Andy Matuschak: belief

Transcript context

…I think The Witness is an absolutely extraordinary work of art. It's a game that has no text, at least no text that's relevant to the game elements. In kind of classic Myst style, you wake up on an island, and figure out what's going on. And the game proceeds to explain to you, without using words, but just by shaping your environment, a series of extremely complex mechanics of a system that exists in this world. You learn a bunch of stuff and it gets to the point where it feels like you're in conversation with the game's designers. It's like, “Ah, he's asking me to do this here.” No one's asking you, right? There's no text, but you can feel that you are being asked. You perform some interaction in the environment and you feel that you have answered the game's response in kind. This is very, very interesting. It's like a medium of action. Some people have tried to make educational games, games that are explicitly about arithmetic or something, Jonathan Blow's game is not about that. It's the mechanics that you learn are they're about the environment. I don't think anybody has yet really succeeded in doing this about explicit subjects. There are, for instance, things like Kerbal Space Program. Maybe people learn some things about project management or orbital mechanics from that. Zachtronics has a bunch of games that are sort of about assembly language, roughly speaking. Maybe you can learn some things about that. The issue seems to be that games are ultimately in aesthetic form. The purpose of the game is to have an experience that feels a particular way. And so they're sort of serving a different purpose than Grant's videos or a text. Grant's videos are also serving a different purpose from the text. The text you might pick up because you're like, “I want to be able to build a robot.” So you pick up a textbook on robotics or something. And so is there something that you can pick up that's sort of like a game in so far as it's an active environment that you use in a similar situation to “I want to learn to build a robot?” Maybe kind of? We don't quite have those yet. We have some things that are kind of like that. I don't know if you've seen From Nand to Tetris. This is a very interesting project that's kind of along these lines. And what characterizes it, like games, is doing. It's active. So when I was asking all those questions of the book, that was active learning, active reading, Nand to Tetris is naturally active. So this is a course in which you kind of start with basically nothing. You start with memory and you build a virtual computer and build Tetris. You build a processor and stuff. The whole thing's active. The whole time you're making the computer grow. This is doing a similar job to the question asking that I was doing, except that you don't have to regulate all of that yourself. The regulation, the choice of what activity to do, is in the course, is in the structure of the material. question asking that I was doing, except that you don't have to regulate all of that yourself. The regulation, the choice of what activity to do, is in the course, is in the structure of the material. I think some kind of mass medium that is like that is waiting to be created, but that can be applied in many, many circumstances. We have the non-mass medium version of it already and it's apprenticeship. If you want to be a good yoga teacher, you go hang out in yoga studios. If you want to be a good surfer, you go to the beach when the other surfers are there and you participate peripherally and you talk to them and you learn about their tactics. They might give you some feedback eventually and you'll start to participate less and less peripherally over time and eventually you'll be part of the community. This isn’t a mass medium. We can't print billion copies of it like we can with a book. What is the experience of watching George Hotz on the stream code up tiny grad? How does that compare to just being in an office with him? Because even if you're in an office with him, there would be constraints on his time and how much engagement there would be. Why isn’t video a scalable way to increase apprenticeship?…

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