05.14.2025 - Writing a technical specification for a nonlinear experience is a challenge. Writing itself is linear. It starts somewhere and progresses to a conclusion. Nonlinear experiences will start with some set of conditions and no experience will occur outside the technical confines of the product.
I think of this outer boundary as the shell of a three-dimensional object.
Three dimensions represent volume. The simplest regular solid is a tetrahedron. If the vertices of a tetrahedron are thought of as a subject heading, the linear transition from one heading to another describes a relationship. Four possible headings may define a game. Following are ones I have used.
- the World - objects and physical rules of a game environment
- the Toy - mechanisms the player uses to interact with the game world.
- the Game - rules that govern success, failure, reward, and consequence.
- the Story - representative content contextualizing the World, Toy, and Game.
By thinking of a tetrahedron defined by these four points, one can conceive the whole of video game existing within a boundary. Thinking about relationships is simplified. Is the Toy fun? If we change the Toy, how that that impact the other elements? The Toy/World relationship is a sandbox that runs without rules.
05.28.2025 - Discussions over coffee with a colleague on the merits and limitations of machine learning brought up the subject of human capability to quickly visualise data with more than three dimensions. I suspect that follows due to human visualization being trained on interactions with our physical world. This visualization vocabulary may also be most easily shared due to our common experience interacting with the physical world.
This got me thinking.
My success using the model I describe above may be attributed to a shared visual capability, and as the purpose of the model is communication, it is most appropriately applied to relaying context to another person.
Human cognition surely operates with more than three dimensions. I have not investigated contemporary neuroscience in relation to identity and the physical/chemical mechanics of thought. Please forgive any missteps here.
I suspect our individual experience and environment shape the nature of how additional parameters are trained. Humans have all manner of parameters they may associate (sensory, emotional, threat, social) but these don't conveniently conform to visualization.