Like eyeglasses for the mind
36 years ago, Steve Jobs famously described computers as “like a bicycle for the mind”. By analogy, I want to signal boost a tool for thought I think of like eyeglasses for the mind: Jesse Schell’s lenses, as described in his 2008 book The Art of Game Design.
Schell literally wrote the book on game design. 18 years later, his work is considered a default textbook, and priced accordingly. At the time, its novel theorizing, addressing inane-sounding but actually important questions like “What is a game?”, was a revelation.
The world is more complicated than you think, even if you already think the world is very complicated. And the wicked examples given in that article aren’t even alive, much less the combinatoric explosion involved in conscious. In order to make sense of all this rich wildness, we must reduce it to tractable ideas using simplifying abstractions. Using world models. All models are wrong, but some models are useful. No model truly captures reality — the map is not the territory — but intentionally swapping between models can give you a fuller picture of it.
Schell’s book models this modeling with the theory of lenses. Game design is an art, a craft, and a science. A good game designer has to inspect and analyze their creation from very different angles. Schell uses lenses as a metaphor to explicitly decide what angle to look from this time. You can imagine switching between lenses like visors in Metroid Prime. Maybe today it’s useful to detect motion, or heat, or sound.
1895 illustration of lens shapes, as seen from the side. Six different cross-sections, shaded with lines, are labeled with numbers from 1-6. 1 has two convex sides and 4 has two concave sides.
Some of the lenses I find consistently useful for understanding the world are:
Money. Who’s paying for this? Who are they paying? How does your job deliver value? Why do they pay you? What does the person who decides whether to pay for things want? What does the internal financial auditor want? Who paid to put this here? Who pays to maintain it? Who think this person’s job is valuable enough to pay for it?
Incentives. How does this person’s manager know how good a job they’re doing? Metrics, vibes, peer review? Does what you want from them align with any of those legible things, or are you stuck appealing to your mutual relationship or their kindness as a person? How does the company track how good a job this team is doing?
Status. How do this person’s actions make them look good to their peers? Their reports? Their superiors? What are this person’s clothes telling the world about them? How important do they think that is? How can I interpret this action as an attempt to gain status, or prevent losing status? Or were they trying to make this other person lose face? What values did they appeal to?
Problems. This object, this process, this clause, this structure, this checklist. Every single thing you can see. It’s not here arbitrarily. Someone decided to put it here because they had a problem and tried to solve it. What was the problem? Is that still a problem today? How would you know? How can you test that?
Data. This person or organization makes decisions based on what they know about the world. How do they know what they know about the world? What’s easy to track? Clickthrough rate, unique visitors, average call time, unit sales? What does it cost to track those things? What would they be tracking instead if it were easier?
Needs. What does this person need from the world, or from me, that they’re not getting? Quickly check baselines: food, shelter, sleep. Do they feel unsafe? Do they feel valued? Do they have autonomy, mastery, and purpose? Belonging, improvement, choice, equality, predictability, and significance?
Those six lenses are just the ones I personally find most useful. If you subscribe to lens theory, introspection will lead you to other lenses that are useful to you, and practice will tease out their relative importance.
While lenses are useful and powerful, like eyeglasses, they are a tool for noticing. Lenses won’t help you decide what actions to take once you’ve noticed something. A different metaphor would better serve you there. If you have a good one, I’d love to hear about it. Go forth and see the world more clearly!
A brief history of time units: Tenths
This is part four of a multi-part series on the origins of the time divisions of a day.
[Part 1: Hours] [Part 2: Minutes] [Part 3: Seconds]
Tenths
If we extend the pattern we see with hours, minutes, and seconds, then seconds should be subdivided into 60 thirds. Instead, we subdivide them into 1000 milliseconds. Imagine what a world where we used thirds would be like. Movies would run at 0.4 fpt (frames per third), fluorescent lights would flicker at 1.67 or 2 fpt, and games would strive for 1 fpt.
In the world we live in, decimalization and metrication became symbols of reason and revolution in 1790s France and America. Decimal time was officially enacted in France in 1793. Each day would be divided into 10 hours. Each hour would be subdivided into 100 minutes, and each minute would be subdivided into 100 seconds. The resulting 100,000 seconds per day is close enough to our 86,400 seconds per day that decimal seconds feel surprisingly reasonable. Decimal hours and minutes did not. The revolutionary regime gave up trying to enforce the unpopular change in 1795. (Swatch would resurrect decimal time 200 years later as Swatch Internet Time. This was also not widely adopted.)
Unlike decimal seconds, decimal meters and decimal grams (and decimal cents!) did successfully spread. By the mid-1800s, there was a clear consensus that any subdivision of seconds should be decimal, like the other metric units. Tenths was a long established English word for fractions. English ten (and its inverse tenth) shares an origin with German zehn or Dutch tien, rather than French dix, Spanish diez, or Latin decem. Preserving the original term was not a foregone conclusion. For example, English generally prefers the Latin word percent (short for per centum, meaning “by the hundred”) and derived terms percentage and percentile over its native hundredth (German hundert, Dutch honderd).
Painting of a horse race titled “The 1821 Derby at Epsom”, by Théodore Géricault. Four male jockeys ride racing horses across the English countryside against a backdrop of dark clouds. The horses have all of their legs outstreched off the ground in the “flying gallop” pose.
California tycoon Leland Stanford (who founded Stanford in 1885) commissioned an 1878 photo series called The Horse in Motion. Automatic electrophotographs captured how horses actually moved, revealing errors in human observation. The commonly depicted “flying gallop” pose, airborne with all four legs outstretched, was never actually a part of a running horse’s gait. The indifferent machine proved that what we thought we saw with our eyes was wrong. The photos were an international sensation, warranting a cover story in Scientific American.
In 1823, astronomer Friedrich Bessel observed consistent errors while recording very precise event timings. He created the concept of the “personal equation” to explain the errors: different people had different, but predictable, reaction times. There’s a lot of individual variation, but it takes most people 0.2 to 0.3 seconds to notice a stimulus and act in response. This raised a philosophical dilemma. What was the point of being human if impartial machines were better at seeing than we were?
The shift to impressionist and pointillist styles of painting illustrated a similar reaction to the spread of photography. If a camera could capture the reality of a landscape or stern expression more perfectly than any human could hope to, why compete directly? Why not do something else that machines couldn’t do instead?
Official times at the 1896 Olympics were kept by individual referees with stopwatches. This was barely enough precision to keep records to the tenth of a second. People tried many different things in the following decades to achieve hundredths of a second-level Olympic record accuracy, but kept running up against the limits of human reaction time. Any precision beyond tenths would require that humans be removed from the loop entirely.
Infinite Lives, 1990: Super Mario World
Super Mario World had impossibly big shoes to fill. Not just the direct sequel to megahit Super Mario Bros. 3 (1988), not just one of two launch titles justifying the purchase of a new ¥25,000 (roughly $470 equivalent) console, but also the first in a new era of video games where anything was possible and technical limitations were a thing of the past. Not only did Super Mario World successfully fulfill its expectations, it’s still commonly used as a creative canvas 35 years later.
This is the fourth in a series of posts exploring video game history by focusing on one game I loved from each year, 1978–2027.
[2000: Diablo II] [2010: Super Meat Boy] [2024: Caves of Qud]
Screenshot from Super Mario World shown at double its native 256x224 resolution. Wearing a yellow cape, Mario is riding Yoshi in a dense forest, flanked by a hovering Goomba, a shell-less Koopa, and an obscured Wiggler.
Super Mario Bros. 3 was already a nearly perfect 2D platformer. What could Super Mario World add to make people to sit up and take notice? Levels could have secret exits, rewarding exploration with surprise and delight. You could replay levels, helping the world feel more like a world and allowing you to search for secrets at your leisure. Mario could already fly, but his new yellow cape boasted dynamic speed and altitude control. Most visibly, the Mario team had always wanted to have him ride a dinosaur, but weren’t able to make that work within hardware limitations until the Super Nintendo.
Super Mario World’s influence extends far beyond its initial release. It had a central role in the development of romhacks, where video game designers would replace the game’s data with their own levels. One Japanese romhack series, Kaizo Mario World (2007), inspired the category of extremely difficult “kaizo hacks”, and eventually the entire precision platformer genre. A tool-assisted speedrun demonstrated a crowd-pleasing arbitrary code execution exploit in 2014. Wilder still, a human-viable arbitrary code execution skipping to the credits was discovered in 2016.
Like many children’s properties, Super Mario World enjoyed a multimedia merchandising blitz that included comic books and a TV cartoon. The Mario Cinematic Universe became a childhood obsession for me. McDonalds tie-in? Weird cereal? Serial manga? Off-model trading cards? I was there for it, designing levels, drawing comics, and imagining extensions to Super Mario World and its tie-ins like Super Mario Kart (1992), Yoshi’s Cookie (1992), and Mario is Missing (1993). I dressed as Mario for Halloween in 1993. It’s hard to overstate its impact on my childhood.
There’s a tough tradeoff to make when categorizing games before 1995. Do you count the year a game was first released in any market, or just the US market? In this series, it makes more sense to count the first release in any market. This approach better showcases the gradual lifting of the era’s technological limitations. One caveat is that Super Mario World’s US influence is inextricably tied to the media landscape it released into in late 1991, not 1990. Another caveat is this series is a personal history, and my own stories about the game center around 1992, not 1990.
In the US, Super Mario World launched alongside Sonic the Hedgehog (1991). From our future perspective, we can assess that Mario’s fundamentals and continuous reinvention handily outpaced Sonic’s attitude and speed. Both hardware and game design needed to advance before Sonic’s core promise of full speed could be realized. That didn’t line up until as recently as Sonic Mania (2017). In contrast, Super Mario World is still the exemplar of a 2D platformer. Super Mario Wonder (2023) might do more things, do wilder things, and be more kid-friendly, but it isn’t fundamentally better at doing the thing that Super Mario World aimed to do. Anyway, this was all unclear at the time. The two mascots began a heated rivalry that only started dying down a generation later, with Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games (2007).
Mickey Mouse stole our cultural legacy
My journey started with an innocent question. In 2002, a younger, more naive Jesse was enraptured by a new online encyclopedia that started gaining traction. It still had many placeholder articles, containing text copied verbatim from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. 1911?, young naive Jesse wondered. That’s almost a hundred years ago! Surely there must be a more recent edition this so-called Wikipedia could crib from.
There was not.
Twenty-four years later, I write to you from the other side of a lifelong obsession with the public domain.
The public domain is best defined by the protection it lacks: copyright. Anyone can legally adapt, copy, or transform any public domain work for any reason. For example, Project Gutenberg can provide the full text of public domain books to everyone at no cost. Anyone can record and sell their own performance of public domain classical music. The omnipresence of Shakespeare and Brothers Grimm adaptations is partially due to their public domain status.
US law today stipulates any work created before 1931 is public domain. Fifty years ago, US law stipulated any work created before 1920 was public domain. Look how common reimagings of properties from before 1920 are as a result. Alternate takes on The Wizard of Oz (1900). The Cthulhu mythos (1919). Sherlock Holmes’s myriad incarnations (1887). Alice’s wonderland adventures (1865). The world is poorer for the 39 missing years copyright extensions have stolen from us. Instead of works from 1930, we could be in conversation with resonant works from 1969.
1969! Imagine what that would be like. In that world, anyone could make indie films starring the Joker as a trans woman without being ready for a multimillion-dollar lawsuit. Beatles cover albums could be as common as classical cover albums. Anyone could put their Kirk/Spock slashfic on bookstore shelves and auction off the movie rights. Casablanca might have a hit musical deconstructing it that goes on to inspire a series of two movies. Works like those are a part of our cultural background, and we should have a right to engage with them as we like.
How did it come to this? In 1842, Charles Dickens traveled across the US on a book tour. It was his first time visiting the country. The 30-year-old chronicled his strange experiences in the strange land in a travelogue, American Notes for General Circulation. He had yet to write his 1843 masterpiece, A Christmas Carol.
Dickens was confronted with cheap bootleg copies of his work everywhere. Flooded by requests to sign books he never saw any profit from, he testily wrote treatises arguing for international copyright law. Under the 1710 Statute of Anne, UK copyright law granted exclusive rights to publishers for 14 years from first publication, plus a 14-year extension on author request. US law was defined by the Copyright Act of 1790, ironically a near-verbatim copy of the Statute of Anne. To Dickens’s chagrin, neither law governed works created in other countries.
Dickens’s international copyright work culminated in the 1886 Berne Convention. That first international agreement established the norm of a 50-year copyright term. (The US agreed to its terms fashionably late, in 1988.)
Animation cel from Steamboat Willie. A black-and-white Mickey Mouse cheerfully steers a boat down a river with a ship’s wheel. Notably, Mickey is not wearing his iconic gloves.
In the 1970s, Disney realized it had a problem. Steamboat Willie, the first animated short featuring Mickey Mouse, was from 1928. At that time, US copyright law protected a work for 28 years by default, plus a 28-year extension on request, for a total of 56 years. If Disney didn’t take drastic action, Mickey Mouse would enter the public domain in 1985, precipitating a company financial crisis. So Disney sent money through lobbyists to Congress, which was revising US copyright law to conform to the Berne Convention. The resulting Copyright Act of 1976 extended copyright protections by 19 years, to 75 years after date of publication. Works from 1918 entered the public domain in 1975. Works from 1919 entered the public domain in 1976. Works from 1920 would not enter the public domain until 1996. The mouse was safe.
In 1998, Disney did it again. They even had the nerve to deploy the name of Cher’s recently-deceased husband to gin up Congressional support for the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Its opponents called it the Mickey Mouse Act. 95 years after date of publication. Reader, I was furious to learn about this in 2002. Absolutely livid. Works from 1921 entered the public domain in 1997. Works from 1922 entered the public domain in 1998. Works from 1923 would not enter the public domain until 2019. That was unimaginably far in the future. I would be old by then!
Disney didn’t dare try a third round in 2018. 1998 was near the end of the era where they could do it without public outcry. The Internet and its post-scarcity information abundance had transformed the world. Works from 1924 entered the public domain in 2020.
2024 came and went without incident. 2022 had set a useful precedent, as A. A. Milne’s 1926 book Winnie-the-Pooh entered the public domain. People made distasteful works about the bear with very little brain (but without his iconic red shirt, a 1932 addition protected until 2028). But money continued flowing to the multimedia giant, which by then had purchased ABC, ESPN, Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and Fox. Similarly, no mousepocalypse occurred when works from 1928 finally entered the public domain in in 2024.
We have now celebrated Public Domain Day 11 times in the last 50 years, welcoming in works from 1920 through 1930. Here’s to the recently renewed prospect of public domain’s enrichment, at the rate of one year per year.
Experiments in self-medication
I’ve struggled with social anxiety my whole life. Fortunately, we have several OTC drugs for temporary anxiety relief, such as alcohol. Unfortunately, they all come with their own problems, such as hangovers. By default, I am a pretty inhibited, straight-laced, rule-follower. If you’re in a similar position, here’s what I’ve learned about taking advantage of anxiety relievers while limiting their side effects.
Alcohol: It feels dishonest not to talk about alcohol first. By far the most socially acceptable, to the point that teetotalling is regarded as weird. Alcohol absolutely does the thing people say it does. I have inhibitions that warn me not to do things because they might look stupid or inconvenience people. My experience is that alcohol makes those inhibitions much quieter. At the right dosage, they’re still present: I won’t humiliate myself or hurt people. But it brings their weight down closer to the average person’s. I also experience mild euphoria, a warm pleasant buzzing sensation.
The down sides are many! So many. Alcohol is really expensive. Alcoholic drinks are calorie-dense and not filling. Alcohol disrupts your sleep. I like its characterization as a “reverse nootropic” that takes effect the next day. I personally have the alcohol intolerance common among East Asians. My face doesn’t flush, but if I have more than two drinks, I’ll get a splitting headache within 20 minutes, definitively ending the evening’s merriment. I understand there are treatments that will address this disorder. I also understand that going over the right dosage, while literally painful for me, is debilitating for most people. When I tell people about my disorder, they sometimes express envy or tell me I’m virtuous somehow. So there are also treatments that will induce this disorder, if you want to enforce a screen-time-like limit to your drinking. I am happy with my current equilibrium.
As the omnipresent default option, alcohol is the yardstick against which anxiety relievers should be measured. ★★★☆☆
Marijuana: Recently legalized decriminalized, I haven’t experimented much with weed, on my psychiatrist’s recommendation. I have done the stereotypical thing of clearing my evening plans, taking gummies, and observing no effect. I have also done the stereotypical thing of taking slightly more gummies and having a wild brush with ego death that I’m glad I experienced once and would not care to repeat ever again. The one time I got the dosage right, I had a pleasant giggly dreamlike experience, but it didn’t feel like I was actually present for it. I’d prefer to have enough clarity to enjoy whatever’s happening. ★★☆☆☆
Photo of a traditional Fijian method of kava preparation. The focus is a large metal urn of light brown liquid on an outdoor rattan floor. A sitting person with brown skin and red pants, face out of frame, mixes a drink vessel above the urn.
Kava: A traditional Polynesian social lubricant, rated about as addictive and safe as caffeine. I sought some out in Hawai’i, only to later learn there are more kava bars in NYC than there are in Honolulu. Under the influence of kava, I experience the same reduced inhibitions as with alcohol, but with more chill undertones. Like everything’s cool and I don’t need to do anything in particular. This is honestly the perfect effect to aid my quest to be a part of the masses, rather than apart from them. It tastes terrible (a friend reported, “Like something my grandma would make me drink”) and numbs my mouth and throat. Unfortunately, kava is easily confusable with kratom, a Southeast Asian stimulant rated about as addictive and safe as heroin. Kratom is illegal in most developed countries, but the US FDA refuses to regulate herbal supplements. So kratom is often on the menu right next to the kava. Not only is it sketchy to invite my friends to this extremely normal bar to try this totally safe drug I like, I have to strongly warn them against the other similar-sounding legal drug that the same place sells. I can’t give kava a perfect rating, because of how much courage and trust is required to set up a chat over kava in the first place. ★★★★☆
Tranquilizers: Xanax, Valium, et al. I don’t know of any OTC drugs in this family, so my experience is limited to the few times I’ve had them prescribed. Under Xanax, I experience everything as fine and cool, even things that would normally be upsetting. Then I have a deep, restorative sleep. Tranquilizers sound like great options in theory, but are limited by their lack of availability in practice. ★★★★☆
Caffeine: Don’t take caffeine to relieve anxiety. It makes it worse. Woe betide any hypothetical person with ADHD and social anxiety who self-medicates the ADHD with caffeine. Would not recommend. ★☆☆☆☆
Meditation: Not an external drug, but belongs on this list. As strange as it sounds, I had traumatic experiences with meditation as a kid. I wasn’t able to even consider meditating until my 30s. I only discovered my preferred method a few years ago, through personal experimentation and reading blogger trip reports. If you’d told me last year that diving deeper into meditation would permanently reduce my anxiety, I would not have believed you. So I don’t expect you to believe me. Just keep it in mind as something you can explore for yourself later. ★★★★★
Psilocybin: My lawyer has advised me not to comment on this drug while outside the state of Oregon.