Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Where do your eyes go?, published by alkjash on the LessWrong.
This is a linkpost for/
[Shoutout to the LW team for very helpful (and free!) feedback on this post.]
I. Prelude
When my wife first started playing the wonderful action roguelike Hades, she got stuck in Asphodel. Most Hades levels involve dodging arrows, lobbed bombs, melee monsters, and spike traps all whilst hacking and slashing as quickly as possible, but Asphodel adds an extra twist: in this particular charming suburb of the Greek underworld, you need to handle all of the above whilst also trying not to step in lava. Most of the islands in Asphodel are narrower than your dash is far, so it’s hard not to dash straight off solid ground into piping-hot doom.
I gave my wife some pointers about upgrade choices (cough Athena dash cough) and enemy attack patterns, but most of my advice was marginally helpful at best. She probably died in lava another half-dozen times. One quick trick, however, had an instant and visible effect.
"Stare at yourself."
Watch your step.
By watching my wife play, I came to realize that she was making one fundamental mistake: her eyes were in the wrong place. Instead of watching her own character Zagreus, she spent most of her time staring at the enemies and trying to react to their movements and attacks.
Hades is almost a bullet hell game: avoiding damage is the name of the game. Eighty percent of the time your eyes need to be honed on Zagreus's toned protagonist butt to make sure he dodges precisely away from, out of, or straight through enemy attacks. In the meantime, most of Zagreus's own attacks hit large areas, so tracking enemies with peripheral vision is enough to aim your attacks in the right general direction. Once my wife learned to fix her eyes on Zagreus, she made it through Asphodel in only a few attempts.
This is a post about the general skill of focusing your eyes, and your attention, to the right place. Instead of the standard questions "How do you make good decisions based on what you see?" and "How do you get better at executing those decisions?", this post focuses on a question further upstream: "Where should your eyes be placed to receive the right information in the first place?"
In Part II, I describe five archetypal video games, which are distinguished in my memory by the different answers to "Where do your eyes go?" I learned from each of them. I derive five general lessons about attention-paying. Part II can be safely skipped by those allergic to video games.
In Part III, I apply these lessons to three specific minigames that folks struggle with in graduate school: research meetings, seminar talks, and paper-reading. In all three cases, there can be an overwhelming amount of information to attend to, and the name of the game is to focus your eyes properly to perceive the most valuable subset.
II. Lessons from Video Games
Me or You?
Hades and Dark Souls are similar games in many respects. Both live in the same general genre of action RPGs, both share the core gameplay loop "kill, die, learn, repeat," and both are widely acknowledged to be among the best games of all time. Their visible differences are mostly aesthetic: for example, Hades' storytelling is more lighthearted, Dark Souls' more nonexistent.
But there is one striking difference between my experiences of these two games: in Hades I stared at myself, and in Dark Souls I stared at the enemy. Why?
One answer is obvious: in Dark Souls, the camera follows you around over your shoulder, so you're forced to stare at the enemies, while in Hades the isometric camera is centered on your own character. This is good game design because the camera itself gently suggests the right place for your eyes to focus, but it doesn't really explain why that place is right.
The more interesting answer is that your eyes g...
view more