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pnictogen_wingThere's an idea that I've been trying to piece together slowly. I've been trying to figure out what it is, exactly, that's so bamboozling and confusing about being on a personal computer. Or a smart phone, or tablet or whatever.
For a while I thought: oh, it's the unnatural light. No matter what screen technology you're using (with the exception of e-paper, whose physical nature makes it uniquely pleasant on the eyes) the light that comes from a computer monitor or similar screen isn't like the light you'd get from usual Earth objects. More and more of the light sources in widespread use in human society are "unnatural" in this sense. The mammalian eye is used to continuous sources and continuous spectra and colors that aren't too saturated. Technology is required for sources that have narrow emission bands, or which are intermittent or oscillating. So it's kinda weird to stare at a screen. Is that the only issue, though?
There's also the fact that objects on a monitor have a blurriness or jagginess that isn't usual for physical objects. Text on a screen is always a bit annoying to read, and I don't think anti-aliasing helps (rather the opposite, with me anyway). Physical objects have a sharpness of definition that's missing from texts and other objects on screen. I remember hating the widespread introduction of anti-aliasing into OS X and later releases of Windows; it felt a bit like I was being made to squint through a thin layer of vaseline spread over the screen.
But there's a more important piece of this idea I'm less clear on, because we're not good with the math and geometrical concepts necessary to understand the nature of the beast, so to speak. I'm referring in general to how the presentation of information on computer screens, in overlapping rectangles that behave in eccentric and counterintuitive ways, has created a bizarre sense of interdimensional space. One can, on a computer, slip into a realm that has some notion of depth and direction, as if one were stepping into a *physical* 3D space, but in fact it's a chaotic mess, a labyrinth of passageways that presents the superficial aspect of a simple screen—pixels in a plane.
It hadn't occurred to me before how pseudo-3D shooters also exploit the ability of the computer to display the appearance of paradoxical spaces. They look *locally* like ordinary hallways or whatever, but in fact they're self-intersecting and connected up with each other in strange non-Euclidean ways. You know, like in R'lyeh! Gamers have simply gotten used to navigating such paradoxical locations so long as they look superficially acceptable to the eye...and I'm not sure that's really a good thing.
I am reminded uncomfortably of the appearance of the Witches' Labyrinths in *Madoka Magica*, which have something of the appearance of proper three-dimensional spaces, with depth and direction, but which follow their own confusing rules and are dominated by *flat* images. I suggest that without knowing it, computer programmers have led users into a paradoxical space that is neither two dimensional nor three dimensional, a space where people can be given the *illusion* of progress and motion without actually going anywhere. And now a large fraction of the computer-using population is so used to this state of affairs, the ordinary world now seems wrong to them.
~Chara of Pnictogen
For a while I thought: oh, it's the unnatural light. No matter what screen technology you're using (with the exception of e-paper, whose physical nature makes it uniquely pleasant on the eyes) the light that comes from a computer monitor or similar screen isn't like the light you'd get from usual Earth objects. More and more of the light sources in widespread use in human society are "unnatural" in this sense. The mammalian eye is used to continuous sources and continuous spectra and colors that aren't too saturated. Technology is required for sources that have narrow emission bands, or which are intermittent or oscillating. So it's kinda weird to stare at a screen. Is that the only issue, though?
There's also the fact that objects on a monitor have a blurriness or jagginess that isn't usual for physical objects. Text on a screen is always a bit annoying to read, and I don't think anti-aliasing helps (rather the opposite, with me anyway). Physical objects have a sharpness of definition that's missing from texts and other objects on screen. I remember hating the widespread introduction of anti-aliasing into OS X and later releases of Windows; it felt a bit like I was being made to squint through a thin layer of vaseline spread over the screen.
But there's a more important piece of this idea I'm less clear on, because we're not good with the math and geometrical concepts necessary to understand the nature of the beast, so to speak. I'm referring in general to how the presentation of information on computer screens, in overlapping rectangles that behave in eccentric and counterintuitive ways, has created a bizarre sense of interdimensional space. One can, on a computer, slip into a realm that has some notion of depth and direction, as if one were stepping into a *physical* 3D space, but in fact it's a chaotic mess, a labyrinth of passageways that presents the superficial aspect of a simple screen—pixels in a plane.
It hadn't occurred to me before how pseudo-3D shooters also exploit the ability of the computer to display the appearance of paradoxical spaces. They look *locally* like ordinary hallways or whatever, but in fact they're self-intersecting and connected up with each other in strange non-Euclidean ways. You know, like in R'lyeh! Gamers have simply gotten used to navigating such paradoxical locations so long as they look superficially acceptable to the eye...and I'm not sure that's really a good thing.
I am reminded uncomfortably of the appearance of the Witches' Labyrinths in *Madoka Magica*, which have something of the appearance of proper three-dimensional spaces, with depth and direction, but which follow their own confusing rules and are dominated by *flat* images. I suggest that without knowing it, computer programmers have led users into a paradoxical space that is neither two dimensional nor three dimensional, a space where people can be given the *illusion* of progress and motion without actually going anywhere. And now a large fraction of the computer-using population is so used to this state of affairs, the ordinary world now seems wrong to them.
~Chara of Pnictogen
