Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

“We live in hard times, not end times.” –Jon Stewart, October 30th, 2010

Those are words to live by, folks, especially the day after the midterm election. As I process my disappointment with Tuesday’s results, my spirits are bolstered by the still-fresh memories of Saturday’s Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, which I attended in person, in the heart of Washington. “Do we actually want to do this?” I asked the Southerner, a few months ago. “Book a flight and do it for real?”

“Yes,” said the Southerner. Within minutes, he engaged the roughly 90 percent of his brain that is dedicated to the transit systems of these United States and secured us remarkably cheap travel arrangements for an insane twenty-four hour itinerary in DC. I won’t bore you with a post about the grandeur of the Capital, the beauty of the White House by night, the joy of catching up with friends, or all the details of the Rally itself. Suffice to say that it was a pleasure to be among the 200,000 people gathered on the National Mall for what turned out to be a hilarious, inspiring three hours. Highlights included a benediction courtesy of Father Guido Sarducci, Sam Waterston’s reading of The Greatest Poem Ever Written, and most importantly, Jon Stewart’s Moment of Sincerity. If you watch one online video this year—or for the rest of your life, for that matter—let it be that one. Being there in person for that moment was, I believe, a once in a lifetime experience.

As we boarded the Saturday evening Amtrak back to Boston I was too tired to think much about the whys and wherefores of the trip. In fact, I was too tired to read, sign a check at dinner, or drink through a straw. Sleep deprivation can do incredible things to you. But now my mind is clear, and it’s time to put into words why I felt it necessary to push myself beyond exhaustion for the sake of three hours on the National Mall.

I’ve been watching The Daily Show every day for years, rarely, if ever, missing an episode. My roommates know that Monday through Thursday at 11:00PM is Jon Time. If I have a religion, Stewart and Colbert are my high priests. I had been watching the show off and on since 1996, before Stewart was the host, before the show even had a studio audience, and the only laughter on set was the sound of the show’s producers. I liked The Daily Show well enough, especially after Stewart brought his sharp intellect to the show, but I wasn’t yet the sort of fan who would travel to DC for a rally.

As it happens, I can tell you the exact moment of my conversion: October 16th, 2001. I had just started my freshman year at college, and America had just been attacked. I was on my own for the first time in my life in a strange city, and less than a week into this new stage of life, the entire world changed. The towers were brought crashing down, and with them, any notion that I lived in a safe society. Then came the letters laced with anthrax. This during an autumn in which everyone, everyone had a cold or a cough. I felt rootless, uncertain, and yes, frightened. It’s not that I wasn’t enjoying myself in college, or that I wasn’t able to get on with my life, but a dark cloud seemed to hang over everything. I couldn’t shake the feeling that another disaster was right around the corner.

I was in my dorm room watching a recently-posted clip of The Daily Show (this was pre-Youtube, and Comedy Central didn’t see much point in posting entire episodes then). Jon Stewart opened another of his “America Freaks Out” segments with a smile and said, “Alright. Think of a number between one and ten but don’t tell me.” He held his fingers to his head, pausing for effect. Opening his eyes, he looked into the camera and said, “Is it anthrax?”

And just like that, the clouds parted. For the first time in what felt like years, I laughed. Really, really laughed, not just at the joke, but at myself. With a single punchline, Stewart had shown me the heart of my anxiety, and how crazy it was. Could another attack happen? Could terrorists rain poison from the sky and kill us all? Sure. But it’s ridiculous to let the possibility fill every second thought in my head.

Jon Stewart restored my sanity that day, and The Daily Show has been mandatory viewing ever since. That is the reason I went to the rally, and the reason that the Moment of Sincerity resonated so strongly with me. I can only hope that we take that message to heart. When we are besieged by racists, extremists, demagogues, and a media that values drama over reason, when all seems hopeless and it looks like poison is going to rain from the sky any minute now, we must take a moment to reclaim our sanity. We must remember that we live in hard times, not end times.

I’m taking a class about professional issues in psychological science, in other words, a class in how to be a real scientist. Giving talks is as much a part of the professional life of a scientist as running a lab and applying for grants, so yesterday was talk day. The goal was to give a talk about your research lasting no more than ten minutes, and I hit it on the dot. The talk was generally well-received, which was gratifying, as it will likely evolve into my eventual dissertation defense. Then the professor spoke. “Really great job,” she said, “but, Jon, why should I care about this topic?”

Ah yes. That. I knew I had forgotten something. To be fair, I’m not likely to give this talk to audiences who are utterly unfamiliar with the topic in question, which in this case is something called perceptual learning. But I’m hedging here. I can play devil’s advocate with myself until the sun implodes, but really, I should have just found an extra thirty seconds to explain why my field matters. Good scientists explain their work clearly and concisely. Great scientists—your Carl Sagans, Oliver Sackses, Steven Pinkers, and Albert Einsteins—make the point of their work so obvious and accessible that anyone can understand it.

To the above list of Great Scientific Communicators we should certainly add Dr. Jean Berko Gleason. Dr. Gleason is one of the world’s preeminent psycholinguists, and if you don’t know what a psycholinguist is, I’ll let her explain. All those clips are wonderful (and yes, she is exactly like that in person), particularly for how clearly she explains herself. Multiple branches of nuanced research laid out—zip, boom, bonjour—in half a minute. After watching those clips no one is left wondering why psycholinguistics is an important field. We all understand why Dr. Gleason has allowed psycholinguistics to fill her life, and how it’s relevant in our own.

So what about my field? What’s perceptual learning?

Perceptual learning is a process by which we get better at perceiving things over time. We’re not interested in changes in strategy or decision making (usually), rather, true perceptual learning means that you are literally getting better at seeing. With practice, you can become more sensitive to contrast, motion, or a thousand other things. Take my dentist, for example. Since I’m a graduate student with a bargain basement dental plan, my dental work is performed by fourth and fifth year students at my university’s dental school. Before the end of every visit, a supervising dentist double-checks the student’s work. During one recent checkup, my student dentist told his supervisor that he hadn’t found any cavities in my mouth. The supervisor took one of her tiny metal hooks in hand and glanced it over my molar for what could not have been more than a second. “There’s some decay there. We’ll need to schedule a follow-up to treat it.” She, the experienced dentist, had seen plainly what the less experienced student could not, because her extensive training had made her more sensitive to the tiny precursor of a cavity on my tooth.

It’s not just dentists, of course. Radiologists have to hunt through murky x-rays to find fractured bones and dangerous tumors. Baggage screeners need to be able to spot a knife amongst shampoo and sweaters. Jewelers peer inside diamonds, looking for perfection. Perceptual learning makes the difference between an amateur and an expert.

Perceptual learning is important because it demonstrates that experience and practice can create dramatic change in the brain. If you have a stroke, can we help you recover? Yes. As the developed world grows older on average, what can we do to protect the brain from the ravages of age? Back in ’86, two researchers showed that you could turn an eighty year old into a twenty year old, given enough practice. We spend increasingly large amounts of time playing video games. Some decry this as a waste of time, a habit fated to create a nation of ADHD-addled zombies. But the science says video games improve our visual capacities. Hell, what are you doing right now? How did you get so good at reading? How are you able to process letters, words, and whole sentences with such blinding speed? In part, reading is a product of perceptual learning.

Over the summer, I participated in a colleague’s experiment, one that involved what’s called a texture discrimination task. Imagine a grid of horizontally dashed lines. Somewhere in the grid, off in your peripheral vision, three of the dashed lines have been turned into diagonal slashes. Sometimes the slashes are arranged vertically in the grid, and sometimes horizontally. The whole stimulus is displayed for a fraction of a second, and your job is to say whether the slashes were vertical or horizontal. On the first day of the experiment, the task was impossible. My performance was so poor that I might as well have had my eyes closed. It was the same story on the second day. After three weeks of training, however, my performance bordered on perfect. The exciting thing, the amazing thing, was that I could feel my perception changing over time. What had once been impossible became trivially easy. The slashes, once as jumbled and fleeting as a snowflake in a blizzard, now jumped out at me as clearly as a snowball in summer.

As scientists we can argue at length about why and how my perception changed. Was it a low-level change in highly specific sets of neurons, or was it a broader change in the way I allocate attention? Will this transfer to other tasks, and what does that mean? Was I detecting the slashes, or filtering out the horizontal lines? It’s easy to get bogged down in the methodology and specifics, and lose sight (har har) of the big picture. Whatever the reasons, there is no doubt in my mind that my perception changed over those three weeks, simply as a result of diligent practice. That’s an amazing thing, a powerful thing. That’s why I do what I do.

There’s a new beta of Internet Explorer 9 out, and I actually like it. Did I just praise a Microsoft product? Stop, wait, it gets weirder. Internet Explorer 9 has features that I wish were in my current browser (Chrome). You need only look at the screenshot to see why. Note the uncharacteristic minimalism; no logos, no extra toolbars, no attempt to make the web browser more prominent than the web. It’s a stunning reversal from a company that once tried to confuse users into believing that the entire internet was just an extension of Windows. The addition of pinned shortcuts allows IE9 to treat individual websites as separate applications, a brave step that establishes the browser as nothing more than a display interface for other companies’ software. Again, I can’t believe Microsoft made this thing.

The new user interface seems to borrow the best of Chrome and Firefox. Search and address entry have been unified into a single field, and tab management now happens alongside the address field. Looking at my own address bar, I can’t help but notice what seems like a mile of empty, wasted space. There’s more than enough unused horizontal space to accommodate the five tabs I’ve got open right now, and I wish there was a way for me to rearrange the interface. IE9 also sports an enlarged Back button, ala Firefox. Aesthetically I like it, but I’m starting to question whether Back deserves such prominence in the browser interfaces of 2010.

Marc Andreessen, one of the creators of NCSA Mosaic, once remarked that his ur-browser had only one real flaw: the Back and Forward buttons. “That never made a lot of sense to us,” he said, “Back to what? Forward to what? We thought there would be a better way to navigate. But no one ever came up with one.” I think there’s something awfully Zen in the statement “Back to what? Forward to what?” but I think that sentiment is even truer today than it was in 2003, when that interview was conducted, and especially compared to 1993, when Mosaic was first released. Way back in ’93, the web, such as it was, was still little more than a collection of handcrafted HTML pages. As you navigated from page to page, you formed a personal chronology, and the Back button would simply take you back one step. Makes sense. But in 2010, we visit a website like Facebook, Gmail, or WordPress and rarely, if ever, employ the Back button. These sites are really designed as self-contained applications. If you have to hit the Back button to get something done inside them, the designers of the site have failed. Nowadays, Back is more like an Undo command, but specific to navigation.

Video killed the radio star, Youtube killed the television, the text message killed the telephone, RSS killed the bookmark, and the web will kill the Back button. It’s only a matter of time.

I’m way, way late to the party when it comes to critiquing Final Fantasy XIII, but this is one of those instances where I know my brain won’t stop buzzing until I’ve written this down, so here we go.

Let me begin with a disclaimer. I haven’t actually played Final Fantasy XIII, at least not directly. Rather, I’ve watched my two roommates play two separate games. After watching hours upon hours of Square-Enix’s latest offering, I’m left with absolutely no desire to play it myself, because I’m fairly certain—and here’s the crux of the problem, so pay attention—that there is little difference between playing the game and watching it.

It certainly looks stunning, I’ll give it that. Animation is detailed and fluid, and the world positively explodes with color and texture (often literally). It’s obvious that an enormous amount of thought went into the game’s art direction and implementation, though Square’s increasingly eccentric aesthetics do occasionally spiral out of control. At times it feels like you’re not battling a well-defined monster so much as an oddly pleasing collection of curves and particle effects. It doesn’t help that enemies have names like “Zwerg Scandroid”. It can be downright Lovecraftian at times.

So while the Art Direction department obviously got a truckload of gold bars to spend, it seems like every other department suffered as a result. The plot oscillates between numbingly straightforward and needlessly confusing. It’s established early on that there are god-like entities in the world who turn humans into magically-empowered servants to perform specific tasks. Fail to complete your task and you become a zombie. So far, so good, I see where this is going. Successfully complete your task, and you turn into an ornate statue. Huh? Plot-wise, the conditions for success or failure are never clearly established, nor is the timeline for your inevitable transformation. It robs the narrative of any real drive or tension.

The characters are your usual band of Square-Enix JRPG standards. Terrorist who’s portrayed as a snow-white good guy? Check (and in this case, he’s actually named Snow). Thirty year-old who routinely gets referred to as if he’s one bowl of oatmeal away from collecting Social Security? Check. Angsty female? Check. Willowy, androgynous blond male semi-protagonist with self-esteem issues? Check. Gratingly annoying, sexually infantilized female? God almighty, check. Yahtzee hits this point really well, if you’re looking for more, but the long and short of it is that you end up actively hating the characters with which you’re supposed to empathize. Snow is a jerk, Lightning’s an angry bitch, Hope alternates between whiney and saccharine, and Vanille? God, just go see for yourself.

These are but quibbles compared to Final Fantasy XIII‘s crucial failing, and that is this: if you step back from the overproduced spectacle, you’ll realize that there isn’t an actual game there. True, Square has been gradually taking the “G” out of “RPG” ever since Final Fantasy VII. I’m certainly not the first gamer to point out that Square’s games consist of walking in an exceptionally pretty line until you hit the Big Bad Boss, but XIII is beyond the pale.

Imagine game design as a great big decision tree. At every fork in the tree, Square had a choice to make: give the player X amount of control over the game, or don’t give them that control. At every opportunity, every available decision point, Square decided to rob the player of control. You don’t select attacks individually, you switch your party into “paradigms,” or sets of roles that broadly determine their actions in the fight. Just as in every Final Fantasy game, your characters can learn a vast corpus of magic spells and attacks, but as far as implementing them in Final Fantasy XIII, your choices boil down to “attack” and “defend”. This allows battles to play out at a positively frantic pace, but it’s counter-productive. If you can’t keep track of what’s going on, you aren’t really playing, are you? The fights become a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

The plot, such as it is (see above) is spoon fed to you at discrete points throughout the game, and I do mean discrete. Either you’re running around looking for the next incomprehensible fight, or all the action comes to a dead stop so that another character you don’t care about can have an epiphany. A good game will weave story elements directly into the gameplay, so that you, as the player, feel responsible for the character’s actions, thereby becoming that character (see God of War, Fallout, Bioshock, etc). With Square, it’s an either/or proposition. The game is either clumsily dialing the pathos to 11 or throwing you into gameplay that’s totally detached from the story.

Of course, many other recent hits can be critiqued as Exceptionally Pretty Lines. Bioshock, both the original and its sequel, have but two possible outcomes, and as far as the story goes, you don’t have much choice in how things turn out (the first game, of course, turns this unspoken truth on its head to truly masterful effect). Fallout 3, for all its decision trees and engaging sidequests, still forces the main story to culminate in a ludicrously transparent choice between selfless good or overwhelming evil. Despite the appearance of forks in the road and tangles in the plot arcs, these games are linear. Still, there are lots of things to do. In Bioshock there are many plasmids to be had, many ways to deal with the next wave of crazed Splicers, and in Fallout you can lose yourself in the Wasteland for literal days, leaving the main story untouched. In both cases, there are many possible ways to play the game.

Stepping back onto Square’s turf, consider Final Fantasy X. It’s one of the few Square games to feature a strong plot (though by no means perfect) and a simple battle system that still offered plenty of control. Toward the end of the game, you’ll have to take on a character named Yunalesca. She’s one of those difficult, somewhat undead, multi-stage bosses that Square loves. When the Tall One fought Yunalesca, he cut her to pieces with a handful of basic physical attacks. She was defeated in perhaps two minutes, most of that time spent on her transformation animations. The Tall One was able to do this because of how he plays. He will happily grind his characters for hours, until they can easily overpower any foe in the area. Then it’s a simple matter to press “Attack” and stomp the local boss to death. I, on the other hand, prefer to progress the story. New areas, new art, and new plot are my preferred reward, not overwhelming might. As a result, I was somewhat underpowered when I went up against Yunalesca. It took me an unbelievable forty minutes to beat her, and even then, I did so by the skin of my teeth, pulling out every magic spell and item at my disposal. I found this experience infinitely more epic, more rewarding, then simply dispatching her by pressing “Attack” three times.

The point is this. In Final Fantasy XIII these kinds of choices do not exist. The Crystarium, which is the visually overwrought screen where you’ll gain new strengths and abilities, is divided into tiers that only unlock as the story progresses. In fact, you can’t access the full Crystarium until after you beat the game. Why would I want more abilities after the game is, you know, finished? And let’s remember, all these abilities you’re unlocking still boil down to “attack” and “defend,” so all that really matters is whether you’ve done enough character grinding to take on the larger enemies. You don’t even have full control of your party members until about twenty-five hours into the game. And I’m not talking about some kind of accelerated gameworld clock, I’m saying that you sit there and play the game for an actual twenty-five hours before the game lets you decide who you can use (before that point, Square is too busy doling out the plot to care about things like autonomy).

The Tall One and the Southerner both played Final Fantasy XIII to completion. These are two guys with vastly different gaming habits, game preferences, play styles, and life philosophies. By all rights, there games should look very different. Yet their save files are virtually indistinguishable from each other. I submit that this is a game that is not really a game. It’s all art, no matter. It is a game without real decisions or choices. It is not a game you play, rather, it’s a game that plays you.