The room you are about to enter in is pitch black. Before venturing more than a step, you fumble around for a light switch. Searching along the walls, you feel the plastic mold and familiar shape. Raising the switch upwards produces a small, audible click. Yet no light appears. Odd, you think. Perhaps the switch needs to be in the down position. Flicking the switch downwards, a similar but opposite click is heard. Still no light.
A mistake we make socially is believing that the way we interact with the world is the same way we interact with other humans.
The world is completely indifferent to expectations and has no directive from anyone. When we think of the people around us, we cannot hold them to this attitude. People like to say that they aren’t beholden to anyone but themselves. But by virtue of capitalism and due to the nature of family and proximity, it is nearly impossible to live without an expectation from another or without an expectation from ourselves.
When we have an expectation from the world, we rely on our agency to produce the desired result. If I cannot produce light in a dark room, I will find another solution such as a flash light or repairing the light switch. There is very little rational operation outside of this, as thinking or wishing for the room to be different brings no change.
The act of agency, the observable moments when a person applies change or control to their environment, is a form of communication. While earlier I stated that the world is indifferent to expectations and thusly would be indifferent to communication, acts upon the world carried out by agency is what produces change. So the world may not directly communicate to us or facilitate anything on our behalf, but without our influence we would have absolutely no control on outcomes.
This is starkly different from our expectations of humans.
In my analogy above, there is a human and an environment. Our human looks for ways to control or alter his environment and with that desire he extends into action. Change this analogy to there are two humans. One human is attempting to elicit a response from the other human, mostly in the form of illumination or visibility in this analogy. What would we expect from our human to human interaction? Should we expect the same approach as the first example, with human A looking for a light switch to see what human B is up to?
Unfortunately, not. Although there are many situations in which communication or a bit of direction can largely influence social interactions, more often I find that people elect non-feedback, non-confrontation, or to simply to ignore or move on from the situation. My most familiar outcome of this situation is that human A simply sees human B is “off” and human A proceeds to do nothing about human B until unprovoked change occurs.
I say unprovoked change in the same context as our human versus environment example. It would be unrealistic to expect change to occur to an environment, desired change, without correlating directive. Yet this is often the case with human versus human interaction. We believe the other participant in our conversation has the ability to change to our desired outcome without our input, without our agency, without our feedback.
This is partly for two reasons. In densely populated areas, it’s much easier to accept an environment and to move on from person to person we find incompatible, than it is to relocate or change environments we deem incompatible and to accept whatever people are thrown at us.
The second reason is that we innately understand that nature is indifferent to our expectations. This conversely means that we innately understand humans are not indifferent to our expectations. In fact, we can just announce our expectations and do very little else but wait for desired outcomes from others.
There are many metaphorical carrots on sticks that fool us into believing we are interacting with or providing feedback with others. While this analogy is becoming more and more abstract, try to imagine asking a room to illuminate itself or telling it to with rewards in mind. Even if the room has the ability and means to illuminate itself, it will not illuminate itself until there is feedback or interaction. And that failure to be bright is not interpreted personally or antagonistically by us, but rather as part of its nature.
There is a strange assumption that we believe it is in people’s nature to agree, work with, or understand each other innately. This handshake of an expectation only goes smoothly day to day because we’ve set a baseline social model we are all expected to follow. People are supposed to say “How are you?” but we are not supposed to be overbearingly honest. People are inconsiderate in traffic but if they wave and acknowledge the other party, it’s more reasonable. These social constructs are built over time and passed on to one another through day by day interactions, becoming social mores.
Social mores and our ability to disengage instead of confront expectations, is what is deeply different from approach with the world versus our approach with other people.
The most fascinating aspect of the topic of feedback is that I haven’t even reached the topic of the game world, or the nature of great design, which is to provide consistent and accurate feedback to the user. In a future post, I’ll go over designed worlds and how gamifying our world or providing accurate and consistent feedback changes our expectations, attitudes, experiences, and outcomes.
Writing, Design, Poetry 