Making Mystery part 2

Eating Cake

Dirty dishes don't really bother me. But when I see a plate covered in crumbs, I get rather upset. Someone bought cake and I didn't get to eat it.

Knowledge is a lot like food. An idea can give you energy and help you grow as a person. Just as there's more food than you could possibly eat. Not just in terms of variety but also capacity. Your brain and stomach have a limit. It takes a scientist to build rockets, just as it takes more than the average bear to be a hot dog eating champion.

If you'll pardon me for mixing metaphors, there's more to the analogy: if food is like knowledge, learning is like eating. If you want to eat the cake your first step is to find it.

Where is the Cake?

The first part of learning is Perception - the act of gathering information. You need to get the cake before you can stuff it down your face, just as you cannot learn something if you can't see it.

The primary way that we gather information is through our senses - Sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell.

Look for the Cake

Sight is our primary sense. Most technology revolves around sight - Reading and writing, Television, and computers all use sight. Games are they same way: You see the Goomba touch Mario and then you see him die. If you were reading a text message when the Goomba touches Mario you would have no idea why you died.

I have a problem with learning new fighting games because I have to focus on the controller instead of on the screen. Quarter Circles and Shoryukens are not built into my muscle memory.

There’s this fun thing with fighting games and sight - You don’t actually see the game. The hit box on Ryu’s sweep could be shorter or longer than his actual foot. The health bar is just a representation of damage. You don’t know if you've done 850k or 870k damage to Sentinel, you only see that he has a little bit of life left.

Obfuscation is a problem with video games in general. Video games are a black box. The player never actually sees the game. What information a game shows is incredibly important.

Hear of the Cake

Sound! The best of all the senses, mostly because of music. The mood and feel of a game is shown with music. It resonates with your emotions and adds to them. You can hear the speed of Sonic and the intensity of Master Chief. If you are playing a horror game, hit the mute button. Zombies turn from frightening to comical.

Sound effects reinforce sight with a redundancy. You see Mario jump and you hear the ‘Boing’ sound. Sight and sound work together. Without this redundancy there can be confusion and frustration. Walking across the street is a good example. If you pressed the walk button, but you don’t know if the machine registered your input. I press it about 10 times to make sure. Cross walks could use a ’Boing’ sound effect.

Grab the Cake

We also perceive information through touch. Tag is a game based on touch. You know you’re it when you feel the it person touch you. Many children’s game use touch. Gooey Louie, Jenga, or Touch Football.

In Chess, you see the pieces and the board, but you don’t have to. If you close your eyes you can Perceive the game through touch. By feeling what piece is where, you could form a mental image of the board.

A side note: If someone is born blind their brain doesn’t have the faculty for sight. The neurons have been rewired for other uses. A doctor can’t cure those born blind by repairing the eyes. They must also teach the brain to see. (I‘d link this awesome video but I can‘t find it gah!)

Smell and Taste the Cake

Taste and smell are rarely used to show information in games. I use smell when looking for a smash brothers tournament. I know I’m in the right spot by the stench. Wine Tasting is a kind of a game which uses flavor. A player uses their tongue to determine how woody or fruity a wine is.

To lead into the next section: here's a little puzzle.

The Wizard's Cake

You want to be a wizard. So you start searching craigslist for wizarding schools. Scrolling down the list you see that all of them have very difficult entrance exams with side effects of death or mutation. Continuing down the list you find a school less violent requirements. It reads - "able to eat cake." Considering that you're an award-winning cake eater, getting in should be easy. You could even get scholarships! To apply you only need to click on the "Apply now!" button.

Click. A mini-wizard jumps out of your screen and casts a spell on you. He informs you that the spell he cast was a Cake-numbing incantation. For the next 48 hours you cannot see, smell, touch, taste, or hear cake. If anyone tells you about cake you will hear them talking about something else. If you read about cake you will see it as something else entirely. If you can find and eat cake in the 48 hours the spell will instantly wear off in a dazzling array and you will be accepted into wizarding school. He jumps back into the screen and wishes you the best of luck.

How would you find the cake? How would you begin to eat it? Is it even possible?The short answer is yes. The long answer is in Making Mystery part 3.

...to be continued in Making Mystery part 3: Eating the Invisible Cake