Colin Ellard - You Are Here

Toy stories, rules, and the flattening of creativity

I’ve been breaking some of my own rules this holiday.  We’ve spent far too little time outside and far too much time sitting within arm’s reach of the holiday treats.  I blame the weather.  Our magnificent four-storm week eventually gave way to a deluge of rain and wind that neutralized any thoughts of snow forts or squirrel tracks.

 Still, indoor play presents no shortage of opportunities to hang out with your kids and to have them teach you a thing or two about what’s wrong with the world.  This Christmas, I bought my son his first Meccano set.  Even though he has a fascination for mechanics and construction sets, at just a few weeks short of five, he’s really far too young for this toy.  I admit shamelessly that I bought it as much for me as I did for him.  Yesterday, we finally tore into the box and spilled a marvelous pile of metal rods, nuts, and bolts onto the deep pile rug.  And then, yes, quickly realized what a bad idea this was and spent the next 15 minutes retrieving the tiny bits from a wooly forest of carpet camouflage.  I was surprised by the visceral nostalgic tug of some of the classic pieces – the red steel pentagons, the beautifully designed wrench – and slightly chagrined by the amount of plastic in the newer sets. 

 Reflexively, I unwrapped the instruction manual, admired the beautifully designed graphic directions for everything from sorting the parts to using the tools, and then set about following the detailed eleven step instruction set for building a very cool helicopter.  As soon as I’d finished counting out the right number of nuts and nylon washers, a wayward Boy Wonder leg kicked my little part collection across the room.  Trying not to register annoyance (we’re here to have fun, after all), I retrieved a handful of nuts from the carpet (amazing how much smaller these things seemed than the last time I’d handled them a few decades ago) and started over again.  I think I’d gotten through the first two steps, carefully measuring bolt size and counting holes to ensure everything would fit together correctly, when I noticed Boy beside me, happily singing a song of his own invention, putting together some kind of strange insectoid creature with randomly chosen parts.  I urged him back to the regularly scheduled program.   “MacLaughlin!  We’re building a helicopter here!  Hand me the wrench!” but to no avail.  He soon finished his metal and plastic bug-eyed monster, handed it to me, and wandered off.  I sat on the carpet by myself, surrounded by parts, instructions, and half-formed helicopter rotors feeling mildly irritated that he wasn’t “growing up” fast enough to play with me properly.

 Slowly (I blame a surfeit of eggnog and candy cane martinis for my lack of wit), I understood how we’d parted ways.  I’m not sure whether Meccano sets have always included these little instruction books, but I’m pretty sure that, as a kid, I never used them.  The whole joy of a construction set is that it presents infinite possibility in a package with almost no rules at all.  Even my father, who used to imagine so many practical uses for Meccano sets that there were often more of the pieces in his toolbox than there were in my toybox, had understood this.  In my house, Meccano held together countertops, fixed plumbing attachments, and held up pictures.  I suppose it was the British version of Canadian duct tape.

 Now, Meccano sets are marketed not by the number of pieces they contain, but by the number of different “things” that can be built with them.  As if, in a child’s hands, that could possibly be a countable set.  Lego sets now seem designed in much the same way.  Along with the fantastic multi-purpose bricks, there are custom molded Harry Potter, Sponge Bob, or Star Wars pieces.  I suspect that these look-alike pieces have much to do with the attraction of kids to the sets, but little to do with how they are used once out of the box.  Like my son, children seem to tap their creative juices to build interesting little gadgets in a freely flowing and constantly regenerating interplay between the materials and the contents of their imaginations.  If it is true that art predates language, then a mound of construction pieces in the hands of an engaged child shows us how that magic might have worked.  A good construction toy, with its pre-formed sizes, shapes, and connections, gives a few basic affordances to the child, like an artist’s palette of colours, but it doesn’t burden him with too many rules.  The instruction booklets are for adults.  The goofy commercial tie-ins may draw the eye, but they are quickly cast aside as one-dimensional and useless.

 At this time of year, we often find ourselves looking back at the past, assessing our records while at the same time leaning forward into the future, trying to guess what will happen next.  This year, for many of us, neither of these seasonal activities may be comfortable.  Our collective pasts are riddled with tragic errors and, as a result, our futures are uncertain, perhaps even bleak.  It wouldn’t surprise me if it turns out that finding the way forward will require that a few of those old instruction booklets get tossed.  The world is far more complicated than a Meccano set or a Lego toy, but in a child’s hands this means freedoms gained and not lost.  Why not for the grown-ups too?

I'm game for anything

I'm sure these brain-wave reading headsets will turn out to be a crude early version of what will be available in two or three years, but I'm nothing if not an early adopter,so I've just ordered one of the first of such devices to come to market.  The OCZ "neural impulse activator" -- a bit of a cheezy title for the product to be sure -- promises to allow me to find ways to manipulate my computer using my thoughts.  All this for a couple of hundred bucks -- how could I refuse?  I suspect that what's really happening here is a little self-training to control combinations of brow-furrowing and eye-popping, but cheap methods of measuring bio-signals have come along by leaps and bounds in recent years, so one never knows what little surprises might be in store for me.

Other than the joy of gaming, I've been thinking a lot about the role of a computer interface in mediating our connections with cyberspace.  In our lab, we think this is pretty important.  That's why, when we place people into virtual environments simulating big houses, we lug a big van load full of delicate gear from our lab space to a large gym -- so that rather than using a mouse or a joystick to move around a space, people can just walk naturally.

I don't know how far this OCZ device will take me -- I'm keeping my expectations on the low side -- but imagine being able to generate an immersive virtual environment and then being able to wander through it just by wanting to, but separating the intention from the action itself, or at least much of it.  Even if it begins to feel as though you're controlling your place with your thoughts, how is that going to affect your understanding of where you are?

And now back to my day job.  Wait!  This is my day job!

Wayfinding games

I had an email today from a clever young student asking me if I knew about the impending release of this parkour inspired game.  My answer, happily, was "yes" because I follow the Space and Culture blog (where I must once again applaud the noticeable uptick in great content on this site -- thoroughly recommended for those with an interest in, well space, culture, planning and design).  But it made me reflect again on how the times are full of playful interest in space both physical and virtual.  Not only will Mirror's Edge be a hit but so is Portal, a game in which it's possible to warp one's way through walls and floors by throwing down self-made openings between spaces, defying both Euclid and Newton.

The other side of the spatial divide, where we use technological aids like GPS to help us use real space in a playful way is also full of promise.  I like this idea, for example.  I suspect there is no end of clever ways to use this kind of gear both to help us reflect playfully and creatively on what space means to us, but perhaps also to get us off our bums and into the thick of the real stuff.  Time to buy a new computer.  And a new pair of running shoes.

Are men wired for space?

There's an interesting study of gender differences in computer game play that is about to hit print and has already been summarized in the press.  The study, by a group of researchers at Stanford led by Allan Reiss, shows differences in behaviour between men and women on a game in which the objective was to capture territory by pointing and clicking on balls on a computer screen.  The more balls were clicked, and the closer the clicked balls were to a wall, the harder the player could push back the wall to capture more space.  Both men and women learned how to play the game, but men outperformed women on the task.  Not only this, but the pattern of brain activation was different in men and women, with some of the same areas that are involved in other kinds of reward (such as drug reward) lighting up more strongly in men than in women.

The authors speculate about a link with the known male territorial imperative.  In many (but far from all) animals, males explore, occupy, and defend larger amounts of space than females do.  The main reason for this has to do with patterns of mating.  For lots of animals, control of territory converts to control of resources needed to attract mates.  It's interesting to speculate about a mechanism that drives men to command space that is so deeply rooted that it can turn on the same ancient brain circuits that drive us to seek out crack cocaine, but it's too soon to know how critical the territorial component of the video game was to the outcome.  One would need to test people using other kinds of games--experiments that it sounds as though this group intends to pursue.

Nevertheless, the study sent my mind to some interesting places.  Modern warfare, as perhaps most clearly laid out by the French philosopher Paul Virilio, is as much about occupying by looking as it is about occupying by being on the ground.  If I have a satellite that can look down on a piece of the ground from a position high above the planet and trigger a cruise missile attack when it sees something it doesn't like, then the surveillance itself, the potential for action, works just as well as columns of soldiers marching on the ground.  It's more than interesting -- damned scary in fact -- to imagine men sitting at screens, watching displays of coloured pixels that represent buildings, villages, and lives, limbic systems pumping away as surely as if they were doing lines of coke on their dashboards filled with shiny buttons.  These are video games at the highest and most deadly level.

Wayfinding and broccoli

No matter how old (or young) you are, wayfinding can be a challenge, especially when you have other things on your mind.  Here's a transcript to illustrate:

My 3 year old son, we'll call him Boy Wonder (as he climbs aboard his trike):  Bye mom!  I'm going to the grocery store
Mom:  What are you going to buy?
BW: Broccoli and jelly beans! (BW does a few laps of the driveway and then returns with a worried frown.)
BW:  Darn!
Mom: What's wrong?
BW: I forgot the broccoli.

Math games

                    

Late for school, but not really very concerned about that, as long as we were there to drink each other's company without too many distractions, my daughter and I stood at a busy corner , counting cars, waiting to cross.  She has had some rough tumbles with her math textbook lately.  I saw a teachable moment.

"Hey, kiddo, how many of these cars have just one person in them?"
"All of them do, Dad."
"How many people can fit into one car?"
"At least four."
"So, if these people got together and shared rides, how many fewer cars would we have just counted, and how much easier would it be for us to get across the road?"

I'm brilliant.  Brilliant!  Eco-mathematics.  Quantitative urban planning for grade 4 math.

My daughter tilted her head up at me with a crooked smile. She fixed me with dark pools of eyes, little dimples of amusement forming.

"Dad.  I know what you're trying to do.  But we're studying 'area' in math.  Not cars."
"Oh, ok.  So how big is your room?  How many meters across?"
"About as big as this road.  20 meters."
"Really?  How tall am I?"
"10 meters."

The traffic cleared.  We crossed the road.  I had to duck underneath the telephone wires.