There’s one section of this paper that is harder to grasp its concept and frankly just confuses me. So I will be using this post to work through the ideas and significance of “Invariance, Accuracy, and Synchronicity” . The section is, The Anxiety of Control/The Control of Anxiety, it’s the fourth section in the paper by Bernstein.
Bernstein sums up that Invariance, Accuracy, and Synchronicity are just not (common) qualities used to describe a person’s informational process, however is relatable to certain ideas of a person’s reasoning process.
Invariance seems to be about how the computer is predictive and fixed. In terms of video games the “game world” is unchanging, time has seemingly stopped awaiting for the player to play.
Computers don’t make mistakes, rather mistakes are human error. Accuracy, in terms of its importance according to Berstein, appears to be more about the mistakes that occur. How it’s the players fault if something goes wrong, due to lack of accuracy.
Bernstein’s use of Synchronicity, though this is nearly a guess, I believe refers to the connection between the real world and that of the “game world”. He explains that video games (computers in general) allow an individual to return to a problem over and over and get the same response, unlike in real life where you don’t always get the same effect of repeating an occurrence or event. Well doesn’t that just contradict the meaning of synchronicity? Technically yes, but referring back to wheat Bernstein mentioned earlier in his paper, that synchronicity is related to our reasoning process. I think importance of his point is that an individual’s reasoning and problem solving is synced inside the game world and out of it. Although the difference is video games allow for the problem to be tried over and over again.
Invariance, Accuracy, and Synchronicity according to Bernstein the importance of it is related to our reasoning and problem solving. What are your thoughts on this section? Do you agree or did I miss something?
I thought this article was confusing as well. . Video games allow freedom from the constraint of time (limitless).Bernstein notes that the dominant forms/genres of video games involve a restricted economy, in social context are unrestricted: it is our play as being unproductive or produces a social function. Video games are the moving-image medium (functioning differently than film or television) separated into genres and formats (hardware/software). The medium is the CPU (either on or off) its language is coding and algorithms which provide our escape from reality. Because computers are a new/foreign medium, and our interaction has no conscious communication, evoking anxiety over the amount of control the computer. Instead of using the word unchanging, Bernstein uses the word“uniformity” of the stimulus/response in the computer, the game world will remain the same (unlike real life where it is seldom to receive the exact same results, which makes games an escape).
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This article and specifically the part talking about these three terms was actually fairly brief. The one that stumped me was invariance because I originally thought of invariance as implying that a game is invariable but you clarified a bit for me. That even if a game is programmed to be variable, the fact is that the game is invariable in what is possible within its structure or code. And to your point about synchronicity I think what he was saying is that if I have two computers with the same specifications and enter the same parameters, they will be synchronized in the idea of having the same outcome which is relatively similar to his idea of invariance. Accuracy was fairly straightforward for me as it just implies humans are not nearly as accurate as a computer can be. Overall the article went over relationships between humans and computers and how its odd for humans to enjoy computers when they are innately different from the beings we interact with everyday.
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