Brain Wars! (and their effect on gamers?)

[Scribble]

I'm not entirely sure what I'm thinking about with thi post, but I figured I'd type a bunch of stuff and either something would come of it, or not. It's not something I've "heavily" researched- Just some thoughts. (Also it's really long... so I apologize in advance...)

So I'm sure most of us (if not all) have heard about how there are really two sides to the human brain, right and left (duh) and that thy not only control the different sides of the body, but they actively have different ways of interpreting things, and thinking of things.

For those that don't:

The left brain is the more "rational" side. It looks for logic and order, is math based, and looks for patterns and "realism" in things.

The right brain is the "emotional" side. It's more aware of fantasy, imagination... Things like religion and philosophy. "Ideas" tend to be more important and understandable to the right brain, as opposed to facts.

We can only really think with one side at a time, and in the modern world, for the majority of the population the left brain is the only side that gets to routinely interact with conciousness. This is a good thing, because we need it to do things ike talk to eachother, process information, not get hit by cars, and not walk down the street babeling "nonsense."

Even acts of creativity need to get funneled through the left brain in order to actually share that creativity with others. (It's kind of like a business man and a hippy working together to get the hippy's "far out man" ideas spread to others.)

The "problem" though is that because of this, the right brain tends to get ignored. It's kind of like the aformentioned Business man and Hippy in a conference about how best to market the far out idea. The business man has all kinds of charts, and always has some rational fact when asked a question, but when they turn to the hippy he just says somthign like "I like circus peanuts!" and eventually they just stop asking his thoughts on the matter at hand. (There are activities that you can do that let the right brain speak, but the left brain almost always wants to quickly step in and shush it.)

Some people have right brains that are a little more active though. The left brain is still the side that interacts with the rest of the world, but it's not as quick to "shush" the right brain. It's a little more open to letting the right brain have some input, or accepting that the right brain has the right idea.

Anyway getting back to gaming!

I kind of wonder how this effects gaming? I personally see two "styles" of gamer, and it makes me wonder if they correlate.

One side seems to interpret the rules as "things one can do in the game world." If the sheet says I can sing, then I can sing. If it doesn't I can't (or at least I'm not very good at it.)

The other side seems to interpret rules as more of a way to decide what happens when they do something in the game world. I've already decided I can sing, so when I DO sing, does it achieve whatever I wanted it to?

Where these two styles meet I think is where the majority of the "heated" debate about game design comes from.

I tend to think people with more of an active "right brain" tend to flock towards the second set. The right brain has already decided "singing is neat!" And doesn't care (or even understand) about a measurement of "how neat" the signing was. It only wants the left side to step in when it needs to... like interacting with the rest of the world.

Now that said I think I know what a lot of people are going to say- The right side is where "creativity" is housed, so if the second set is more of a right brain idea, then he's trying to say the second set it more creative right???? Wrong! I want to stop people there before it starts. I am NOT saying that. I've seen a lot of creative stuff from left brain people and a lot of uncreative stuff from right brainers. I'm just saying there is a difference in how it manifests itself.

The creative type with a very dominant left brain tends to want a creative idea to still have a rational form. I think this is where the idea of versimilitude comes from. The right brain digs the idea of a dragon, and digs it enough to make the whole person dig it, but the left side wants it to stil "make sense" within the context of the game world.

The creative type with a very right side active brain tends not to care as much about it. The rule of cool and all. I think this is where the more abstract ideas in gaming come from. Hit points being a nebulous measurement of "something" rather then a physical measurement of "state of being" tends to be something right brainers just "get." The left brain won't comprehend that because it's not designed to.

(In Star Trek the creatiove person liked the creative concept of ships in deep space interacting, but the left sided person wanted an explanation of WHY the ships always seemed to be oriented the same way when they did interact inside of in various positions. So they came up with an idea of a signal sent between ships that orients them. The right sided people probably didn't even understand that was an issue in the first place.)

Anyway I think I've babeled on enough... Make of it what you will, but I thought it was neat because I think games really ARE effected by left/right brainedness of the designers...

 

[Brain]

Stop trying to pit me against myself! The brain wars don't start for another 511 years!

 

[Umbran]

We can only really think with one side at a time, and in the modern world, for the majority of the population the left brain is the only side that gets to routinely interact with conciousness.

Not a neurologist, but I'm pretty sure that this assertion is just flat incorrect. Somewhere up there with we only use 10% of our brains. Get a good citation, and maybe I'll accept that, but otherwise, color me skeptical.

 

[Scribble]

Not a neurologist, but I'm pretty sure that this assertion is just flat incorrect. Somewhere up there with we only use 10% of our brains. Get a good citation, and maybe I'll accept that, but otherwise, color me skeptical.

Sure I'll do my best. Part of it was me failing to accurately put into words what I meant?

It's along the lines of our left brain is the side that deals with the logical and rational, while the right brain tends to be more subjective and holistic.

Since the majority of things we interact with on a day to day basis involve logical and rational thought, we tend to use our left brain thinking more often.

Although we do show strong "dominance" one way or the other, (right brained vrs left brained) most daily activities are funneled through rational thought. Even typing this message works through the left brain thought process. (Although my right brained nature tends to make me mispell things a lot and sometimes wander off on weird tangents in an attempt to convey my message "whole.")

 

[Umbran]

Since the majority of things we interact with on a day to day basis involve logical and rational thought, we tend to use our left brain thinking more often.

Try this: Go to Science News, Articles and Information | Scientific American (Scientific American's website), and do a search on "decision making". Read some of the articles. You'll find things like this:

When making complex decisions, legitimate factors sometimes mask choices influenced by prejudice—so bias is hard to detect. Recent research untangled some of these complex scenarios revealing that people are willing to sacrifice quite a lot to fulfill their subconscious biases.

Choosing when to schedule a doctor's appointment or whether to fasten your seatbelt might not seem like emotional tasks, but a new study suggests that in fact people use the emotional part of the brain to make rational decisions for themselves. The findings, presented yesterday at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America, lend weight to the notion that the emotional and rational parts of the brain may overlap more than previously thought.

And so on.

I submit that the whole "we only think one way at a time" and "modern folk think mostly rationally" things are highly suspect. It seems to me that we (humans in general) spend a whole lot of effort putting rational casts on fundamentally irrational thoughts.

 

[Scribble]

Umbran- As I said when I first started my post wasn't based on hard research or anything. The whole left brained vrs right brained idea is largely pseudoscience. Or more correctly real science exagerated through psuedoscience.

It's been shown that certain tasks use certain sides of the brain predominantly to be done, (although injruy to the brain can havr the other side "learn" how to do the other stuff.) but it isn't really quite as literal as the "right side / left side" thing suggests. It's an easy way to categorize personality "types" though for the purposes of a random message board post.

And what I was saying wasn't that the right side gets no say at all, that's impossible. It's just that th right side's ideas tend to be funnelled through the left side ideas. So yeah, sometimes we make emotional decisions, but the left side always seeks to give us a rational explanation. The left side comes to the forefront: "I put my seatbelt on to prevent injury in an accident." Rather then the right side "no seatbelt is bad!" (Or an image of yourself splattered on the pavement.)

But realy, I'm more interested in the thoughts on games.

 

[Inyssius]

I submit that the whole "we only think one way at a time" and "modern folk think mostly rationally" things are highly suspect. It seems to me that we (humans in general) spend a whole lot of effort putting rational casts on fundamentally irrational thoughts.

This, yes.

I've also heard that the "left side = all emotional, right side = all logical" thing is something of an exaggeration, but then again I believe I read that in the Dresden Files so I really can't argue.

 

[Umbran]

But realy, I'm more interested in the thoughts on games.

Well, my point is that the whole left/right brained-ness model is a weak and inaccurate one for this purpose.

Now, I think the games certainly the games, and thus the gamers, are affected by the thought processes of the designers. But in this case, I don't think left/right is at all at issue. Focus on particular design goals (explicitly stated or not) are the real big deal we are seeing these days.

4e makes a good example here. I think it is a good enough game, quite playable. But, for my own purposes, I think it would have been a better product if they'd focused a little less on uniformity, for example, and allowed the system and mechanics to have a few more quirks or idiosyncrasies.

I think what you see as a left brain thing is more accurately viewed as a strong focus on what (if we slip into GNS nomenclature) the "game" aspect of the thing.

 

[PrecociousApprentice]

I am not a neurologist, but I have studied the brain as a medical student. There is a relatively small amount of lateralization of different thought processes, but on the whole, we use our whole brain for all thought. Every conscious thought has a lot of different data types that have been synthesized in it, and we get about the same amount from each. The only thing that is lateralized to any degree is the inputs and the outputs. When it comes to processing, we use the whole brain. The left/right brain theory of thought is pretty well bunk.

As for "right brain type people" verses "left brain type people", I would definitely fall into the left brain team, but I definitely like the rule of cool in my gaming. Fantasy doesn't have to be completely logical for me to like it.

I would disagree with the assessment about what Scribble calls "left brain" as gamist though Umbran. A lot of things that are gamist grate on what Scribble seems to be calling "left brain" minds. I think what he is implying is more in the lines of simulationist. His caricature of "left brained" would likely have purely narrativist and purely gamist fantasy. Logical and consistent simulationism would likely be more to the tastes of "left brainers".

EDIT: Sorry Umbran, you said "game" not "gamist". I could totally be misunderstanding you. Sorry. We shall see if I am totally off now.