These are my slides for a panel talk on virtual worlds I’ll be giving today at the ECREA 2008 conference in Barcelona.
Category: Stuff
The Power of Weakness 4: Some preliminary definitions
So Jonas, what is this “power of weakness” thing you keep going on about? you, the implied reader, ask.
And I want to thank you for taking the time, because that is a truly relevant inquiry.
The whole thing revolves around something which I find fascinating: That, in many diverse situations, we go out of our way to inhibit ourselves. We set up our environment in ways which limit us from making certain choices in the future. And we do so intentionally in order to gain an advantage.
The phenomenon is curious, since intuitively more options is better. In practice this is often not the case and examples are easy to come by: The dieter cleans out the fridge to eliminate temptations, the would-be cigarette quitter makes sure that the house is cigarette free, the writer shuts down his internet browser to avoid the temptation of checking online newspapers.
In these examples, a person fears that his future self will not share his current preferences. The current you prefers not having a chocolate bar to having one, but you fear that the person you will be in an hour will feel differently. In a sense, you’re engaged in a conflict with your future self.
Notably, this is different from merely fearing that your future self will not remember that which you presently have in mind. You’re acutely aware that you’re out of milk, but you fear that your future self (faced with the distractions of a thousand special supermarket offers) will (once again) forget to buy a certain dairy product. So you influence the cognitive focus of your future self by that powerful technique: The shopping list. This is not an example of the power of weakness, since your future self is not restrained, merely reminded of what he actually wants to do.
The power of weakness is not, however, limited to your battles with your fickle future self. Yes, I’m referring to the mass of mobile shapes commonly referred to as “other people”. At times, you want to limit your future options in order to elicit a particular response from someone else. This is something I’ll come back to ad nauseam, but a banal example is the commonly used strategy used whenever two people engage in that little left-or-right dance in which they need to move past each other without collision: To visibly commit to one side and avert one’s eyes (thus limiting one’s options as of this very moment). The message is this: We have no obvious way of solving this coordination problem and it doesn’t actually matter (i.e. no-one wins and loses) who does what, so I’ll simply choose left now thank you very much.
So, the power of weakness is: The phenomenon that, in certain situations, limiting one’s future options bestows a personal advantage.
Stay tuned for burning ships, suicidal drivers, kidnappers, speech acts, and bee wax.
The Power of Weakness 3: Norwegian News Flash
Image 1: Trond Giske, Norwegian minister of culture
Technically we’re off topic here (unless our topic is very broad indeed) but I just realized that the near-Danes of Norway have taken a drastic approach to the lure of gaming.
Distressed with the rise of gambling addiction, the Norwegian government last year chose to ban all privately owned gambling machines. Lest riots should appear, the government is rolling out strictly controlled tailor-made machines which uphold a strict time and money limit and which are intentionally free of all the bells and whistles which normally attract gamers/gamblers.
Now, this is not directly related to the power of weakness, but a government is arguably a group’s way of controlling itself by adjusting the attraction of certain actions. I’ll get back to that in a later post. Right now I just thought that this was interestingly drastic and game-related to boot.
More details from Associated Press and for pictures of the unattractive wonder see VG.
The Power of Weakness 2: Lead me not into instant messaging
Working the way I usually do – backed up powerfully by Wikipedia, Google; seriously revising drafts etc. – I sometimes wonder how on Earth pre-computer people were able to do any serious writing.
Of course, I also – paradoxically – sometimes wonder if I wouldn’t be able to work faster, better and with far greater personal gratification if it was just me and a clunky old type-writer alone in a secluded cabin deep in some Swedish forest.
I suppose most of us feel that way. Distractions and how to manage them is certainly a prevalent topic on blogs such as Lifehacker (offering tips on all aspects of your digital existence). Witness also the rise of no-nonsense retro-style full-screen word processors such as Writeroom and Dark Room. These offer to limit your options, for a price (while jDarkroom does it for free).
Image 1: jDarkroom
Riding the wave, Gmail just introduced a useful new feature, giving users the ability to shut down email for a while.
Image 2: Gmail’s Email Addict feature
Such features clearly minimise distractions such as blinking new-email notifiers. But they also help us minimize temptations, that is they help us control our future behaviour by hiding temptations.
The Power of Weakness 1: Choose your users with care, objects!
I’m immensely fascinated by the ways in which we, the alleged Homo Sapiens, set up our environments and construct our objects in order to make them difficult to navigate and use.
And I’m not being the least bit sarcastic here. We do, deliberately, and for excellent reasons, limit others and (even, more fascinatingly, ourselves) from easily taking certain causes of action in the future.
Now, this general topic is of profound depth and importance. We’ll discuss that another time then, shall we?
Today, let’s limit ourselves to a mere minor aspect of these big questions: Designed objects which, by their design, test and select their users.
The most common of such objects is the lock. The lock is an object which selects among the pool of possible users by being inoperable without the key. Thus, a lock requires the user to be in possession of a certain object.
Objects can test users in two other ways.
First, they can test for a certain knowledge. This is merely another type of lock, typically manifested as the need to know a password.
Second, an object can test for a certain characteristic (and here I use the term characteristic to also cover abilities).
Image 1: To open, you need to hold down the small white button, while first turning then sliding the lock to the left
An example of the latter is the child lock. The child lock is meant to impose minimal annoyance on the adult user wanting to open a window or a kitchen cupboard, while making it impossible (or very difficult) for a young child to operate it. A child lock typically tests for several characteristics: Physical strength, logical thinking, and dexterousness.
Image 2: To get onto this climbing wall, you need to be of a certain height
The alternative to child locks (in the broadest sense) is often complete inoperability (blocking the window until the child grows up) or posting a human evaluator/guard. The latter approach is The Amusement Park approach – amusement park rides often demand that users be of a certain height. But unless the guard is awake, anyone could get on board.
Now you’re entitled to your own aesthetics, but in my opinion the child lock approach is by far the more elegant. I think objects which cannot be used by users who shouldn’t are simply cool.
Of course, we can the discuss how this relates to things like the politics of artefacts if you’re interested…
Oh, a knowledge test is sometimes used to test for age… But it’s pretty inaccurate and often functions more like a test of whether the user can read and use Google.