Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

Every Psychology 101 course will spend a week or two on the principles of learning. The larger question being addressed is: How can a person’s thoughts or behaviors be changed in an enduring way? In discussing how this question has been studied by psychologists, the lesson invariably starts with the example of Pavlov’s famous drooling dogs and ends with B. F. Skinner and his quirky pigeons. How quirky were they, you ask? Skinner successfully trained his birds to play ping-pong, and even secured military funding to see if he could train them to act as bomb guidance systems. Project Pigeon, as it was called, actually worked, to an extent. True story.

Students don’t have much trouble with the drooling dogs and bombardiering birds. Nor do they have much difficulty mastering the concepts of positive reinforcement, in which you are given something desirable (food, money, etc) to reinforce a target behavior, and punishment, in which you experience something unpleasant whenever you perform an undesired behavior. Confusion doesn’t set in until negative reinforcement is brought up. Negative reinforcement, just like positive reinforcement, increases the likelihood that a target behavior will occur (in contrast, punishment decreases the likelihood of a behavior occurring, and isn’t very good at creating long-term behavior change). The difference is that while positive reinforcement introduces something pleasant to reinforce behavior, negative reinforcement works by removing something unpleasant. It’s a tricky concept to teach because it’s difficult to think of examples in which you’re removing something unpleasant without also introducing something pleasant. As it happens, I’m living just such an example right now.

I am not a morning person. I never have been, and I probably never will be. I am not one for whom the dawn is its own reward. It takes a supreme effort and an elaborate system of alarms to wrench myself out of bed every morning. During holidays my circadian rhythms inevitably slide toward the nocturnal. I eventually find myself falling asleep at 4:00AM and waking up at the crack of noon. Nevertheless, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve overslept for an early appointment. If I absolutely have to be somewhere at 7:00AM, I’ll be there. It’s just how I was raised.

For the past two weeks I’ve been arriving at the lab by 7:30AM. Initially I did this because I had to; a subject in an experiment I’m running could only come in at 8:00AM. But the subject in question finished up last week, and now I’m coming in early by choice. You may be wondering how I’ve managed to sustain such a miraculous change in my behavior, and believe me, “miraculous” is definitely the word here.

It has everything to do with the B Line. Anyone who lives in Boston knows what I’m talking about. The B Line is by far the slowest, most crowded, and least reliable subway line in the city. That it serves the most densely residential sections of the city but runs the fewest trains is a topic for another day. The end result is that rush hour on the B Line is a nightmare. Moreover, the B Line remains crowded for huge swathes of the day, even as the ridership on other branches of the Green Line thins to almost nothing. The thought of having to stuff myself into a B Line car for what is, all things considered, a short commute fills me with dread.

It turns out that if I can get myself onto the train by, say, 7:00AM, all of these problems go away. The trains haven’t had the chance to get backed up, seating is plentiful, and the ride is quantifiably faster. The whole experience is far less aversive, so much so that I’m actually willing to push against twenty-seven years of night owl habits to change my behavior. Negative reinforcement in action, ladies and gentlemen.

There are positive reinforcers as well, of course. There are more hours in my day and I’m more productive (the only other time in my life where I managed to maintain this schedule also happens to be the time I wrote daily). Since I’m in so early, I don’t feel bad about dodging the evening rush hour by leaving at 4:00. The positive reinforcers are obvious, but it’s the negative reinforcement of avoiding a horrible commute that gets me up in the morning. Skinner tends to get a bad rap these days, but there’s no denying that the man was on to something.

In my program I study something called psychophysics. It’s a cool-sounding if somewhat baffling term, and for me used to conjure images of the criminally insane on see-saws and rocket ships. Psycho physics, get it? I’m extremely funny. In reality, we call it psychophysics because we are interested in investigating the relationship between the physical properties of a stimulus and the psychological percept those properties create. Psychophysical investigations have helped us design interfaces, learn about the effects of aging, and—I’m not making this up—determine the absolute brightness thresholds of pigeons (which is actually very impressive, given that pigeons are very stupid, can’t talk about their experiences, and certainly have no idea what it is you want them to do).

Psychophysical experiments typically require a small, simple set of responses from participants. Yes/No, First/Second, Left/Right, Brighter/Darker, Pigeon Pecking/Pigeon Not Pecking, that kind of thing. So I’ve always thought it a bit strange that we (meaning my lab) record responses from a full Apple keyboard. If the subject only needs three keys to participate in the experiment, why present him with 109?

About a year ago, I volunteered to participate in an experiment at a lab where they specialize in eye tracking research. I could detail the hellish setup they employed to stabilize participants’ heads—which involved an eye patch, plastic rods, and dental impressions—but I won’t. I think it’s more fun to let you imagine how those three items fit together. Anyway, there I am, feeling like a pirate about to be fitted for braces, when into my hands is thrust a Playstation 2 controller. “What a brilliant idea,” I thought, trying not to drool into my lap.

I’d put the whole experience out of mind until the Mimeo thing got me thinking about video games and controllers. Should I purchase a USB gamepad for use in my experiment rooms? Something like this or this, perhaps? The ergonomic advantages are pretty clear. When you’re trying to confine yourself to a chin rest it’d be a lot easier to hold something in your hand, rather than peck awkwardly at the bottom of the numeric keypad. The reduced set of buttons might even reduce subject errors. Such advantages are well worth considering.

In my search for a good, simple USB controller, it became clear that they come in all shapes and sizes. Some are even made to mimic the peripherals of our youth, and the nostalgia is almost powerful enough to overcome the litany of reviews detailing these products’ shoddy workmanship, unreliable responses, and generally short lifespans (still, this slightly more expensive model looks more promising, and more faithful to the original hardware). The mere sight of those four purple buttons—the exact shape, size, and color of Smarties, I have always believed—is enough to set my brain on edge and fill me with vivid memories of Mortal Kombat and Super Mario Kart. Hours upon hours of them. I can almost feel my fingers reaching out to hit the SNES’s spring-loaded reset button before my Arwing explodes for the millionth time.

As my search for gamepads inevitably branched into unrelated areas (oh, internet), I was surprised to learn that you can actually get a workable NES or SNES on eBay for far less money than you might think. Then again, I think these things are priceless, and it’s downright shocking to see my childhood on sale for $65.82. You’d think that these venerable gaming systems, particularly something as old as the NES, would have begun to appreciate in value. Or at least I would think that. Perhaps normal people do not. In any case, even if I ponied up the piddling amount of cash necessary to buy a SNES, where would I put it? Is it really worth having the thing around? I’m still undecided. Am I genuinely interested in buying such a system, or just eager to distract myself from work? It’s hard for me to disambiguate the signal from the noise on this one.

Maybe I should collect some more data. With a gamepad.

I thought I’d start this one by pointing you at Mimeo and the Kleptopus King. Mimeo is being developed by Shaun Inman, in whose person you will find the unholy merger of a skilled programmer and virtuoso designer. That combination has resulted in some truly remarkable work, and I can’t wait to see what he might produce in the context of a video game. Mimeo triggered all sorts of odd thoughts in my head, one of which I’ll talk about tomorrow, and one of which I’ll talk about now.

I’d like to take a moment to formally define something I’m going to call Year Twelve. This is the year of your life when everything seemed exciting and wonderful, a time full of seemingly endless enjoyments with little to no interference from the hassles and complications of the adult world. This is almost always the year when you, personally, were twelve. Pixels were the language of my childhood. They take me back to a time when everything was simpler, newer, and more fun. In other words, Year Twelve. As such, the sight of 8-bit or 16-bit graphics can provoke one of two powerful reactions in me: absolute joy or utter disdain.

It all comes down to how the pixel aesthetic is being used. Is this game being retro for retro’s sake? If so, I have a problem with it. If pixelated graphics are being used solely to maximize cuteness, that’s a waste. If they’re being used to hide the game designer’s lack of artistic skill, that’s dishonest. In both cases the underlying problem is laziness. Can’t be bothered to come up with some decent art direction? Here, let me take a cheap shot at your childhood and hope it hits home.

What many people forget when they see a retro game is that those pixelated graphics were products of their time. Memory and screen resolution were limited. Look at The Legend of Zelda. An enormous section of the screen is given over to graphical elements that don’t move, cleverly (and necessarily) reducing the game’s demands on the NES’s limited hardware. This sort of context is essential to understanding why the sprite-based games of the 80s and early 90s look and, more importantly, behave as they do.

Why did I like Mega Man 9 so much? It wasn’t just the cutesy, blocky graphics harkening back to Year Twelve. The game’s designers had gone out of their way to flawlessly replicate the unforgiving precision required to play the game. That’s what so many people miss about sprite-based games; the best ones were marked by precision in all things, from the meticulously crafted graphics to the demands made of the player. In Mega Man 9, you play this section exactly right or you die (although why you’d forego use of the Jewel Shield here is beyond me). Along the same lines, players always have a certain amount of control over Mario’s jump when in the air. Games that did not allow for a similar level of precise control feel loose and frustrating in comparison.

In his introduction to the Mimeo project, Inman writes:

A single pixel out of place, one too few or too many, ruins the illusion. There’s an unmuddied, economy of expression, the thankless result of the limitations of cartridge-based consoles.

At its core, play, and by extension video games, is learning. Call it discovery or mastery but a good game introduces new ideas (teaches), leverages existing ones (reviews) and layers them to create unique challenges (tests). Teaching, at its core, is communicating. Verbosity is an academic sleeping pill. A game’s graphics are the player’s teacher and a good teacher is consistent, clear, and concise. Like good pixel art.

Clearly, Inman gets it. I’m on the edge of my seat for Mimeo and the Kleptopus King. My only regret is that since Mimeo is being developed for the iPhone, I won’t have a plastic controller in my hands when I play it.

In last week’s episode of Family Guy, Chris tries to date Ellen, a girl with Down Syndrome. During their first date, Chris, struggling to make conversation, asks her what her parents do for work. “My dad’s an accountant, and my mom is the former governor of Alaska,” she says. The one-liner didn’t sit well with the inferred governor, who used Facebook, that venue of all truly serious discourse, to say that it “felt like another kick to the gut.”

I’ve watched the episode in question, and I’m left wondering what made Sarah Palin’s gut feel so cruelly kicked. That a person with Down Syndrome is portrayed as worthy of teenage affection and desire? That Ellen is capable of living a life as normal as any other teen? How does that constitute a kick to the gut, exactly? The Palins (Bristol Palin has also made some public comments about the episode) seem dead set on interpreting the entire episode as an attack not just on persons with Down Syndrome, but on Trig Palin, specifically. Frankly I think it’s a stretch to see the episode as offensive to the disabled community (the jokes are remarkably tame by Family Guy’s notorious standards), and outright ludicrous to conclude that the show’s writers set out to mock a specific infant.

But this is America, by gum, and just as Seth MacFarlane has the right to express his nonsense in public, so do the Palin family. In her comments on the episode Bristol said, “People with special needs face challenges that many of us will never confront, and yet they are some of the kindest and most loving people you’ll ever meet,” which is one of the most ignorant things someone could possibly say about persons with disabilities. Disability is not a virtue in itself. Having a disability does not automatically make someone a better person. Bristol’s comment is particularly ironic since the entire purpose of the Chris/Ellen story was to make exactly this point. Chris ends up dumping Ellen after their first date because she is a demanding, overbearing, terrible person, disability or not.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t also point out that in her capacity as a Fox News pundit Palin asked, “When are we going to be willing to say, you know, some things just aren’t really funny?” Probably around the time that Glenn Beck gets pulled off your network for calling the sitting President a racist, which is to say, never. Of course, the Family Guy joke in question wasn’t really about Trig, it was more of a small jab at his mother. This isn’t really about Palin’s motherly outrage so much as it is about her penchant for victimhood and her inability to accept any comment that even mildly conflicts with her personal narrative of Conservative Sainthood, Unsmartened Wisdom, and American Greatness.

I’ll leave the rest to Andrea Fay Friedman, the actress who voiced Ellen and who herself has Down Syndrome. In response to Palin’s comments she wrote, “I guess former Governor Palin does not have a sense of humor. I thought the line ‘I am the daughter of the former governor of Alaska’ was very funny. I think the word is ’sarcasm’. In my family we think laughing is good. My parents raised me to have a sense of humor and to live a normal life. My mother did not carry me around under her arm like a loaf of French bread the way former Governor Palin carries her son Trig around looking for sympathy and votes.”

Imagine that it’s 1939 and your country is about to enter World War II. Further imagine that you work for your country’s propaganda department, and you have been charged with designing a series of posters with the goal of calming the public in the event of mounting catastrophe. Also, you are British. Immersed in such a situation and thrown a dash of inspiration, you might—I say again, might—come up with something half as brilliant as what was actually designed for this purpose: “Keep Calm and Carry On“.

“Keep Calm” was the final poster in a series of three commissioned by the Ministry of Information. It was intended to be used only if Britain was invaded by the Germans. I mean, really, how stiff upper lip can you get? There you are knee-deep in Nazis and the King’s message to you is simply, “Keep calm and carry on.” Of course, Britain was never invaded and this third poster never saw the light of day (though one supposes that this might have been an ideal message during the Blitz). The poster was forgotten by history until 2000, when an errant copy turned up at Barter Books of Northumberland.

The bold color, stark typography, minimalistic Crown symbol, and wonderfully succinct slogan combined to create something that was both emblematic of the era and perfectly British, all in little more than five words. Suddenly I remembered that the Southerner’s birthday had just passed (don’t look at me like that, he’s not big on presents) and that he has an affection for all things Royal. It became clear that I had no choice but to buy him a copy for his own especial privilege and certain knowledge.¹

Here’s where things get tricky. Crown Copyright on “Keep Calm and Carry On” expired more than twenty years ago. Combined with the poster’s simple design and immense popularity,² this means that there are a lot of knock-offs floating around the internet. All of them feature the Crown, but only some of them use an accurate font. Since the poster is almost all text, the accuracy of the typeface is critical. Barter Books claims to have the original poster. I have no reason to disbelieve them, but some of their merchandise uses a font that is obviously different from the original’s (note the way the letter “C” terminates, as well as differences in the “M”). The match is close, but not close enough, which is deeply confusing. KeepCalmAndCarryOn.com (even more rhyming than the original!) seems to employ the same near-miss typeface, except on the book (weird, right?). Don’t even get me started on the cheap and highly inaccurate reproductions available on Amazon, which appear to use Adobe’s Myriad Pro. While Myriad has the benefit of being free, it looks nothing like the original 1939 typography (particularly noticeable on the letters “K”, “C”, and “M”).

So, Mr. Amateur Typographer, you might be thinking, what’s the correct typeface, then? The answer, I think, is that it doesn’t exist. Given the way that posters were produced in 1939 and the limited set of letters that “Keep Calm” employs, it’s more likely that the text was drawn by hand specifically for the job. This means that the only accurate type sample is on the original poster itself. I found one vender on eBay who had gorgeous, accurate prints for sale, but because I live in a disreputable neighborhood the print went missing somewhere between the confirmed delivery and my arriving home. Luckily enough, Wikipedia’s version of the poster appears to be a direct copy of the original, and even better, it’s in SVG format. This means that provided you have a suitable vector graphics application and a decent print shop, you can make your own crisp, typographically accurate copy in any color or size you like. As it happens, I have both, so today I’ll be able to present the Southerner with his long-overdue birthday gift. 24×36 inches big, violently red, and defiantly British.

1. For why that sentence is funny, please see Paragraph VI of the Charter of Maryland, 1632. ∧
2. Some people believe that “Keep Calm and Carry On” is too popular, as this thread on Apartment Therapy indicates. One commenter goes so far as to write, “I couldn’t stand to have my Keep Calm print at home anymore, it seems like such a cliche.” This is, of course, idiotic. Great design lasts forever (or nearly so), and remains great despite its ubiquity. Trashing your print of “Keep Calm” just because it’s popular is like buying a Zune just to spite the iPod. ∧