Put Your Face in It: How Gaming Helped Me Understand My Dog | Hacker News Reader

Put Your Face in It: How Gaming Helped Me Understand My Dog

npr.org

43 pointsscott_s12 comments

There's something to be said for creating face putting safe experiences that don't feel restrictive. Stardew Valley is designed so that worst that experimenting can do is waste time. There are no items or challenges that destroy all of your hard work if mishandled. Similarly, dog owners make the world safe for their dogs, stopping the dog from sticking its face in a porcupine or from eating rancid roadkill (although how much of this hidden safety net is designed for the dog's benefit and how much to suite our human tastes is debatable). I think what makes Stardew Valley enjoyable for players and what makes pet life enjoyable for dogs is that, in addition to making face putting safe, the restrictions never feel smothering. Players and dogs still feel that they have agency, and for the most part they do.

Most games and software is not designed like this. Either they assume that users know what they are doing and will happily let them kill their characters or corrupt their files—even if the user had no clue that this is what they were really telling program to do—or they restrict the user so much that the safety net becomes obvious.

That's a really interesting point. Now that you mention it, I realize that when playing most games I tend to be thinking in the back of my mind about what the game "wants" me to be doing, which tends to turn games into chores. I try to walk down the hallway with the loot before the one that advances the plot, I laboriously try to figure out which side quests I'm "supposed" to be doing right now, etc. I don't end up doing many things just because _I_ want to do them.

If I want to just screw around, the game should let me. I think that's why I like Minecraft and Cities: Skylines so much.

This is an interesting thought to me: what if human life were designed this way more broadly?

School can create these sort of spaces, at least to a degree. University for example is many people's first taste of independence, but that independence is supported by some fairly extensive safety nets (financial, social, educational, etc.) that should prevent screwing up too badly. These safety nets are certainly not perfect, and putting your face in bottle can still end quite poorly.

I think one way to create a face putting safe community (physical or virtual) is to allow anyone to safely propose actions but only let these actions effect the world if other community members agree. PR based workflows sort of fit this model. As a new programmer, I should be able to safely submit garbage PRs while learning without actually hurting anyone, and if my code does get merged and it breaks something then it's the community that failed. There are roleplaying communities that also work like this: users can only state their actions and not the effect of their actions, which are determined by the people effected. Of course learning and history also has to be considered. That first garbage PR is understandable, but if I keep submitting garbage PRs without learning then there's something wrong.

Go read "Animal Happiness" by Vicki Hearne. Don't project your mindset into animals. They have their own mindsets, and they are not humans.

As a horse owner, I have to get this. You have to have a reasonable understanding of horse minds to deal with half-ton animals at close range. "Talking with Horses", by Henry Blake, is perhaps the best book on that.

I feel like dogs have co-evolved with humans to such a high degree that they are much more approachable with an anthropomorphic perspective than equines. They, for example, understand human facial expressions, pointing, and words, among other things. There's a massive amount of research done on how well dogs understand humans - maybe the reverse is also true.

I don't know, I love dogs but I doubt they are doing that much research on how well we understand them.

I agree I've never seen my dog do any research

Save for sticking their face into things, which is a form of research if you think about it...

Fully agreed. This is a funny post and an interesting connection but I'd imagine dogs and their sense of smell are way more complex than a single button press.

Text-only version: https://text.npr.org/s.php?sid=629760717

I want to live my life like this.

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