I know something you don't know

If you're like me (and you are) you've had this experience: you find out about something, and then you see it everywhere. This is basically how I ended up learning a lot about web writing this week. I kind of oscillate between thinking of it as having learned something about the craft of web writing, and having learned something about why the internet is awful.

There's a certain style of headline writing that's been taking over the internet. I won't hesitate to compare it to a virus or a fungal blight, because even if the underlying idea is solid, the majority of the execution is terrible. You probably already know what I'm talking about: a hyperbolic, emotion-based claim that doesn't so much indicate an article's content as dare you to prove the headline writer a liar by reading the article in it's entirety. "You Won't Believe..." "Inconceivably Awesome..." "...Will Blow Your Mind." If the internet were truly as rich with such content we would all be quivering husks by now, our every assumption about the world shattered and our relentlessly blown minds a thin paste around the interior edges of our skulls.

Someone has taken it on themselves to make a browser plugin, Downworthy (warning: some language in the link), that changes these stock hyperboles into something more believable. "Literally" thus becomes "Figuratively" and "Will Blow Your Mind" becomes "Might Perhaps Mildly Entertain You For a Moment." I don't think I want to install it myself, because if anyone starts writing headlines like that in earnest I want to give them credit, and not mistake them for the work of my cynical plugin. Besides, Downworthy would only externalize what I already do in my head as I read these things. The point is that stumbling on this plugin was among my first steps down the rabbit hole.

Soon after this (or before, I don't remember--reality is confusing) I found the same style lampooned again, on Cracked.com, of all places. The irony here is that for years I had been thinking of this as "Cracked style," and if they didn't pioneer it they were the first place I saw it. Not to be too judgmental--I could forgive this sort of thing from a humor site. It was only when it caught on elsewhere that it actually became objectionable.

The last piece of the puzzle--I didn't think of it as a puzzle until I saw this--fell into place shortly after I found, through wandering internet happenstance, the following tweet:

Dear CNN https://t.co/B0edardjf3 The curiosity gap is not for every news story. Especially about murder.
— Adam Mordecai (@advodude) January 23, 2014

In reference to this tweet:

14-year-old girl stabbed her little sister 40 times, police say. The reason why will shock you. http://t.co/5ZFqHFrviw
— CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) January 23, 2014

I took a moment to be suitable appalled about it all. But to the point of this post, I hadn't realized we (and by "we" I mean you, CNN) had sunk so low. And more to the point, I had finally given a name to my pain, and it is "curiosity gap."

A name enabled research. Whose bright idea was this? Well, I'm not being scientific about this, but some Googling indicates that the concept originated in behavioral economics courtesy of George Loewenstein in the mid 90s, and entered the marketing vocabulary (which is to say, metastasized) around 2006. The concept itself is innocent enough: people are curious about what you are going to say when you tell them you know something they don't know, and which they thought was unlikely.

Of course the difference between "informing" and "lying" rests mainly on externalities, what's good for telling the truth is good for lying, too. Conversely, the technique isn't evil in and of itself. Manipulative? Maybe, but not necessarily--surprising information exists. Tired, though? Hells yes. At least the way they're driving it right now.

I do believe that knowing the name of something is a sort of power. Now I (and you, too) can recognize this thing. I can conceptualize it. With the proper precautions I may even summon it someday and make it do my bidding. For good, of course.

I can't think of a good title, but this post is about Yoshi's Island

I was playing Yoshi's Island recently* and Girlfriend walked into the living room, drawn by the bouncy music and the boings and ka-dings. "Jumping!" she exclaimed. "Coins! This game is triggering reward centers I forgot I even had!"

"You're telling me," I replied (or something to that effect). "At the end of every level, I get graded out of 100 points!" I proceeded to show her my (disappointing but in-progress) B average across the current world, and my string of perfect scores across World 1.

I think that Yoshi's Island may be the game I loved most out of the entire SNES oeuvre.** It's been my go-to game now ever since I reunited it with my SNES. I'm discovering the feeling of realizing that the 11-year-old version of yourself actually had good taste.

I didn't really have the vocabulary to explain why I was enjoying myself so much, but I definitely was. I pretty clearly remember gushing about the game in a journal assignment in school soon after I got the game. I was pushing the limits of my fledgling vocabulary and I specifically remember praising the games abundance of "simple complexities." I got that journal entry back with a red-ink chastisement about "simple complexities" being a contradiction. I knew what I meant! (But, little Cory, it doesn't matter what you know if you can't communicate it.)

What I realize now that I meant was that the game consistently found ways to surprise me by building on a consistent, if whimsical, internal logic. It was full of Aha! moments. Some of my favorite were the things they did with the eggs which Yoshi would lay and which would then follow him(?) around like ducklings until he(?) used them as projectiles.

About halfway through the game you run into a ducklike creature with a trail of little ones following behind it. Sure enough (by the game's logic) you can scoop up the little duckthings, who then follow you around like eggs--as if you were their mother. And yes, you can throw them at things--they act like cute little boomerangs.

Somehow I loved this at the time and yet I don't think I understood the visual pun behind it.

It's been--oh wow--almost twenty years since Yoshi's Island came out. I've learned a lot of useful things in that time, but I've also learned a lot about video games and media and how we enjoy them. Playing this game again I get to see all the craft that went into all the fun I had.

So now I can see, and actually recognize, how the game teaches you how to play it. How the game controls how you encounter new elements and nudges you toward understanding how to interact with them. You would learn that you could stand on a rolling boulder because the game would show you the boulder and then show you goodies that you could grab if you stood on that boulder. The game would reward experimentation and mildly obsessive-compulsive behavior, which would drive you interact with the world and see what happens. I didn't notice the game teaching me back in 1995. But about a year ago I ran into a YouTube video where a man explained, with a surfeit of enthusiasm and NSFW language, how it was done in the Mega Man series, and I've been noticing it ever since.

Sometimes when you get older and discover that the things you enjoyed as a child were insipid. As a compensation, sometimes you discover that the things you enjoyed as a child were actually brilliant--sometimes better than we remember.

* My whole SNES game collection was reunited over Christmas, thanks to my sister, who delved into my parents' attic on my behalf in exchange for the N64.

** Possibly in a photo finish with Chrono Trigger and Earthbound.

Advent, Christmas, Fimbulwinter, Epiphany

Where to begin? Not with another apology for letting my blog languish so long, I hope.

Immediately before I left for a long Christmas vacation, my trusty laptop went kaput. I ordered a new laptop, which I had shipped to where I would be on Christmas Eve, and alternated between packing and file recovery the next day. Everything important was saved, I'm pleased to say. What wasn't important wasn't lost--I just haven't bothered moving everything off the old computer because the process is a pain. But all my writing and work files are here, and I didn't have to worry for very long that they were irretrievable.

Since I had just wrapped up a big project that had to be out before Christmas, and I hadn't lined up any work for the week I would be on vacation, being without a computer was almost relaxing. It gave me more time to relax and really focus on the things that are important in life, like food, naps, movies, and presents.

I came home with a supply of good literature (Stephen King's special extra-long edition of The Stand), good games (the first season of Telltale Games' The Walking Dead, as well as the lost trove of my Super Nintendo titles finally uncovered by my dutiful sister in exchange for custody of the N64 and its games*), good music (Florence + the Machine's album "Lungs," which provided the soundtrack for the drives between New York and Philadelphia), a great movie (Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai), good chocolate, and two bottles of Sky River mead, one of a handful of Pacific Northwest beverages that I miss almost as much as my friends who still live there.**

If you've read the news about as much as I have, you've probably noticed that it's cold all over the place. That includes here in Maryland, and although I don't claim to be nearly as hard off as folks in the Midwest, or the folks who recently had to get rescued off an Antarctic research boat, or the people who just had to be rescued off the boat that rescued those people. But it's pretty cold here, and by "here" I mean "inside."

As it happens, my contentious downstairs housemates moved out on New Year's Eve. And it turned out that they called the gas company as they moved out and had the gas shut off. Do I know why? No. Am I going to speculate about their motives or possible negligence in a public forum? Heck no. Can I see my own breath in the dining room? Yes.

If Pepco is as good as its word, this will be sorted out on Monday, which will be very nice. In the meantime, Girlfriend and I have been keeping very close to our favorite space heater.

Not that I want to complain, or, more correctly, not that I want to complain any more. I am not nearly as miserable about the situation as you might think I have right to be. But a maxim I'm coming to believe--and one I beg everyone not to abuse--is that if a situation must be bad it behooves it to also be interesting. It also helps to spend the time in good company, and I suspect I would be a great deal grouchier about this if the school year had resumed on the second.

* If playing Dungeons & Dragons has taught me anything, it's that people will delve for your lost treasure and fight the necessary monsters for you if you let them in exchange for a share of the loot.

** Hey, I said "almost."