Auto-organization is one of those concepts that you can find in every aspect of life once you understand it. But what is equally interesting is to see people noticing this phenomenon who have never read this article but found examples of it in seemingly obscure domains. I found an example of a video game reviewer and journalist who saw automatic order at work in video essay posted on YouTube. The subject? How video games use color to convey ideas. He opens by saying:
As you might be able to tell from my sense of dress, I don’t place much importance on color. But I find it interesting that, without an open discussion or meeting on the subject, video games have developed their own colorful language. Isn’t it interesting that in the live gear grinding world, green means rare, purple means rare, and orange means very rare? Why is it always like that? Who decided that? I don’t remember participating in the vote. But this is just scratching the surface. Interface designers have long been able to use certain colors to quickly convey certain concepts to the player without additional explanation needed.
He goes on to list the various colors and what they are often used to convey. Part of what makes this a good example of automatic order can be found in his comments above. These color schemes and policies took place “without any open discussion or meeting on the matter,” without anyone “such as participating in the vote.” That is, the patterns he describes emerged as a result of human action but not of deliberate human design. But there are a few other features of the default order that are shown here.
First, the default order can seem messy and counterintuitive at first. For example, when discussing how video games use the color green, he notes that the meaning of green can be “everywhere.” It is often associated with health and healing in games, but at the same time it can be used oppositely to indicate poison. Sometimes, it can be used to indicate basic damage, sometimes it indicates damage caused by “poison, acid, plant, even wind. As someone with many years of gaming experience, I can think of examples of all of these. And the irony is that despite green being used to signify so many different and contradictory things, I’ve never once been confused about what the sign meant in any particular context. Namely, I never once encountered a green item in the game thinking it would restore health only to find, to my surprise, that it was poison instead. This is because color is one of the few ways ideas are conveyed, and other points in the context of the game make it clear what “green” is supposed to mean in a given situation. However I doubt I can say exactly what these other elements are and where they are used in combination to clearly show what green means in this particular case. I just know it when I see it. The information used is not the type of information that is easily defined and classified by different rules.
Second, once rules and regulations have emerged in this process, adherence to them is important, because common knowledge allows people to reliably know what to expect in their area. When game developers ignore the established order about what colors are rendered, they end up confusing the player. Watching the video mentioned above caused a memory that entered my mind to dig up an old one the story since last years we are discussing an example of that matter. In this case, the problem was the red barrels. In a video game that focuses on shooting, if you see a red barrel, there is a 100% chance that shooting the barrel will cause it to explode, causing massive damage to nearby enemies. (And in video games, the bad guys often play enough to make sure their base of operations is correct it’s full of garbage (with these barrels because…reasons?) The “exploding red barrel” is among the oldest expressions in video games. One game developer tried to break out of that cliché by making their exploding barrels green instead of red:
Representative of Bullet storm the design team, known as Arcade, blogged about the process that went into making the explosive barrels in the game. At first they wanted to go with the green barrels to fight the red ideas. In the heat of the action, however, they found that the players were ignoring the barrels; they saw a green light while running and it didn’t register as “fireworks.” In this case, the team rightly decided that conveying an immediate message was more important than making a style statement.
This is a small but real example of how automatically established conventions, even if they seem illogical, are still important because they help convey important information and guide behavior and set expectations.
Finally, the complete set of rules and concepts that are automatically embedded cannot be fully isolated. This came up in the video towards the end, when it was suggested that people in the comments “talk about any video game color combination I missed.” There are many examples in the comments, and I can think of a few myself. This shows that any attempt to identify rules from an automatic system will always be limited and partial – not the deliberate design of any human mind, it cannot be completely reduced to a system of clear, human-stated rules. mind. This doesn’t make it pointless to try to tease out what those rules are, of course. But we must always remember that no effort will capture all the relevant information.
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