Interesting Bits for Tuesday October 9

I’d never read Good Magazine, now in print for a year, before, possibly because it’s a teensy tiny wee bit more crunchy granola than my usual fare. However, I picked up the latest issue, High Tech/Low Tech, Technology: Shaping Our World from the Top Down and the Bottom Up on impulse for the cover story on political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, one of the foremost, and most controversial, scholars of game theory.

Game theory, or rational choice theory, is taking assumptions based on human behavior, and breaking them down into mathematical equations, “statements of logic based on on a predictive theory of how people with those motivations will behave.” The foreign conflict forecasts generated by Mesquita’s model have been proven wildly more accurate and detailed than traditional analysis methods used by the CIA and other intelligence agencies, for example. And his private business, Mesquita & Roundell (website appears to be under construction), is apparently very successful with top national companies in litigation, m&a, and regulation sectors.

I first became interested in game theory a few year ago in a marketing context. Not that I was applying game theory to my work, I’m not a closet genius for goodness sake, but I was certainly thinking a lot about it. My mentor’s management style was all about predicting human motives and thus subsequent behaviors and working within that framework instead of trying to change it. Needless to say, we had a lot of arguments but I gradually learned that even if I personally don’t like buying into an idea, like “x person will behave this way because of x,” because it doesn’t feel good, that certainly doesn’t mean that it isn’t true. Anyway, I’m rambling. Long story short, somewhere in that mix of marketing, working for someone with an econ background, and really thinking about human behavior in a predictive context for the first time, I ran across game theory, and the Good Magazine article is… well, good.

I also enjoyed the rest of the magazine, especially some of the art and graphical representations of current events. Check it out.

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Speaking of appreciating those people who have an economics background, as in the case of my former boss whom I mentioned above, I’ve been reading a lot of Daniel Miessler’s excellent blog lately, and he brings this up in his post “Economics as the Solution Cognitive Dissonance.

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Artifice, a small local publication created to promote the arts in and around St. Louis and support independent galleries, is available at the following locations:

White Flag Projects
Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
Left Bank Books
Star Clipper Comics
Rag O Rama

Artifice has also launched a new blog where you can contribute your opinion.

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I’ve been reading the latest book by McKenzie Wark (author of A Hacker Manifesto), Gamer Theory, online at Future of the Book. A subject matter of interest in a format- a networked book- that happens to also be a subject matter of interest. (I’m fascinated by the study of hypertext, metafiction, hypermedia, ergodic literature, etc. etc.) In his review on Pop Matters, Vince Carducci contrast of the online and offline additions makes some interesting points about the benefits of a more organic, networked format versus the traditional form of the bound version, mentioning media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s argument that the linear thought process of the Western mind is a direct result of our standard organization of printed material.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, in his blurb on the book, summarizes
the thesis of Gamer Theory: “computer games constitute the dominant cultural form of our time,” and cites statistics from the Entertainment Software Association.

So why on earth am I reading about gamER theory? (As opposed to GAME theory, mentioned earlier.) I’m the furthest thing from a gamer imaginable, right? Right. So I got to thinking… why is it that I can watch someone ELSE play a video game for at least a half hour before becoming bored? Who else does that? Theoretically, isn’t watching someone else play a video game the most boring activity imaginable? Well, yeah. Until I read a description of gamer theory…

“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.”

…and realized that’s er, what I think about while I’m sitting there, not how many points one gets for blowing up x. Anyway, long story short, it’s pretty fascinating.

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And speaking of Wark’s theory that the video game functions as a utopian version of the world we actually live in, an article by James Bowman in The New Atlantis chimes in precisely on cue to remind us the utopian ideas of modernism are still more influential in our culture than we sometimes may think.

Anyway, I’m going to go back to reading my postmodern hypertext networked book…

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Which leads us to two recent articles discussing the relationship between advancing technology and the human memory, the first of which mentions Jorge Luis Borges’ writing on the risks of perfect memory in the context of Google.

In the Boston Globe’s “The Advantages of Amnesia,” author Jessica Winter says:

“Jorge Luis Borges envisioned the risks of perfect memory in his famous story “Funes the Memorious,” about a man gifted with unlimited recall, and paralyzed by it. Perhaps not even Borges, however, could have imagined our present capacity to accumulate and preserve memory in digital form - or the powerful impact it is already having on individual lives, as temporary indiscretions become part of the permanent record.”

Her perspective seems to focus on concerns that the archival capabilities of our technology will inhibit our freedom to forget, which some sociologists maintain is an important ability of our consciousness. The article goes on to discuss data retention policies versus adaptation occurring through our natural coping mechanisms.

On the other hand, over at Wired, Clive Thompson’s perspective on the same subject, “Your Outboard Brain Knows All,” is much more reminiscent of my own. Uncannily so, actually. He writes about our growing tendency to recall fewer and fewer basic bits of information these days, telephone numbers, for example.

“I’ve long noticed this phenomenon in my own life. I can’t remember a single friend’s email address. Hell, sometimes I have to search my inbox to remember an associate’s last name. Friends of mine space out on lunch dates unless Outlook pings them. And when it comes to cultural trivia — celebrity names, song lyrics — I’ve almost given up making an effort to remember anything, because I can instantly retrieve the information online.

In fact, the line between where my memory leaves off and Google picks up is getting blurrier by the second. Often when I’m talking on the phone, I hit Wikipedia and search engines to explore the subject at hand, harnessing the results to buttress my arguments.”

I feel the same. I don’t memorize phone numbers anymore, and information I’d like to retrieve is just a bookmark away, although song lyrics still tend to stick. I find that to truly study something, and commit information to memory, I have to take it offline, away from my brain extensions of gmail, which has archived many of my thoughts and conversations in the years I’ve been using it and made them searchable, Diigo, which contains every resource I find valuable, annotated if I like, and Google of course, instead writing notes by hand, and reviewing them later.

Like Thompson, I kind of like it, although I get a creepy feeling that I’m probably perceived as far more intelligent by those who know me through email and instant messenger than by those whom I meet at random cocktail parties. To be fair though, this isn’t just because of cyborg crutches, I also express myself differently when I write, even it it’s just an IM chat, so. I suppose, as usual, a balance of both is desirable.

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There now, that ought to be enough to make up for the lack of posting and keep you all entertained for a while…