain. The hypothalamus controls drives like hunger and thirst and the amygdala handles arousal, among other things.

In the studies of people in love, “we didn’t find activity in either,” according to Dr. Fisher, an anthropologist and author of “Why We Love — the Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love.”

… At some point, the two do become linked. People in love have elevated levels of dopamine. Lots of dopamine, in turn, triggers the production of testosterone, which is responsible for the sex drive in both men and women.

… In their work with the lovestruck, the scientists found brain differences between men and women.

“The men had quite a bit more activity in the brain region that integrates visual stimuli. This isn’t surprising considering that men support the porn industry and women spend their lives trying to look good for men,” says Dr. Fisher.

… The scientists found that women in love had more activity than men in the areas of the brain that govern memories. Dr. Fisher theorizes that this is a “female mechanism for mate choice.” There are no visual clues for whether a man is fertile, but if a woman really studies a man and remembers things about his behavior, she can try to determine whether he’d make a reliable mate and father.

… Now their research is centered on the flip side of love. They’ve recruited college students who’d just been rejected by their sweethearts. Again, the scientists performed MRI’s while these students looked at photos of the objects of their affection.

This time, the results were different, Dr. Brown says. The insular cortex, the part of the brain that experiences physical pain, became very active.

“People came out of the machine crying,” she said.

[Elizabeth Cohen: cnn.com]

America and the Dollar Illusion — Gabor Steingart comments on America’s place in the global economy:

• The US foreign debt grows by about $1.5 billion every weekday and has now reached about $3 trillion
• Private household debt, both at home and abroad, has reached $9 trillion — and 40 percent of these debts has been incurred since 2001
• Almost no one is saving money in the United States today
• The Americans are enjoying the present at the cost of selling off ever larger chunks of their future

US economic growth, in fact, is fueled by ever-increasing consumer spending — puzzling given that American wages are dropping as is industrial output. Still, everyone knows the answer to this riddle. The rise in consumption isn’t based on an expansion of production, a rise in wages or even an increase in exports. To a large extent, it’s based on the growing debt. But why do banks keep issuing credit? Because they accept the ever-increasing prices of stocks and real estate as a kind of collateral. A closed circuit of miraculous money minting has been created.

Self-delusion

The extent of this self-delusion can be read in the balance sheets of the banks: Almost no one is saving money in the United States today. The US foreign debt grows by about $1.5 billion every weekday and has now reached about $3 trillion. Private household debt, both at home and abroad, has reached $9 trillion — and 40 percent of these debts has been incurred since 2001. The Americans are enjoying the present at the cost of selling off ever larger chunks of their future. Arguably, the imminent economic crisis is the most thoroughly predicted one in recent history. Rather than refuting the crisis, the current US economic boom merely heralds it.

Biologists have observed similar phenomena in plants contaminated by toxins. Before they wither, they produce one last batch of healthy shoots — to the point that they can hardly be distinguished from healthy plants. Some speak of a panic bloom.

[Gabor Steingart: Spiegel Online]

Glossary

• US economic growth
• ever-increasing consumer spending
• debt
• miraculous money minting
• panic bloom

Wally Wood’s 22 Panels That Always Work!!

“or some interesting ways to get some variety into those boring panels where some dumb writer has a bunch of lame characters sitting around and talking for page after page!”

Once shrouded in secrecy, Wally Wood would selectively give assistants and those close to him three 8×10 photocopies of comic panels that bore the absolute essence of drawing comic book panels. 22 images in total, they held the secret to a comic book illustrator’s success, and those who learned from them benefited from the master’s wisdom.

[Link]

Via Boing Boing.

Today’s Mood Panel:

Reflection

“There is no sincerer love than the love of food.”

- George Bernard Shaw

Makes one think:

The Saddest Thing I Own invites people everywhere to share the saddest thing they own. What are these sad things? What makes things sad? Do things start off sad? Do some sad things begin as happy things that then become sad? Are some things only sad because for some sad reason we kept them? Are some things just plain sad no matter what? This is what we want to know.
[Link]

via boingboing

Emotion:

An emotion is a “complex reaction pattern, involving experiential, behavioral, and physiological elements, by which the individual attempts to deal with a personally significant matter of event.”[1] It arises without conscious effort and is either positive or negative in its valence.

- Wikipedia: Link.