
Put Your Face in It: How Gaming Helped Me Understand My Dog - scott_s
https://www.npr.org/sections/monkeysee/2018/07/18/629760717/put-your-face-in-it-how-gaming-helped-me-understand-my-dog
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mattbierner
There's something to be said for creating face putting safe experiences that
don't feel restrictive. Stardew Valley is designed so that worst that
experimenting can do is waste time. There are no items or challenges that
destroy all of your hard work if mishandled. Similarly, dog owners make the
world safe for their dogs, stopping the dog from sticking its face in a
porcupine or from eating rancid roadkill (although how much of this hidden
safety net is designed for the dog's benefit and how much to suite our human
tastes is debatable). I think what makes Stardew Valley enjoyable for players
and what makes pet life enjoyable for dogs is that, in addition to making face
putting safe, the restrictions never feel smothering. Players and dogs still
feel that they have agency, and for the most part they do.

Most games and software is not designed like this. Either they assume that
users know what they are doing and will happily let them kill their characters
or corrupt their files—even if the user had no clue that this is what they
were really telling program to do—or they restrict the user so much that the
safety net becomes obvious.

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aalleavitch
This is an interesting thought to me: what if human life were designed this
way more broadly?

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mattbierner
School can create these sort of spaces, at least to a degree. University for
example is many people's first taste of independence, but that independence is
supported by some fairly extensive safety nets (financial, social,
educational, etc.) that should prevent screwing up too badly. These safety
nets are certainly not perfect, and putting your face in bottle can still end
quite poorly.

I think one way to create a face putting safe community (physical or virtual)
is to allow anyone to safely propose actions but only let these actions effect
the world if other community members agree. PR based workflows sort of fit
this model. As a new programmer, I should be able to safely submit garbage PRs
while learning without actually hurting anyone, and if my code does get merged
and it breaks something then it's the community that failed. There are
roleplaying communities that also work like this: users can only state their
actions and not the effect of their actions, which are determined by the
people effected. Of course learning and history also has to be considered.
That first garbage PR is understandable, but if I keep submitting garbage PRs
without learning then there's something wrong.

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Animats
Go read "Animal Happiness" by Vicki Hearne. Don't project your mindset into
animals. They have their own mindsets, and they are not humans.

As a horse owner, I have to get this. You have to have a reasonable
understanding of horse minds to deal with half-ton animals at close range.
"Talking with Horses", by Henry Blake, is perhaps the best book on that.

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faitswulff
I feel like dogs have co-evolved with humans to such a high degree that they
are much more approachable with an anthropomorphic perspective than equines.
They, for example, understand human facial expressions, pointing, and words,
among other things. There's a massive amount of research done on how well dogs
understand humans - maybe the reverse is also true.

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lgas
I don't know, I love dogs but I doubt they are doing that much research on how
well we understand them.

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timwis
I agree I've never seen my dog do any research

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aalleavitch
Save for sticking their face into things, which is a form of research if you
think about it...

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Asooka
Text-only version:
[https://text.npr.org/s.php?sid=629760717](https://text.npr.org/s.php?sid=629760717)

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ohmatt
I want to live my life like this.

