A Bestiary of Jewels - a remarkable artwork created by the jeweller Kevin Coates, consisting of a series of broaches and necklaces mounted in imitation book pages, each one of which is themed around a person and an animal (for example, Flaubert and a parrot, Montaigne and a cat, Charles Ludwig Dodgson and a dodo). Unfortunately the film of the opening of its exhibition at the Ashmolean is not very good, but it does at least show some of the objects, which are actually quite wise as well as witty…
Syberia – iPad version. (See review of original, and "making of" video.) My initial excitement an iPad version of one of my favourite games was
tempered by the discovery that (1) the iPad interface doesn't work as
well with the gameplay (instead of hotspots becoming visible on mouse
rollover, you're only able to have their either On or Off - On and all
the surprises and hidden objects aren't surprising or hidden, but Off
and you can't see where you're able to move and explore); (2) some of
the animation sequences have been shortened (why? how much money can it
really have saved?); and (3) it's only the first chapter of the game,
the first of four locations. I won't be recommending it to all my
friends.
The Last Express - by contrast, this is a really super conversion of a 1997 game, set on the Orient Express in the months before the Great War. There's a tremendous feeling of being in an early Hitchcock movie (The 39 Steps or The Lady Vanishes), as you discover the friend who'd summoned you to join him murdered in his compartment (your first task is to avoid getting arrested for his murder), and you slowly investigate the other travellers on the train (a German "businessman", an Austrian celebrity violinist, a French engineer and his family on their way to an oilfield in the Middle East, a bohemian Frenchwoman and the Englishwoman she''s persuaded to come on a romantic getaway, an elderly Russian count and his daughter, and a posse of Sebian nationalists). Fantastic rotoscoped animation conveys character and response, with very smooth transitions from first-person to third-person view as they character you play enters a cut-scene. A time-based adventure too; characters move between the cars (for example, to have dinner) and you need to be in the right place to overhear the right conversations. Definitely a classic. (See the iOS version trailer, the original trailer, and the Adventure Gamers review.)
Oh Do Shut Up Dear! The Public Voice of Women - London Review of Books lecture by Mary Beard. A proper, old-fashioned lecture; why don't we have more of them on telly? Especially when they're as good as this. Beard, as is well-known,
has direct experience of the disturbing and disturbed ways in which men
try to get women not to speak in the public sphere, and the classical
knowledge to trace it back to the Odyssey where it's presented as part
of the adolescent Telemachus' coming of age. But her argument goes
beyond her own, or other women's, experience. "We should ... try to
bring to the surface the kinds of question we tend to shelve about how
we speak in public, why and whose voice fits. What we need is some old
fashioned consciousness-raising about what we mean by the voice of
authority and how we’ve come to construct it."
Serenade to Music, by Ralph Vaughan Williams – performed by Milton Keynes Sinfonia and Polymnia (in which I sing). Stunning RVW harmonic textures, with words from Shakeapeare’s Merchant of Venice, including this passage expressing his mistrust of anyone who did’nt “get” music: “The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not mov’d with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;… let no such man be trusted.” Which when you think about it is pretty much the same as Trevor Chaplin’s verdict on the people who can and can't hear the music in Alan Plater’s Beiderbecke Connection (about which I've blogged previously).
The Americans, series 2 - the return of our favourite KGB agents. Now that Philip and Elizabeth’s marriage has stabilized, after he saved her from death at the hands of the FBI in the last season’s final episode, the domestic drama for this season is proving to be the effect of their espionage on the children – especially their far-too-savvy teenage daughter, who is understandably curious about what Mom and Dad get up to at night.
Turks and Caicos - very watchable political thriller by David Hare, with Bill Nighey rivetingly compelling and full of presence as the honest and decent ex-MI5 man seeking obscurity in the titular islands.
W1A - does one laugh or does one cry? For anyone who works in a large organisation, the idiocies of the fictional BBC's PR and senior management are all too familiar, and to see the absurdities blown up on screen is at least a reassurance to us that we're not crazy.
Sacred Body - experiential workshop at Turvey Monastery. A very good day with pschyotherapists Katarina Gadjanski and Hannah Russill, moving back and forth between the triple foci of mind, body and emotion. Leaving behind the dualism of Western philosophy and Pauline theoogy, as Thich Nhat Hanh says: "Only by cultivating a mindful body and an embodied mind can we be fully alive" (Peace of Mind: Becoming Fully Present).
Wednesday, 2 April 2014
Cuttings: March 2014
If religion exists to make raids into what is unsayable, musicians penetrate further than most - Giles Fraser's "Loose Cannon" column. “The best theologians are musicians. And Christianity is always better sung than said. To the extent that all religion exists to make raids into what is unsayable, the musicians penetrate further than most…. All of which is why it is such a mistake that the church is selling off its best family silver by increasingly cutting its cathedral choirs….This isn't something that ought to be a concern simply for the religious. When the National Gallery seeks to save a painting for the nation, Richard Dawkins doesn't protest that it's a painting of St John or a depiction of the crucifixion – or, at least, I don't think he does. Even those who don't do God generally get the value of cathedral choirs. Let's protect them.”
Hidden hatred: What makes people assassinate their own character online, sometimes driving themselves to suicide? - article in The Independent, referenced in Mind Hacks blog. “Why would anyone post dozens of fake messages of abuse about themselves on a social media website?... In the pantheon of attention-seeking disorders, self-trolling has much in common with self-harming and self-starving….As a therapist, I think we're confronted by people in severe distress feeling insecurely attached to parents, guardians and peers. As a result, mental processing remains juvenile whatever their biological stage. Their sense of personal identity seems fluid, fragile or miscalculated (one reason to denounce yourself in public is to conduct a rather risky opinion poll). Fantasy becomes reality – it's notable that some of the American students in the study came to believe that they'd been trolled for real just because their own words in print said that they had.”
Writing Hyperlinks: Salient, Descriptive, Start with Keyword - article from the Nielsen / Norman Group. “Improve page scannability by using links that are easily noticeable and understandable. First, don’t make users hunt around the page in search for clickable elements. Second, don’t force users to read the text surrounding a link to determine where it leads. This is both time consuming and frustrating. Helpful links are visually distinct from the body text and specific to the page or document that they refer to.”
The perils of feedback - Oliver Burkeman's "This column will change your life" column. “Too many managers muddle three types of feedback, write Stone and Heen: appreciation (praise for accomplishments), coaching (tips for improvement) and evaluation (rating someone's performance, especially relative to others). At the least, they argue, companies using formal reviews should separate those three into different sessions. “
The truth about lobbying: 10 ways big business controls government - article in The Guardian by Tamasin Cave and Andy Rowell. 1. Control the ground. 2. Spin the media. 3. Engineer a following. 4. Buy in credibility. 5. Sponsor a thinktank. 6. Consult your critics. 7. Neutralise the opposition. 8. Control the web. 9. Open the door. 10. And finally…
There and Back Again: A Packet’s Tale. How Does the Internet Work? - video referenced in John Naughten’s Memex 1.1 blog. “The video lets you ride shotgun with a packet of data—one of trillions involved in the trillions of Internet interactions that happen every second. Look deep beneath the surface of the most basic Internet transaction, and follow the packet as it flows from your fingertips, through circuits, wires, and cables, to a host server, and then back again, all in less than a second. “
What's so funny about peace, love and Starship? - Dave Eggers article in The Guardian. “I tried to think of a time when I'd seen so many people so happy all at once.... Most of what we do is wrong, we have to admit this – most of what we do is utterly wrong. We make colossal blunders, then small corrections, then more mistakes, more small corrections. Sometimes we learn, usually we don't. But then every so often we create a little joy. Every so often someone creates a perfect pop song, and then people can come and hear it being played, even in an Native American casino built on land stolen and restolen over and over again, by a band far past its creative prime, simply because if they do, before we are too old to do so, before we all die, before the United States crumbles in on itself, people will forget all our mistakes, national and personal, for a second or two, and will dance our ugly selves stupid."
Thursday, 20 March 2014
Visions of the future
As part of the Guardian’s Generation Y series, four authors wrote short-short SF stories about the media of the future. All were dystopian, and interestingly two of the four focused on the issue of personalization (as distinct from customization, see below), taken to the extreme: where you can view only the online content which has been deemed suitable for you, not by some Big Brother central state but the commercial forces of advertising and profiling.
In “News hacking is the new glue sniffing” by Laurie Penny, teenagers gather in a seedy dive to read the news: “not only the news that’s been tailored to their age, interests and background, but any news” - for example, that Tottenham has been under military occupation for two months, which is blocked if you have a London login. They hack the internet service to create open logins, which is a risky pursuit; “companies can and do sue users for loss of potential advertising revenue”.
In “Paper” by James Smythe, a man on the underground is reading his own (digital) Paper, which is feeding him news and gossip about the Oscars ceremony and trying to get him to buy a suit similar to the one worn by one of the actors. He sees a woman reading about an unfolding war on her own Paper, but he can find no trace of it in his own (although he finds “war” occurring in the names of TV shows and films, and a story about a fight between two women on a reality TV show). A message comes up: “Based on your social profile, we have predicted that these will not be interesting to you. Would you like to know more about best actor at last night’s Oscars?”
Generation Y, it seems, has no truck with the happy hippy utopian vision of the internet as a free space for (hedonistically) sexual expression or (politically) democratic protest. Some of us old ‘uns never believed it anyway, but the younger generation sees perhaps more clearly – despite, or perhaps because, being more immersed in online social media – that the digital world replicates all the power structures and social tensions of the physical, though amplified and on a larger scale. Let’s be careful out there, as they used to say in Hill Street Blues.
Note
In “News hacking is the new glue sniffing” by Laurie Penny, teenagers gather in a seedy dive to read the news: “not only the news that’s been tailored to their age, interests and background, but any news” - for example, that Tottenham has been under military occupation for two months, which is blocked if you have a London login. They hack the internet service to create open logins, which is a risky pursuit; “companies can and do sue users for loss of potential advertising revenue”.
In “Paper” by James Smythe, a man on the underground is reading his own (digital) Paper, which is feeding him news and gossip about the Oscars ceremony and trying to get him to buy a suit similar to the one worn by one of the actors. He sees a woman reading about an unfolding war on her own Paper, but he can find no trace of it in his own (although he finds “war” occurring in the names of TV shows and films, and a story about a fight between two women on a reality TV show). A message comes up: “Based on your social profile, we have predicted that these will not be interesting to you. Would you like to know more about best actor at last night’s Oscars?”
Generation Y, it seems, has no truck with the happy hippy utopian vision of the internet as a free space for (hedonistically) sexual expression or (politically) democratic protest. Some of us old ‘uns never believed it anyway, but the younger generation sees perhaps more clearly – despite, or perhaps because, being more immersed in online social media – that the digital world replicates all the power structures and social tensions of the physical, though amplified and on a larger scale. Let’s be careful out there, as they used to say in Hill Street Blues.
Note
“Personalisation” and “customisation” are similar and the words are often used interchangeably, but there’s an important distinction. In usual usage, “customisation” is what you, the user, do to select the things you want; for example, you can “customise” the Toolbar in Microsoft Office so that it contains the icons you want to see most frequently. “Personalisation” is the system choosing what to put in front of you, based on what it knows (or thinks it knows) about your and what you want; targeted advertising or, more benignly, Amazon recommendations, are personalisation.
Thursday, 13 March 2014
Why do people do postgraduate courses?
I saw a surprising statistic the other day: about the study motivation of postgraduate students. They were given a choice of saying that their motivation was (a) mainly employment / career, (b) mainly personal development, or (c) employment / career and personal development equally important.
Now the result needs to be taken with a large barrel of salt. The main focus of the investigation was something else entirely (about website resources for postgraduate students), and the number of responses was low (42 out of a sample of 300). But there's no obvious non-randomness to the respondents, and the results are (I think) still surprising. These were:
Here's a dark thought. Postgraduate students, at least at my university, are overwhelmingly in mid-career, already engaged in professional practice, and one change which has affected professionals in all disciplines over the past decade or so is the increasing buraucratisation of their working lives. Tight performance management, inflexible reporting systems, and management by targets and strategic cascade have all combined to make professional work more like that of a white collar production line, so that it's harder for professionals to keep in touch with the reasons why they entered the profession in the first place. Those who think of themselves as creative in their professional practice find this particularly difficult (as this Dilbert cartoon about management obstruction of creativity illustrates).
Under such circumstances, what does a professional do? Leave and do something else? But usually there are mortgages to pay and children to feed. And most of the time the reasons for doing the job are still visible and salvageable - but they need support outside of anything which the workplace itself provides.
And perhaps that is where postgraduate study comes in: supporting "personal development" in the sense of reaffirming the professional's identity as someone who is good at their calling, who shares core values and standards with other co-professionals, and is more concerned about perfecting their practice than advancement in a management hierarchy, which will usually mean doing less of what they love and doing more of what they hate. So the return on investment for postgraduate study may be not so much about career advancement but career sustenance: not enabling students to get a better job, but to live with the one they have.
Now the result needs to be taken with a large barrel of salt. The main focus of the investigation was something else entirely (about website resources for postgraduate students), and the number of responses was low (42 out of a sample of 300). But there's no obvious non-randomness to the respondents, and the results are (I think) still surprising. These were:
- Employment / career and personal development equally important: 18
- Mainly personal development: 14
- Mainly employment / career: 3
Here's a dark thought. Postgraduate students, at least at my university, are overwhelmingly in mid-career, already engaged in professional practice, and one change which has affected professionals in all disciplines over the past decade or so is the increasing buraucratisation of their working lives. Tight performance management, inflexible reporting systems, and management by targets and strategic cascade have all combined to make professional work more like that of a white collar production line, so that it's harder for professionals to keep in touch with the reasons why they entered the profession in the first place. Those who think of themselves as creative in their professional practice find this particularly difficult (as this Dilbert cartoon about management obstruction of creativity illustrates).
Under such circumstances, what does a professional do? Leave and do something else? But usually there are mortgages to pay and children to feed. And most of the time the reasons for doing the job are still visible and salvageable - but they need support outside of anything which the workplace itself provides.
And perhaps that is where postgraduate study comes in: supporting "personal development" in the sense of reaffirming the professional's identity as someone who is good at their calling, who shares core values and standards with other co-professionals, and is more concerned about perfecting their practice than advancement in a management hierarchy, which will usually mean doing less of what they love and doing more of what they hate. So the return on investment for postgraduate study may be not so much about career advancement but career sustenance: not enabling students to get a better job, but to live with the one they have.
Monday, 3 March 2014
Seen and heard: February 2014
Articles and postings
The Monuments Men - film drama about the US Army team charged with locating and rescuing Nazi-looted art treasures during World War II. Nice statement about the importance of art and culture even (especially?) in wartime, and people's willingness to risk (and occasionally give) their lives to protect it. Mirroring the on-screen drama, George Clooney has assembled and directed a crack ensemble cast, including Matt Damon, Hugh Bonneville, Bill Murray, Cate Blanchette, and Jean Dujardin.
To The Moon - unusual adventure game, low on puzzles and high on narrative, in which two "memory-retrieval specialists" attend the bedside of a dying man to run through his life memories and reconstruct them so that he fulfils his desire: to go to the moon.
The Beiderbecke Connection - the final drama from my Christmas present box set, which I never watched to its conclusion when first transmitted in 1988. A beautiful ending, with Trevor and Jill driving off into the sunset with their firstborn, having shared with us the secret of living in a mixed-up world - the trick being to listen to the music, which for Trevor (and scriptwriter Alan Plater) means his beloved jazz. "You do know how to listen don't you?" says Jill. "You put your ears together and..." Shhhh.
Treasures in MK – fun exhibition at Milton Keynes Gallery, of curious and historic artworks and objects from collections near the city, including a couple of Dürers, a set of Hogarths, a beautiful but smug looking Jacobean lady, some plaster busts and cartoons of the Beatles, and an Aston Martin DB4.
- Dear Mr Gove: here is a manifesto for your education reforms – Michael Rosen’s "Letter from a Curious Parent" column in The Guardian, 4 February 2014. “I would like to offer you and your party a manifesto to help you push on with your education reforms…. . 2. We won't wait for schools or local authorities to decide if schools wish to be academies or not. We will abolish all power that local authorities have over education, apart from dealing with excluded pupils and pupils with special needs. The role of local authority education will be to absorb the pupils who the academies don't want to educate. This will enable academies to improve their exam results, while offering employment opportunities to retired army personnel…. 4. Once all schools are academies, these will continue to be overseen by the secretary of state. To assist him, he will commission firms to compete for the Regional Management of Academies, running the five areas of England. We expect to see reliable market leaders coming from the banking sector, football ownership and security firms with a strong ex-army presence on their boards…. 6. We are aiming for all schools to be above average by the second week of the next government.
- What the Dunning-Kruger effect is and isn’t – [citation needed] [sic!] blog, referenced in Mind Hacks blog. “For reasons I’m not really clear on, the Dunning-Kruger effect seems to be experiencing something of a renaissance over the past few months; it’s everywhere in the blogosphere and media…. the findings reported by Kruger and Dunning are often interpreted to suggest that the less competent people are, the more competent they think they are…. [In fact] the bias is definitively not that incompetent people think they’re better than competent people. Rather, it’s that incompetent people think they’re much better than they actually are. But they typically still don’t think they’re quite as good as people who, you know, actually are good.”
- Finished that ebook yet? Hang on, sorry, it keeps updating – John Naughton's Observer column 8.2.14 (referenced in his Memex1.1 blog). “A Kindle book, in contrast to a printed work, can be fluid, malleable – fungible almost. In the print world, we are accustomed to the idea of discrete editions of a text. But an ebook [can] have a new edition every month, or indeed every week. For fast-changing subjects (such as information technology) that might be very helpful – in which case the argument for physically printing such texts looks increasingly shaky. It will be amazing if, in 10 years' time, undergraduates will still be lugging round the astonishingly heavy textbooks that weigh down the rucksacks of today's students. For authors, the fact that it will technically be possible continually to update their books may be a mixed blessing. After all, one of the consolations of traditional authorship is that when a book is published, it's finished.”
- Heroin, addiction and free will – Mind Hacks blog. “The death of Phillip Seymour Hoffman has sparked some strong and seemingly contradictory responses. What these reactions show is that many people find it hard to think of addiction as being anything except either a choice or a loss of free will. The fact that addiction could involve an active choice to take drugs but still be utterly irresistible seems difficult for most people to fathom.”
- The Reciprocity Principle: Give Before You Take in Web Design – online article from Nielsen Norman Group. “The reciprocity principle says that people respond in kind to nice behavior. If you want your users to trust you with their information and come back to you repeatedly, plant the reciprocity seed by being nice to them upfront and minimizing their interaction cost. Ask as little of your users as possible. On the web and elsewhere, start by giving before taking, and people will reciprocate.”
The Monuments Men - film drama about the US Army team charged with locating and rescuing Nazi-looted art treasures during World War II. Nice statement about the importance of art and culture even (especially?) in wartime, and people's willingness to risk (and occasionally give) their lives to protect it. Mirroring the on-screen drama, George Clooney has assembled and directed a crack ensemble cast, including Matt Damon, Hugh Bonneville, Bill Murray, Cate Blanchette, and Jean Dujardin.
To The Moon - unusual adventure game, low on puzzles and high on narrative, in which two "memory-retrieval specialists" attend the bedside of a dying man to run through his life memories and reconstruct them so that he fulfils his desire: to go to the moon.
The Beiderbecke Connection - the final drama from my Christmas present box set, which I never watched to its conclusion when first transmitted in 1988. A beautiful ending, with Trevor and Jill driving off into the sunset with their firstborn, having shared with us the secret of living in a mixed-up world - the trick being to listen to the music, which for Trevor (and scriptwriter Alan Plater) means his beloved jazz. "You do know how to listen don't you?" says Jill. "You put your ears together and..." Shhhh.
Treasures in MK – fun exhibition at Milton Keynes Gallery, of curious and historic artworks and objects from collections near the city, including a couple of Dürers, a set of Hogarths, a beautiful but smug looking Jacobean lady, some plaster busts and cartoons of the Beatles, and an Aston Martin DB4.
Tuesday, 25 February 2014
No guessing, no lockouts, no death - games design and learning design
(Updated 21 April 2014 - see postscript at end)
Over the past few months, I've been converting my 1986 computer game Bestiary to run in a web browser. (The alpha version is now playable online here, with forum for comments here.) The conversion has made me think about how computer games have changed since the days of 8-bit machines like the Sinclair Spectrum, the BBC Model B, and the Amstrad CPC. Most obviously, today's games usually have stupendous graphics, professionally commissioned music and top-notch voice acting. These days, even "adventure" games such as Bestiary, which are more about narrative and intellectual challenges than rapid hand-eye coordination, usually conform to this model of high production values. (See for example the winners of the 2013 Adventure Gamer awards.)
But technical innovations aside - which not everyone sees as progress (text-only adventure games still have their devotees, though they tend to call them "interactive fiction") - there have also been changes to the basic rules of adventure games, to eliminate frustration which is not a necessary and intended part of the game's challenge. Games design, in other words, has moved on, to give players a better experience. And since I see an analogy between games design and learning design (both being about setting up an environment to create an experience for an unknown person or people whose actions you cannot control directly), at the same time as I've been bringing Bestiary into the world of 2014, I've been thinking what lessons each of these changes may have for the way we teach and how we can improve the experience of our learners.
Text adventure games were the original virtual reality, following the model set in Crowther and Woods' 1975 Colossal Cave Adventure: text description of a location ("You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building") and text input of commands ("Enter building", "Get lamp"). The player experience was one of exploring a virtual environment, encountering problems and challenges, and overcoming them by using objects found in the course of the adventure. (For example, a hostile snake blocking the path could be driven away by releasing a bird to attack it - but you had to catch the bird first.) [1]
When it worked, the text interface of adventure games worked beautifully and immersively, but there were two regular frustrations. The first was the experience of knowing exactly what you needed to do but being unable to find the right verbal command to make it happen. For example, lighting the lamp to pass through a dark corridor is easy enough (LIGHT LAMP), but if it started attracting unwanted creatures what command would you use to put it out? You might find that PUT OUT LAMP was interpreted as equivalent to PUT DOWN LAMP, because the parser could only deal with commands of the verb-noun form. You might wonder about OUT LAMP, which is hardly usual English outside of Macbeth, or EXTINGUISH LAMP, which isn't usual either though at least not odd, or perhaps DOWSE LAMP, although you'd probably need a source of water for that to work. Imagine trying and failing with all of those, and then finding that what you were supposed to type was LAMP OFF: your next utterance (outside the game) might well be a different two-word phrase ending in OFF.
Text commands in CP/M and DOS - which you needed to operate computers before the mid-1980s - brought the same frustration of knowing what you wanted to do but being unable to find the right words to bring it about. After the Apple Macintosh introduced ordinary computer users to mouse-based operation, game designers started producing graphical adventure games with point-and-click interfaces; for example, The Secret of Monkey Island (1990) had the player select their command verbs from a menu and then click on the appropriate object or location in an animated scene. Later games such as Broken Sword (1996) and The Longest Journey (1999) did away with the need for command verbs totally, by having the pointer's effect changing according to context, or by providing a right-click menu for the player to choose an action on a selected object. Such point-and-click interfaces make it easier for the player to communicate their desired actions to the game, eliminating the need to guess command words.
Graphical interfaces also removed the second frustration of text adventure games: the lack of distinction between scenery (which you can only look at) and objects (with which you can actually do something). In the original Colossal Cave Adventure, for example, one of the locations had a long piece of text describing a spectacular view of a volcano, which mentions lava, rocks, glare, ash and brimstone in the air, alabaster formations in the cave roof overhead, rocks in a gorge, a bottomless pit, a geyser of blistering steam, a barren island in the middle of a sulphurous lake, and an incandescent wall.[2] However, all these things were just scenery to be admired; if you tried to do something with any of them, even examine them, you just got the default responses YOU SEE NOTHING SPECIAL or YOU CAN'T DO THAT. The authors clearly wanted to give the player has a sense of immersion in the virtual environment, but at the same time could not program responses for every possible interaction with everything in it. The general problem with text adventures is that the longer and more detailed the descriptions, the greater the risk of players becoming frustrated by trying and failing to do things with the scenery.
A graphical interface allows an escape from this dilemma: the scenery can be as detailed as the designer wishes, but as long as an actionable object is signalled by a change in the mouse pointer (typically, a magnifying glass for something you can examine, a hand for something you can pick up, a speech bubble for someone to whom you can talk) you need never be in any doubt as to which objects are actionable. Without being unfair to the player, the game designer can hide a tiny object on a cluttered workbench, or have a new object become findable in a place you've already searched - especially if, as in many contemporary games, you can toggle on a view which highlights objects that are actionable.
What are the lessons for learning design? That learners should never be in a position where they have to guess what to do with our learning materials; we should always provide them with enough signs and cues to make it obvious what it's possible to do and how they can do it if they wish. Too often we are lazy in our labelling and information architecture; in my own university, for example, we are only just starting to eliminate from our teaching websites the many unclear and unhelpful labels, such as "Module resources" (surely everything on a module website is a module resource?), "Module materials" (how is this different from "Module resources"?), or "Useful resources" (does this mean that the others aren't useful?). Too often as teachers we burden learners with too much information and too many links, making no differentiation between what's essential, what we recommend, what's optional, and what's there simply for credibility or atmosphere rather than actual use, such as references, copyright acknowledgements, and legal notices. Learners have enough of a challenge with the subject matter of their learning; they do not need any additional challenge in trying to find a resource because they don't know what we've called it, nor should they have to guess how to do meaningful work with a resource which we've put in front of them.
Going down blind alleys and having to retrace your steps is a necessary part of exploration, whether in an adventure game or in a learning environment. However, in classic text adventure games, it was quite possible to go down a blind alley which would effectively lock you out of all further progress. For example, in Sphinx, at one point you would fall down a deep hole, out of which you could not climb, but which contained a car jack. When I played the game I wasted a lot of time trying to use the jack to get out of the hole - reasonably enough, I thought, since a jack is a device for elevation. It was only after I'd given up the game in disgust that I learned that getting out of the hole requires another object, which you need to have already picked up before you fall down the hole (which you need to do to get the jack, because the jack is needed elsewhere in the game). My own game Bestiary requires the player to cross an ocean and return, which they can do either by boat (but they're shipwrecked, so they can't use the boat for the return trip) or by using a magic talisman which transports them through the air (but it falls from their hand as they fly, so again it's a single-use object). In the original version, if you used the talisman to cross the ocean for the outward trip, or if you sailed over in your boat without having first obtained the talisman, you would be stuck on the distant continent with no means of return.
Designers of the early adventure games (including me) thought lockouts were acceptable, because we counted them as part of the challenge: you not only had to do the right things to complete the game, you had to do them in the right order. We assumed that players would be willing to replay the game until they got it right and also that they would save their position regularly, making it relatively simple for them to return to a state of the game prior to their bad move. But we underestimated the frustration caused by lockouts and players' sense of being punished for something which was no fault of their own and which they could not have anticipated. These days, as a matter of course, games avoid lockouts: they're designed so that it's impossible for the player to leave an area irrevocably without having collected all the objects and spoken to all the people they'll need to advance the narrative and complete the game. My ocean-crossing puzzle in Bestiary would be unacceptable to players today, so when I converted it for the web I modified the game so that it's now impossible for the player to cross the ocean in the wrong way.
What are the lessons for learning design? That we should not allow or encourage learners to get into a situation where they find that they’ve gone a long way down a blind alley and have to throw their work away. True lockouts are rare in education, except perhaps in badly-designed qualifications where innocuous-seeming module choices can rule out the pathway a student later wants to take; but we still often create situations in which it’s possible for students to waste precious time and effort in ways which could have been avoided. For example, we present students with long and crabbedly-written guidance documents, which they have to read practically to the end to find out that it’s not relevant to their situation and that they didn't need to read it at all; or we ask students to work with a case example from their own experience but provide them with no way of telling whether their chosen example is going to be suitable for the tasks ahead of them except by actually doing those tasks. We need to provide learners with quick feedback on their study choices: confirmation that they’re on the right road or warning if they’re going wrong or have failed to do something essential. Saying that learners can learn from the experience of a dead end is like saying that a lockout in a game is just another challenge, and we shouldn’t allow ourselves that excuse. If we don’t respect the value of learners’ time and effort, we can expect them to feel badly treated.
In old-style adventure games, death could come suddenly and without warning: if you tried to move in a dark location without a source of light, if you did the wrong thing with a dangerous object, if you angered a violent character by choosing a bad option in a dialogue tree. Death was often a necessary part of the game; there might be no way of discovering the dangers in the game world other than by running into them and dying. The assumption was that a player could reload a saved game to return to a point before they encountered the danger and either avoid it or try to deal with it in a different way. Some games even included an OOPS command, which like the Cmnd-Z or Ctrl-Z keystroke today had the effect of undoing your last fatal move; other games automatically saved your progress at key points in case you forgot to do so for yourself.
Despite such efforts to make death palatable by minimising its inconvenience, there has been a great deal less of it in adventure games since the late 1990s. I think this has been a result of adventure games becoming more focused on narrative, rather than just exploration of a virtual world: forcing the player to go back to an earlier stage in the game breaks their sense of an on-going storyline. Those games which do include the possibility of player-character death, such as the Broken Sword games or Cognition, are normally ones which include a thriller element, so it's a requirement of the plot that there should be moments of tension when the character is in some kind of jeopardy. Other games create danger and tension without actually allowing the player character to die; for example, in The Longest Journey, there are two points where April Ryan is threatened by some kind of monster, but in both cases she cannot actually die: the monster simply chases her around the room (while tense music plays on the soundtrack) until the player works out the move she needs to make to escape. But on the whole the absence of death has become so much of a norm that The Book of Unwritten Tales (2011) includes the character of Death sitting gloomily unemployed on a derelict boat because no one ever dies in adventure games anymore.
What are the lessons for learning design? That we should not underestimate the impact of failure on learners, and not create situations in which there’s a good chance that they will fail totally and irrevocably. We cannot, and should not, remove the risk of failure entirely, because experimentation and therefore risk-taking are a necessary part of learning and growth; but we can and should make sure that learners have every chance to avoid disaster. We can provide them with warnings, we can provide them with opportunities to try again and learn from their mistakes, and we can provide them with the possibility of failing in small ways, so that they can learn not to fear mistakes and find that recovery is possible.
In learning design, just as in games design, what we are striving for is that the learner / player should always be able to continue learning / playing, without the burden of an unintuitive interface or the fear of lockout or death. Game on, as they say.
Since writing this post, I've had confirmation from an unexpected quarter of my view that text commands interpreted by a parser present irredeemable usability difficulties for adventure games. Emily Short is probably the leading figure in the UK community for authors of interactive fiction (IF), which is what they themselves call text adventures. And yet she writes:
“I can tell you why I write a lot less parser IF (as a proportion of my overall output) than I used to: accessibility. I’ve put a lot of effort over the years to making parser games that would be friendlier and more inviting. I’ve spent many many hours watching people play them, and reading responses from novice players, and showing off IF in classrooms and at conferences. I’ve experimented with different UI approaches, with adding graphical feedback, with buttons and menus and status windows. A good proportion of my messing around never saw the light of day because it was self-evidently ugly or inadequate. And I’ve finally, about fifteen years on, accepted that there is nothing I know how to do that will make a parser-based game a sufficiently inviting prospect for the majority of players. Tutorial text, external help materials, more synonyms, better error messages, attempts to highlight key nouns and list key verbs for the player — you can spend hundreds of hours on those sorts of helps and still not manage to make a parser-based game that is as immediately comprehensible as a choice-based game is by default.”
[1] The history of adventure games is told in (1) the film Get Lamp, which features interviews with many of the game creators (watch it here, the film starts at 7'30", ends at 1:38:12; (2) a Wikipedia article; (3) a series of videos starting here; (4) a web article here.
[2] The complete text of the original Colossal Cave Adventure is here.
Over the past few months, I've been converting my 1986 computer game Bestiary to run in a web browser. (The alpha version is now playable online here, with forum for comments here.) The conversion has made me think about how computer games have changed since the days of 8-bit machines like the Sinclair Spectrum, the BBC Model B, and the Amstrad CPC. Most obviously, today's games usually have stupendous graphics, professionally commissioned music and top-notch voice acting. These days, even "adventure" games such as Bestiary, which are more about narrative and intellectual challenges than rapid hand-eye coordination, usually conform to this model of high production values. (See for example the winners of the 2013 Adventure Gamer awards.)
But technical innovations aside - which not everyone sees as progress (text-only adventure games still have their devotees, though they tend to call them "interactive fiction") - there have also been changes to the basic rules of adventure games, to eliminate frustration which is not a necessary and intended part of the game's challenge. Games design, in other words, has moved on, to give players a better experience. And since I see an analogy between games design and learning design (both being about setting up an environment to create an experience for an unknown person or people whose actions you cannot control directly), at the same time as I've been bringing Bestiary into the world of 2014, I've been thinking what lessons each of these changes may have for the way we teach and how we can improve the experience of our learners.
No guessing
Text adventure games were the original virtual reality, following the model set in Crowther and Woods' 1975 Colossal Cave Adventure: text description of a location ("You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building") and text input of commands ("Enter building", "Get lamp"). The player experience was one of exploring a virtual environment, encountering problems and challenges, and overcoming them by using objects found in the course of the adventure. (For example, a hostile snake blocking the path could be driven away by releasing a bird to attack it - but you had to catch the bird first.) [1]
When it worked, the text interface of adventure games worked beautifully and immersively, but there were two regular frustrations. The first was the experience of knowing exactly what you needed to do but being unable to find the right verbal command to make it happen. For example, lighting the lamp to pass through a dark corridor is easy enough (LIGHT LAMP), but if it started attracting unwanted creatures what command would you use to put it out? You might find that PUT OUT LAMP was interpreted as equivalent to PUT DOWN LAMP, because the parser could only deal with commands of the verb-noun form. You might wonder about OUT LAMP, which is hardly usual English outside of Macbeth, or EXTINGUISH LAMP, which isn't usual either though at least not odd, or perhaps DOWSE LAMP, although you'd probably need a source of water for that to work. Imagine trying and failing with all of those, and then finding that what you were supposed to type was LAMP OFF: your next utterance (outside the game) might well be a different two-word phrase ending in OFF.
Text commands in CP/M and DOS - which you needed to operate computers before the mid-1980s - brought the same frustration of knowing what you wanted to do but being unable to find the right words to bring it about. After the Apple Macintosh introduced ordinary computer users to mouse-based operation, game designers started producing graphical adventure games with point-and-click interfaces; for example, The Secret of Monkey Island (1990) had the player select their command verbs from a menu and then click on the appropriate object or location in an animated scene. Later games such as Broken Sword (1996) and The Longest Journey (1999) did away with the need for command verbs totally, by having the pointer's effect changing according to context, or by providing a right-click menu for the player to choose an action on a selected object. Such point-and-click interfaces make it easier for the player to communicate their desired actions to the game, eliminating the need to guess command words.
Graphical interfaces also removed the second frustration of text adventure games: the lack of distinction between scenery (which you can only look at) and objects (with which you can actually do something). In the original Colossal Cave Adventure, for example, one of the locations had a long piece of text describing a spectacular view of a volcano, which mentions lava, rocks, glare, ash and brimstone in the air, alabaster formations in the cave roof overhead, rocks in a gorge, a bottomless pit, a geyser of blistering steam, a barren island in the middle of a sulphurous lake, and an incandescent wall.[2] However, all these things were just scenery to be admired; if you tried to do something with any of them, even examine them, you just got the default responses YOU SEE NOTHING SPECIAL or YOU CAN'T DO THAT. The authors clearly wanted to give the player has a sense of immersion in the virtual environment, but at the same time could not program responses for every possible interaction with everything in it. The general problem with text adventures is that the longer and more detailed the descriptions, the greater the risk of players becoming frustrated by trying and failing to do things with the scenery.
A graphical interface allows an escape from this dilemma: the scenery can be as detailed as the designer wishes, but as long as an actionable object is signalled by a change in the mouse pointer (typically, a magnifying glass for something you can examine, a hand for something you can pick up, a speech bubble for someone to whom you can talk) you need never be in any doubt as to which objects are actionable. Without being unfair to the player, the game designer can hide a tiny object on a cluttered workbench, or have a new object become findable in a place you've already searched - especially if, as in many contemporary games, you can toggle on a view which highlights objects that are actionable.
What are the lessons for learning design? That learners should never be in a position where they have to guess what to do with our learning materials; we should always provide them with enough signs and cues to make it obvious what it's possible to do and how they can do it if they wish. Too often we are lazy in our labelling and information architecture; in my own university, for example, we are only just starting to eliminate from our teaching websites the many unclear and unhelpful labels, such as "Module resources" (surely everything on a module website is a module resource?), "Module materials" (how is this different from "Module resources"?), or "Useful resources" (does this mean that the others aren't useful?). Too often as teachers we burden learners with too much information and too many links, making no differentiation between what's essential, what we recommend, what's optional, and what's there simply for credibility or atmosphere rather than actual use, such as references, copyright acknowledgements, and legal notices. Learners have enough of a challenge with the subject matter of their learning; they do not need any additional challenge in trying to find a resource because they don't know what we've called it, nor should they have to guess how to do meaningful work with a resource which we've put in front of them.
No lockouts (no blind alleys)
Going down blind alleys and having to retrace your steps is a necessary part of exploration, whether in an adventure game or in a learning environment. However, in classic text adventure games, it was quite possible to go down a blind alley which would effectively lock you out of all further progress. For example, in Sphinx, at one point you would fall down a deep hole, out of which you could not climb, but which contained a car jack. When I played the game I wasted a lot of time trying to use the jack to get out of the hole - reasonably enough, I thought, since a jack is a device for elevation. It was only after I'd given up the game in disgust that I learned that getting out of the hole requires another object, which you need to have already picked up before you fall down the hole (which you need to do to get the jack, because the jack is needed elsewhere in the game). My own game Bestiary requires the player to cross an ocean and return, which they can do either by boat (but they're shipwrecked, so they can't use the boat for the return trip) or by using a magic talisman which transports them through the air (but it falls from their hand as they fly, so again it's a single-use object). In the original version, if you used the talisman to cross the ocean for the outward trip, or if you sailed over in your boat without having first obtained the talisman, you would be stuck on the distant continent with no means of return.
Designers of the early adventure games (including me) thought lockouts were acceptable, because we counted them as part of the challenge: you not only had to do the right things to complete the game, you had to do them in the right order. We assumed that players would be willing to replay the game until they got it right and also that they would save their position regularly, making it relatively simple for them to return to a state of the game prior to their bad move. But we underestimated the frustration caused by lockouts and players' sense of being punished for something which was no fault of their own and which they could not have anticipated. These days, as a matter of course, games avoid lockouts: they're designed so that it's impossible for the player to leave an area irrevocably without having collected all the objects and spoken to all the people they'll need to advance the narrative and complete the game. My ocean-crossing puzzle in Bestiary would be unacceptable to players today, so when I converted it for the web I modified the game so that it's now impossible for the player to cross the ocean in the wrong way.
What are the lessons for learning design? That we should not allow or encourage learners to get into a situation where they find that they’ve gone a long way down a blind alley and have to throw their work away. True lockouts are rare in education, except perhaps in badly-designed qualifications where innocuous-seeming module choices can rule out the pathway a student later wants to take; but we still often create situations in which it’s possible for students to waste precious time and effort in ways which could have been avoided. For example, we present students with long and crabbedly-written guidance documents, which they have to read practically to the end to find out that it’s not relevant to their situation and that they didn't need to read it at all; or we ask students to work with a case example from their own experience but provide them with no way of telling whether their chosen example is going to be suitable for the tasks ahead of them except by actually doing those tasks. We need to provide learners with quick feedback on their study choices: confirmation that they’re on the right road or warning if they’re going wrong or have failed to do something essential. Saying that learners can learn from the experience of a dead end is like saying that a lockout in a game is just another challenge, and we shouldn’t allow ourselves that excuse. If we don’t respect the value of learners’ time and effort, we can expect them to feel badly treated.
No death
In old-style adventure games, death could come suddenly and without warning: if you tried to move in a dark location without a source of light, if you did the wrong thing with a dangerous object, if you angered a violent character by choosing a bad option in a dialogue tree. Death was often a necessary part of the game; there might be no way of discovering the dangers in the game world other than by running into them and dying. The assumption was that a player could reload a saved game to return to a point before they encountered the danger and either avoid it or try to deal with it in a different way. Some games even included an OOPS command, which like the Cmnd-Z or Ctrl-Z keystroke today had the effect of undoing your last fatal move; other games automatically saved your progress at key points in case you forgot to do so for yourself.
Despite such efforts to make death palatable by minimising its inconvenience, there has been a great deal less of it in adventure games since the late 1990s. I think this has been a result of adventure games becoming more focused on narrative, rather than just exploration of a virtual world: forcing the player to go back to an earlier stage in the game breaks their sense of an on-going storyline. Those games which do include the possibility of player-character death, such as the Broken Sword games or Cognition, are normally ones which include a thriller element, so it's a requirement of the plot that there should be moments of tension when the character is in some kind of jeopardy. Other games create danger and tension without actually allowing the player character to die; for example, in The Longest Journey, there are two points where April Ryan is threatened by some kind of monster, but in both cases she cannot actually die: the monster simply chases her around the room (while tense music plays on the soundtrack) until the player works out the move she needs to make to escape. But on the whole the absence of death has become so much of a norm that The Book of Unwritten Tales (2011) includes the character of Death sitting gloomily unemployed on a derelict boat because no one ever dies in adventure games anymore.
What are the lessons for learning design? That we should not underestimate the impact of failure on learners, and not create situations in which there’s a good chance that they will fail totally and irrevocably. We cannot, and should not, remove the risk of failure entirely, because experimentation and therefore risk-taking are a necessary part of learning and growth; but we can and should make sure that learners have every chance to avoid disaster. We can provide them with warnings, we can provide them with opportunities to try again and learn from their mistakes, and we can provide them with the possibility of failing in small ways, so that they can learn not to fear mistakes and find that recovery is possible.
In learning design, just as in games design, what we are striving for is that the learner / player should always be able to continue learning / playing, without the burden of an unintuitive interface or the fear of lockout or death. Game on, as they say.
Postscript
Since writing this post, I've had confirmation from an unexpected quarter of my view that text commands interpreted by a parser present irredeemable usability difficulties for adventure games. Emily Short is probably the leading figure in the UK community for authors of interactive fiction (IF), which is what they themselves call text adventures. And yet she writes:
“I can tell you why I write a lot less parser IF (as a proportion of my overall output) than I used to: accessibility. I’ve put a lot of effort over the years to making parser games that would be friendlier and more inviting. I’ve spent many many hours watching people play them, and reading responses from novice players, and showing off IF in classrooms and at conferences. I’ve experimented with different UI approaches, with adding graphical feedback, with buttons and menus and status windows. A good proportion of my messing around never saw the light of day because it was self-evidently ugly or inadequate. And I’ve finally, about fifteen years on, accepted that there is nothing I know how to do that will make a parser-based game a sufficiently inviting prospect for the majority of players. Tutorial text, external help materials, more synonyms, better error messages, attempts to highlight key nouns and list key verbs for the player — you can spend hundreds of hours on those sorts of helps and still not manage to make a parser-based game that is as immediately comprehensible as a choice-based game is by default.”
References
[1] The history of adventure games is told in (1) the film Get Lamp, which features interviews with many of the game creators (watch it here, the film starts at 7'30", ends at 1:38:12; (2) a Wikipedia article; (3) a series of videos starting here; (4) a web article here.
[2] The complete text of the original Colossal Cave Adventure is here.
Tuesday, 4 February 2014
Seen and heard: January 2014
Articles and postings
Alice in Wonderland - striking stage presentation, with very impressive puppetry, from experimental theatre company Proteus. This was the kid's Christmas show at The Stables: a nice alternative to the mainstream pantomime, and certainly gave our grand-daughter plenty to think about.
Sherlock, series 3 - still (for my money) maintaining its winning formula of cracking storylines, snappy dialogue and vivid sense of place, animated by top notch performances especially of course Cummerbatch and Freeman. Nice character points explored in these episodes include Sherlock Holmes growing up thinking he was thick, because the only other standard of reference he had was his smarter elder brother, and Watson having a post-Afghanistan need for adrenaline and stress making him unable to settle into a routine life.
Sacred Wonders of Britain - lovely and moving series presented by Neil Oliver, blending archaeology with the (necessarily reconstructive and speculative) spirituality which gave rise to the sites.
Ursula Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind - collection of her talks and essays "on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination". Particularly interesting to me were the pieces about rhythm and metre in prose (as distinct from poetry), which is an important determiner of how far written text reads like speech. Her own writing reads aloud beautifully: one of her stylistic features I've tried to imitate, even in my academic writing. The book is prefaced with a quote from Virginia Woolf: "Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words."
- Five minutes with Sir Ken Robinson – extract from interview by Graham Brown-Martin for Learning Without Frontiers. On how we can stimulate creativity in our teaching and our students’ learning. “Teaching is an art form, it’s not a delivery system. I don’t know when we started confusing teaching with FedEx.”
- noob-2-133t [newb to elite] – reference in MindHacks blog to journal article reporting large-scale research on patterns of learning to play an online game which requires rapid perception, decision making, and motor responding. “We showed that lawful relations exist between practice amount and subsequent performance, and between practice spacing and subsequent performance. Our methodology allowed an in situ confirmation of results long established in the experimental literature on skill acquisition. Additionally, we showed that greater initial variation in performance is linked to higher subsequent performance, a result we link to the exploration/exploitation trade-off from the computational framework of reinforcement learning.”
- No, but you could have made it legible, Virgin Media – post by Rob Waller, The Simplification Centre blog. “My cable TV contract arrived from Virgin Media, accompanied by the traditional terms and conditions in unreadable type, complete with jokey cover…. Buried on page 4 is the rather alarming clause that, although I’ve signed a contract for a year, they can put the price up at any time….I ploughed through more tiny type and found that there is actually a separate section on how the agreement might be ended – and here it does state that I can leave if they put the price up. Fair enough. Except why did they not explain that more clearly?... The problem is that legal documents are not, and perhaps cannot be, conversational in structure. A normal explanation anticipates the reader’s questions [for example, in the Situation-Problem-Solution-Evaluation pattern]…. But to a lawyer it may more logical to see a contract structured with separate sections for the ways in which a contract can change, and for the ways in which it can end. There are plenty of ways to resolve issues like this, of multiple audiences and multiple uses. But they cost money and effort to do well.”
- Geeks on the Google bus create giant social problem in San Francisco – Observer article by John Naughton (referenced in his blog Memex 1.1). “Just under a year ago, Rebecca Solnit, a writer living in San Francisco, wrote a sobering piece in the London Review of Books about the Google Bus, which she viewed as a proxy for the technology industry just down the peninsula in Palo Alto, Mountain View and Cupertino. ‘The buses roll up to San Francisco’s bus stops in the morning and evening,” she wrote, “but they are unmarked, or nearly so, and not for the public. They have no signs or have discreet acronyms on the front windshield, and because they also have no rear doors they ingest and disgorge their passengers slowly, while the brightly lit funky orange public buses wait behind them. The luxury coach passengers ride for free and many take out their laptops and begin their work day on board; there is of course Wi-Fi. Most of them are gleaming white, with dark-tinted windows, like limousines, and some days I think of them as the spaceships on which our alien overlords have landed to rule over us.’
- Has the self-driving car at last arrived? - New Yorker article by Burkhard Bilger (referenced in Memex 1.1 blog). “Four-way stops were a good example [of the driving knowledge the programers find it necessary to include]. Most drivers don’t just sit and wait their turn. They nose into the intersection, nudging ahead while the previous car is still passing through. The Google car didn’t do that. Being a law-abiding robot, it waited until the crossing was completely clear—and promptly lost its place in line. “The nudging is a kind of communication,” Thrun told me. “It tells people that it’s your turn. The same thing with lane changes: if you start to pull into a gap and the driver in that lane moves forward, he’s giving you a clear no. If he pulls back, it’s a yes. The car has to learn that language.”
- Reading and hypothesis - post by Emily Short, in her Interactive Storytelling blog. "There’s ... an argument to be made that the backstory mystery is one of the most natural possible shapes for interactive literature. When it sets up questions and allows the player to look for answers, it engages the reader directly with the substance of the story rather than with extraneous tasks and challenges. It encourages reading hypothetically, making guesses about what really happened that are then affirmed or disproven as one goes."
Alice in Wonderland - striking stage presentation, with very impressive puppetry, from experimental theatre company Proteus. This was the kid's Christmas show at The Stables: a nice alternative to the mainstream pantomime, and certainly gave our grand-daughter plenty to think about.
Sherlock, series 3 - still (for my money) maintaining its winning formula of cracking storylines, snappy dialogue and vivid sense of place, animated by top notch performances especially of course Cummerbatch and Freeman. Nice character points explored in these episodes include Sherlock Holmes growing up thinking he was thick, because the only other standard of reference he had was his smarter elder brother, and Watson having a post-Afghanistan need for adrenaline and stress making him unable to settle into a routine life.
Sacred Wonders of Britain - lovely and moving series presented by Neil Oliver, blending archaeology with the (necessarily reconstructive and speculative) spirituality which gave rise to the sites.
Ursula Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind - collection of her talks and essays "on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination". Particularly interesting to me were the pieces about rhythm and metre in prose (as distinct from poetry), which is an important determiner of how far written text reads like speech. Her own writing reads aloud beautifully: one of her stylistic features I've tried to imitate, even in my academic writing. The book is prefaced with a quote from Virginia Woolf: "Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words."
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