Category: Thinking about Thinking

  • Thinking… Metaphorically

    I’ve been trying to tease out the constituent parts of human problem solving for a little while now. This is the kind of topic you’d think you could just find a couple of books to read or fish out a couple of papers to get some insight. Unfortunately my searches aren’t bringing up as much as you might think. Although I will heavily recommend Jeff Hawkins’ On Intelligence. His book is still pretty theoretical but it has a lot of great ideas that have been slowly sinking into my thinking.

    Nevertheless I have recently contrived a crude theory of human problem solving in my own head. I’ve come about these ideas from reading a few books, some introspection, the rope experiment I mentioned last time, and watching a ton of playtesting of puzzle games. It’s probably shallow, wrong, and not worth anything, but I’m going to subject it to you anyway.

    I think there are two major components to our problem solving.

    • Permutation
    • Metaphor

    The first one is easy. Permutation just means “trying everything”. I have believed permutation to be super important for a few years now. I don’t think the idea of just trying every possible action is going to shock anyone but from playtesting puzzle games I think you’d be surprised just how important permuting is to our problem solving. A lot of puzzles are solved by permutation alone. When you’re just “playing around with something” you are permuting. When you solved one of those “get the metal loop off the rope” puzzles and it just falls apart in your hands you are solving by permutation. When you are thinking out every possible outcome of a chess move you are permuting. Permutation is our go-to workhorse for getting things done. To do it all you need is two hands and a memory. It’s super versatile (you can apply it to pretty much any problem, regardless of how diverse) and it’s generally pretty effective, if laborious.

    So permuting is an obvious part of problem solving but it’s clearly not the whole story. It doesn’t explain how people make leaps of intuition, and it doesn’t explain how people play games with very large solution spaces like Fantastic Contraption. In Fantastic Contraption permuting is very hard. You can put a stick or a wheel anywhere and connect them to anything. It would take you days to solve a problem by just trying every possible machine. Luckily, we have a wonderful gift for metaphor.

    By a gift for metaphor I mean we have the ability to see similarities between seemingly disparate things. Consider this typical metaphor: “an angry man is like a simmering pot of water” (that’s a simile, which is a kind of metaphor). I argue that we are using the familiar pot of water to help understand the more rare angry man. We take some traits shared by the two objects: that they could both quickly convert to a state of painful unpredictability. At the same time we don’t get confused about other qualities of boiling water and anger that are not related. We don’t think of the man as being wet or becoming a gas, for example. This is second nature to us, but if you were to try to write a computer program to do this you’d quickly see how magical the talent is.

    We can use this ability to see similarities between new problems and previous problems. Consider the rope problem from my previous post. A number of people wrote me saying they thought of the rope solution first. In fact I think more people come up with the swinging solution when the problem is posed as a thought experiment than when they have the ropes in front of them in person. I’m going to guess that this is because it’s harder to permute in our heads so we jump more quickly to our metaphor engine. Then we recognise the similarity of the rope problem to a tire swing, or a clock pendulum, and we’re off to the races. Metaphor also helps explain mastery of a game. As you improve in chess, for example, board states start to become analogous to eachother and so the outcome of previous games start to inform future games.

    Permuting also helps us discover new metaphors. By playing with things we are always seeing them in a new light and there is an ever increasing chance that we will see a sudden similarity between the current problem and something we’ve seen before.

    In this way Metaphor is your ability to take what you understand about one problem and apply it to a new problem. That is a super powerful talent that we all have. I believe it’s this ability, along with just trying random stuff, that makes our species so adaptable and so good at videogames.

  • Playfull Problem Solving

    Me not writing a blog post

    I haven’t written much for a while because as soon as we got to San Francisco we got crazy busy. We have so many friends here it’s hard to find the time for things like blog posts. I’m having enough trouble finding the time to do development.

    I also haven’t taken any pictures apropos to this topic so I’m just going to pepper it with random snaps from our time in SF. This blog is also about travel after all. Anyway, one advantage of having so many people around is that I can run experiments on them.

    I’ve been interested in problem solving for quite a while. Specifically, the difference between just sitting down and thinking out a problem versus playing around with it and trying to tease a solution out. To get a feel for how good we are at just thinking something out I devised an experiment and tested some fellow indies.

    Sarah and I work during the day at a workspace we share with some other SF indie game makers. It’s nice to be surrounded by peers and their good ideas and it’s also a convenient space to hang ropes. Lately I’ve been hanging ropes from the light fixtures and proposing a challenge to everyone in the office. I’ll propose it to you now and you can see what you think.

    Sarah arriving in SF

    The setup is simple. There are two ropes that hang from the ceiling. One rope has a loop in the end, and one rope has a knot. Your goal is to put knot through the loop. The ropes are easily long enough to accomplish this but they aren’t so long that you can grab one and then walk over and grab the other. If you tried to do so you would find your outstretched arm about a meter away from the limp second rope.

     

    Now find 4 ways to put the knot through the loop. You can use anything you might find in a typical office. You can not cut the ropes or untie any knots. Give this a few moments thought, you are in a perfect position to be part of the experiment.

    When I do this in the office I let half of my subjects play with the ropes to find solutions. The other half can merely look at the ropes and propose solutions. You are in the second category and I imagine that your performance will not be as strong as the people in the first category (especially since you have to imagine the whole setup).

    Alright, are you comfortable with the solutions in your head? I’m going to give you the four intended solutions:

    • Take a chair, put it in the middle of the room, place one rope on the chair while you fetch the second rope.
    • Find an Ethernet cable or something rope-like to tie to the first rope. Use this to make the first rope longer so that you can reach the second rope.
    • Find a long tube or a stick. Grab the first rope and walk as far towards the second rope as possible, then use the stick to reach the second rope.

    Now here comes the important one. The first three are all pretty easy to find. If you were in the room you would have come up with them all. This next one is the one I’m interested in because people tend not to find it if they aren’t actually playing with the ropes.

    • Tie something heavy to the end of the first rope and give it a big swing. Then run to the second rope and back in time to catch the swinging first rope.
    Indie developers experimentally confirm the presence of gravity

    If you thought of the swinging solution then well done. If you thought of it in less than ten minutes then really well done. You are in the vast minority of people I tested. Most people had a lot of trouble finding the swinging solution unless they got to play with the ropes. Conversely, people who did play with the ropes often found it fairly easily. This is because the rope with the knot on it swings a little bit on its own.

    People who got to play with the ropes would usually find the chair solution first (actually there’s a couch in the right place so people tended to just use the couch). But after finding the chair solution they would drop the ropes and the rope with the knot would swing a little bit. They didn’t always notice it. Sometimes they were looking elsewhere, but by the time they found the three easy solutions it was almost inevitable that they would see the rope swing and that would give them the idea for the fourth solution.

    This is important because I think we tend to be overconfident in our ability to imagine solutions to problems and imagine how ideas will play out. As a game designer I am very guilty of this. I will discount ideas because I can’t imagine them being cool. The problem is that we aren’t as good at this as we think. Natural human problem solving relies on playing around with things. We shake things and pull at them, we hit things and try to mush things together. When we play we’re looking for novel behaviour. We’re looking for cracks in the problem that we can exploit and make wider. We can do this in our minds as well but we’ll never be able to find a truly surprising solution unless we’re in the room playing with the ropes.

    Me driving a speedboat instead of writing a blog post

    This means I should be prototyping more. I should stop discounting ideas because I can’t imagine them working. I should sink an afternoon into hacking them out. I might waste a few afternoons at this but it’s also the only way I’ll find unexpected wins.

    It also means we should just hurl ourselves into those huge, daunting, problems that are so intimidating (like Spacechem). They are daunting because we can’t imagine all the moving pieces but we don’t have to. We can just play around and let the solutions make themselves known. It’s how kids solve every problem, I think we’ve just gotten lazy.

  • We Play Games so we can Eat Crab

    Next time the reason we play games comes up in conversation I have a great anecdote to answer the question. We evolved to push and pull at the world around us to see if we can learn something new and then exploit that knowledge to get something beneficial. Like crab meat.

    Like most mornings I was walking on the beach today thinking about game design problems. Our beach is filled with little holes surrounded by little sand pellets. These are made by little red crabs who are about 15cm from leg to leg. When you walk on the beach you can see them walking around making the pellets (they extract algae from the sand). When you get to within about 10 meters they all run over to their holes and start warily watching you. When you get to within about 5 meters they zip down their holes.

    The crabs are neat and I decided I wanted to see them up close so I chose a comfy looking log in the middle of crab-town and waited. After a while crabs within 10 meters went back to rolling balls. Then crabs within 5 meters went back about their business. Eventually crabs within just a couple of meters went back to work. Crabs closer than a meter never trusted me. They would dart out and back every once in a while to see if I was still there but never came out.

    Experiments like this are the kind of thing humans do. We are innately curious. I wanted to see the crabs close up because I thought it would be neat. I didn’t think there would be anything in it for me. Games are the same way. They are just neat. There’s almost never any good reason to play them. We just like neat things.

    As I watched the crabs I noticed that some of the them were getting pretty far away from their holes. The crabs are quite fast but I wondered if I could beat one of them to their hole. I picked out one of the closest holes and lunged for it. All the crabs scattered and all but one very nervous looking crab went subterranean. I love that humans do stuff like this. When you watch people play puzzle games they are rarely purposefully marching towards the end goal. They just sort of try stuff. They look for interesting effects. They wonder about random stuff and then fiddle with the world to see what happens. We gain knowledge not by persistently mapping a point from A to B we gain knowledge by playing with stuff we find neat.

    I wondered what the crab would do and it turns out they have a plan for this eventuality. The crab ran around a bit, found a nice looking hole, and just ran down it. This resulted in a bit of a tussle with the current owner but they eventually decided it was better to share it for now and work out a long term solution when there were no primates around. For my part I was satisfied. I couldn’t imagine any other crab-related experiments I wanted to perform so I wandered on.

    As I walked I kept thinking about the crabs. I kept thinking about how they had a really good strategy and how I’d never catch one of them because their strategy was so good. Eventually I went back to thinking about game-design. Then, bingo, I suddenly had a brilliant idea. I thought I’d figured out how to catch a crab. This is the best moment games can offer. You have a unique puzzle in front of you, you’ve experimented with the variables, you know all the rules and now you need a novel solution. Here is the moment of epiphany. The most human of moments when you have an idea you’ve never had before. It is the reason we rule the earth and it is the reason we play games.

    I went back to crab-city and I found a fairly isolated crab hole. Then I filled in all the holes near it (don’t worry, the tide does much worse, the crabs can handle it). Then I waited, crouched, a meter and a half away from the crab hole. A few minutes later the crab pops his head up totally unaware that I have set him a crab trap. He looks at me and then slowly comes out of his hole. Then he stars rolling up sand balls and slowly gets farther and farther from his hole until, when he’s about two meters away, I leap! The crab races me back to the hole but loses. He then sprints back to where all the filled-in holes are. But aha! Forethought has beaten you my little crabby friend! I jump up and head off his retreat deeper into crab city. He responds by running into the wide empty strip of sand between the crab holes and the ocean. He’s really fast but I manage to run in wide arcs cutting him off alternately from the sea and then the crab holes. Eventually he runs out of energy, stops running, and slowly gives up. I have beaten the crab.

    CrabAt this point I’ve won. I have shown mastery of the system and beaten the puzzle. I am rewarded by seeing some novel crab behaviour (he stands up very tall and threatens me angrily with his claws) and with a nice little rush of dopamine. Since this is the real world I could theoretically use this knowledge to feed myself with crabs. They don’t look very tasty but it’s a very direct lesson about why we like games so much. I followed a trail of interesting questions and thoughts to a reliable source of food. Most games don’t lead you to a crab dinner. But when you’re as smart as we are sometimes you just need to flex those most-human of muscles.

  • How to Have Good Ideas

    I think about thinking a fair amount. I recon it’s valuable for a game author to have some understanding of thinking for a number of reasons. The most obvious reason is to be able to predict how players will play your games. The other big reason is to make yourself think better. I think I’m starting to see some fruit on this second point so I thought I’d write up my thoughts on it.

    Thinking. Do you ever think about it? What are you thinking right now? Do you know how you read? I don’t know how I read. I also don’t know how I decide if something is funny or how I decide that I don’t like that dude in the corner drinking a Chimay. I don’t know why… he just rubs me the wrong way. This is because most of our thinking is subconscious. That’s really just a way of saying we don’t have introspective access to it. I like that phrase “don’t have introspective access to” better than “subconscious” because it’s less mysterious.

    My brain reads quite well. I just can’t “watch” it read. I don’t know what strategies it’s using. You konw taht tinhg wehre you can mix up all the lteetrs in the mdidle of wrods but can siltl raed tehm? I don’t know why that’s true. I think these subconscious processes are a lot more common in day to day living than we generally believe. Advertising works, but everyone says advertising doesn’t work on them. This is because it doesn’t effect processes you have introspective access to. It still changes your behaviour because grocery-store decision making is a largely subconscious task. You think you control it a lot more than you do. Your conscious brain (mostly in the frontal cortex) might add some variables to the equation or be the final arbiter of that decision but the heavy lifting is happening behind the scenes. Did you know people with damage to the emotional center of their brain can’t make breakfast-cereal decisions? That’s because conscious thought isn’t the prime mover behind those choices.

    Lets look at problem solving and creative thought. I make puzzles games and I love user testing. This means I have spent a lot of time looking over people’s shoulder as they solve problems. Often problems that require a lot of creative thought. I have spent hours upon hours engaged in this and one of the things I’ve learned is that people don’t have any idea how they are coming up with creative solutions. We don’t have introspective access to that part of the brain. I know a very bright man here in Costa Rica who makes a living having really good ideas. He’s a serial entrepreneur who has won and lost sacks of money many times in his life. His life revolves around having good ideas and he is convinced that they come from some shadowy spirit world. He is not very religious but when pressed will present good ideas as evidence for the supernatural. This also jazzes with everything you hear about authors metaphorically “channeling” their books and sculptors “just removing the excess stone around the figure hidden in the rock”. We don’t know how we do complicated things. Which makes sense.

    I’m sure you’ve heard about the 5 +/- 2 rule of short term memory. The idea is that we can only store 3-7 things in our short term memory and after that we have to kick something old out to make room for the new. When you think about it this has pretty big consequences. It means any problem with more than 7 moving parts is impossible to think about consciously. Problems like this certainly include books and video games. Worse than that, creative leaps don’t seem to have anything at all to do with conscious thought. They just conjure themselves out of some crazy pattern-matching engine deeper in our brain. The lesson here is that we can’t hold a whole problem in our head and we can’t make creative leaps with the fore-brain so stop trying.

    Instead, think of the fore-brain as a sort of inept cook. You can decide what goes into the pot and you can decide how much the heat is turned up but that’s about it. The hind-brain seems to be built mostly on pattern matching so fill it up with patterns. These are ideas, images, feelings, anything a human can comprehend. If you have a specific problem cast around for anything related to that idea and push it in. Then push in a bunch of stuff that’s only tangentially related. Once you get it in there turn up the heat. Really focus on that idea. Emotion is the language of the subconscious so you have to really give a shit about your problem. Agonise over the solution. Imagine failing to find one and how your game will then fail, no one will ever play it, and you’ll have to go back to making websites for law offices. Then let it simmer. My personally like to slightly distract myself. Take a walk, stare at the clouds, untangle some headphone cords. Give your brain some very light work. If you can walk around somewhere new then do that. The extra visual stimulus seems to help things percolate. Don’t mind too much if your conscious mind wanders. Aim for a pleasant thoughtlessness but if you end up trying to remember the order of all the original Mario levels that’s ok. Fighting it is going to be counter productive. Sleep seems to be a pretty productive time so have a good hard long think about your problem while you’re falling asleep as well.

    I don’t really worry about down time. I’m pretty lazy so I never worry about letting “work” thoughts overtake personal time. I think this is a great advantage. Derek Yu compares our games to Head Crabs. Things that control us utterly. I think that’s why we’re successful. We live our problems in a way less invested professionals don’t. Our stew is always simmering and when it’s finally ready it will be filled with flavors the world has never tasted and they will love it. Even if we have no idea how we did it.