Regarding our earlier discussion regarding the difficulty of relating the rules of the virtual world to its software ("Guess My Game"), Jeff Atwood forwards an interesting (albeit tangential) follow-on ("When Understanding means Rewriting").
It seems a good opportunity to explore two further questions. Are users programming their virtual world experience, and if so does that also imply an instinct to rewrite the world as they experience it is part of a process of building understanding (?)
Let me expand the above in this way:
A.) How much of the user experience in a virtual world is implicitly technical? For example, if one were to think of a virtual world User Interfaces (UI) as software mediated mapping from a mental model (user), say, to a event-driven, workflow-styled interaction with an imaginary space. That interaction could be loosely thought of in terms of a programming language. This spin is likely most apparent in genre games (FPS, combat sims) where keyboard mappings and macroing are art forms.
B.) Given [A.], is there an impulse by the player/user to "rewrite" the virtual world in order to assist in understanding that world?
Jeff's post on Coding Horror is about the complicated relationship between a programmer and software. He notes (building from Peter Hallam's observation) that paradoxically the lion-share of time spent by a software developer is not writing software but is spent in understand existing code of one sort or another. He goes on to suggest that in many cases that learning/understanding process is best facilitated by rewriting existing software, citing Richard Feynman 's dictum "what I cannot create, I do not understand." While this claim might be seen as unworkable if taken as gospel - in fact the discussion there segues a Joel Spolsky essay as counter argument - there are many cases this makes sense in software.
As for virtual worlds, I wonder if the style of exploring (and pushing) the boundaries of a world often attributed to users/gamers can be percieved in terms of their exploration to recode the world/game experience to better suit their understanding. To the extent then that players strive to push the envelope (metagaming, customized UIs, etc.) are they engaged in learning?
In Guess My Game I asked
Would (Martians)... be better off directly observing the game - sourced by its code. Or would they be better off reverse-engineering it from the behavior observed of human players?
Today's thought inverts this perspective. Does the behavior observed of human players in a virtual world faciliates the user's understanding of that world?
I don't think so. I think minmaxing is just a person trying to do the best they possibly can at "the game" of the world.
Of course this probably doesn't apply to a first-time gamer. They would be more likely to experiment, IMHO, to see what works best. And of course an Explorer type is going to do that anyway.
Posted by: Jim Self | Sep 26, 2006 at 21:10
Jim>
I don't think so. I think minmaxing is just a person trying to do the best they possibly can at "the game" of the world.
To play with this. I don't think this is inconsistent with a "what-ifing" process to learn to better an understanding of the UI mediated world one is engaged in.
For example, in in current Red Orchestra experiment I find myself constantly reworking the keyboard around new tactics and ideas I might develop to improve my game. Then I might go and practice on bots as part of an evaluation process. Sure, the goal is to develop an edge (or rather in my case, just to get to parity :). But it is done through a process of exploration based on hypothesis testing.
Posted by: nate combs | Sep 27, 2006 at 22:49