Blink

Welcome to what might be a new feature for The Astounding Mr. Goodner's Amazing Electric Widgets: "Beyond the Game Shelf."  By the title, I of course mean real life - or at least non-gaming related stuff.  I read more genre fiction than is probably good for me: fantasy novels, comics, horror, science-fiction.  And a lot of it inspires my gaming.  I read mainstream fiction, too, and that's a good resource as well.  If you can stand the plots, nothing in this world will teach you more about character interaction than a romance novel.  (Albeit a fairly limited view of character interaction, but the ability to generate conflict without violence or external stakes is a valuable one)

But fiction is just a tiny slice of the world, and it's filtered through the needs of a story.  There's so much more out there that's worth a look.  So, recently, I've resolved to start reading more non-fiction.

Of course, as enlightening as that is, there's not really any reason for me to inflict my reading on you.  I'm not really interested in writing book reviews, and even if I was, I'm sure you could find other people to write them better.  So why are we here?  Well, I apply a lot of what I read or pick up from other sources to my gaming just like the movies I watch and the comics and books I read.

So, let's get started.  Today I ran across a book called Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell.

Brief review

Blink is a book about how we think without thinking, our instinctive judgments that are often correct.  Every person has the ability to take in a situation at a glance - Gladwell calls it "thin-slicing."  The book opens with an example: a museum is offered a rare statue in amazing condition.  They proceed cautiously, hiring experts to study the style, provenance, even the stone with the most advanced techniques available.  The experts agree that the statue is likely genuine.  Except that several other experts simply take one look at the statue and are convinced it's a fraud.  And they were right.  In a second, with just a glance, they got better information than a team of lawyers, investigators, and art experts could compile in months.

Blink is all about why and how, and what it means.

The book covers cognition, instinct, and how our instincts can be manipulated.  Then it goes on to talk about how and why our instincts mislead us or fail us.  It's written for popular consumption, so there's not much in the way of technical language.  The writing was lively and easy to follow, with lots of examples.  In fact, every section was built around case studies to illustrate the points.

After reading it, I have what I consider to be a good lay-person's knowledge about cognition, instinct, and reflexive decisions.  I learned a bit about how they affect people unawares (like the fact that the package your ice cream comes in affects the way it tastes), and how they can be trained.

But What Does It All Mean?

The real point of all this is how I think Blink might affect my gaming.  I'll focus on three areas.

Playing

From a player's perspective, I began to see just how limited the world revealed in an RPG really is.  An expert on ancient Greek art can take one look at a statue and tell whether it is genuine or fake.  He won't know how he knows, but he'll know.  But as a player, I'm limited to what the GM tells me.  Finding out the statue is fake probably involves asking for a perception roll of some kind, if I even think to ask.  Thinking to ask involves me realizing the statue is important, whereas in real life, an art expert constantly makes these judgments.

On the other hand, I'm starting to re-think the way I think about combat.  One really interesting section talked about the way our perceptions shift under stress.  As your heart rate goes up, your brain filters out extraneous data so you can focus on the task at hand.  At about 110, you reach a sweet-spot where distractions are distant, and the world seems to move in slow motion.  But past that spot, your performance rapidly diminishes.  Tunnel vision sets in, your ability to make rational decisions is impaired.  Even your coordination drops as blood retracts from your surface muscles to protect you from injury.  Trained cops can completely lose it.  And the psychological aftermath of a shooting can be devastating.  This is stuff I knew before, but it helps to be reminded.

I enjoy playing cool, steady combat monsters, but I should give a lot more consideration to how a less seasoned character would behave in a fight.  I should also give more thought to the kind of psychology that makes someone find a firefight exciting, but not cripplingly scary.  It's probably not a happy place to go.

GM-ing

All the above applies from the other side as GM.  I need to think about ways to convey a lot of subtle information very quickly.  What I'm thinking of is a look a each character's skills and stats to get some general thresholds of info.  In my beloved Unisystem, it might go like this.  (This is a rough draft.  I haven't thought all this completely through yet)

Perception + Skill total of 2 or so: The PC is actively impaired.  He gets outright disinformation sometimes, unless he takes time to look carefully.  In combat, he could easily get tunnel vision and not notice the movement of any characters or environmental factors other than his chosen target.  He'll see his target in the most threatening possible way.  He won't be able to hear much at all.

Perception + Skill total of 4 or so: The PC knows what would be obvious to an average person.  Almost everything I tell him would be true, but he wouldn't always get told everything.  I'd throw in really obvious social cues like "the guard looks bored" or "the guy walking by looks kind of dangerous."  The player would have to ask for more, and would need to rely on perception tests.  In combat, he tends to have a tight focus, and might not notice anything beyond it.  Situational Awareness obviously negates most of these penalties.  That's what it's for.

Perception + Skill of 8-ish: Now you're talking about a major expert.  The baseline knowledge I'd give this guy is really high.  Without even a skill roll, he could spot a fake statue unless it was REALLY good (but he'd need to do research and tests to PROVE what he knows).  A people expert would be able to tell more about the people he meets - I'd still probably use opposed tests for some things, but not all of them.  A combatant with this kind of skill is aware of almost everything going on around him, and can easily stay in control of himself.

Perception + Skill of 10 or more: Now you're talking about someone with godlike instincts.  He's the kind of person who, if he's a musician, can identify another musician's style from just a note or two.  As a combatant, I might even start giving someone like this hints about what his opponent is going to do next.  Unless something unrelated to the fight pushes him over the edge, he probably never loses control.

I don't know how much of that I'd implement formally, or what I might add to it, but at the very least I'm going to start keeping it in mind.  The guy playing the mechanical genius can probably tell when an engine has problems just by walking by.  The girl who's an Olympic triathlete (read "Sniper") probably has the ability to size up ranges without even thinking about it.  I should just tell her "it's right on the edge of medium range" before she even asks.

Designing

I'm a pretty rules-lite kind of designer.  If I were to design a game, there wouldn't be weighty systems to support casual perception, but I can kind of see how someone would go about designing them.  For a rules-heavy kind of game, a combat system that takes into account tunnel vision and the like might be kind of neat.

For a game that deals with psychology like Unknown Armies or World of Darkness, a system to measure the initial effects of stress might be as interesting as the existing systems that measure the aftermath.  Say you enter combat and roll some kind of willpower test, modified by your previous combat experience.  It might be part of your initiative roll.  The result gives you modifiers to know what's going on around you.  A bad roll could send you into kind of a berserker rage against one target, completely unaware of the other potential threats, or worse yet unaware that your target isn't really a threat at all.  A good roll might give you extra actions, or the ability to change your action based on what other characters choose to do because you're so hyper-aware.

But, like I said, I'm a rules-lite kind of guy.

So anyway, that's Blink.  If I get the time to sit down with it, I think the next one of these will be How to cheat at Everything, by Simon Lovell.  I skimmed it at work a couple days ago, and it had some really interesting stuff.  But don't count on it.  The whole point of this blog is that I don't have to be consistent. :)