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Issues with Invention (Edited)

6 years ago2,663 words

Radiotherapy's getting easier, though it's still leaving me tired. And I've been trying to work on this associative memory game idea, but I'm unsure how to go about it; there are some fairly severe barriers in the way!

I think the radiotherapy is starting to have its effects... I had session 11 of 30 today, so I'm about a third of the way through. I'm feeling tired quite often already, and it's only going to get worse from this point. My short-term memory may also be impaired, perhaps permanently. Or not. Who can say? I mean, people wear hazard suits to avoid radiation around them, but here I am having it shot directly into the core of my brain, covering about 25% of the area of this most crucial of organs, right in the middle. Of course that's going to cause some issues, even if the dose isn't high enough for it to be horrendously fatal...

The doctor also said that around session 12 was when people tend to start losing their hair. Weirdly specific! I asked a couple of the radiographers about that, but they both seemed incredulous about it. One said that the mask tends to tighten over time though because the head swells up from radiation exposure. The brain swells, too; you have to take steroids for it. So that's lovely. The doctor told me how barbaric the treatment used to be by comparison just ten years ago, how great it is that things have advanced since then (they used to have to nail some chunk of lead to people's heads, or something, and they bathed the whole brain in devastating radiation)... which just makes me wonder if this kind of somewhat-invasive treatment will still be around in another decade, or whether it'll all be nanobots treating tumours then. Maybe I was born at the wrong time. But it could have been worse. If I'd been born just 50 years ago, this probably would have been the death of me.

Speaking of which, I was talking with a woman while we both waited for our treatment, and it seemed that her brain tumour was a lot worse than mine, to the point where she needed to have both radiotherapy and chemotherapy (I just have the former), and even if it was treated, it was almost certain to recur and kill her... That makes me reflect on my position with all this as well. I'm not fortunate, but again, it could be worse.

Also, I'm feeling less anxious about the procedure now; it's becoming mundane. I actually felt particularly relaxed during today's session, to the point where I could have endured it for much longer. So that's good. Progress.

Something's been coming up in my mind again and again though... When I saw the cancer doctor for a weekly "how's it going?" checkup yesterday, my anxiety during the treatment came up, and I mentioned that I suspect I have Avoidant Personality Disorder, but don't have a formal diagnosis. He glared silently at me for less than a second, as if thinking "oh, here's another hypochondriac who's read an internet article and thinks they have some obscure disease; he's only going to harm himself with his delusion". It's entirely understandable, but frustrating... Understandable because a lot of people do indeed do that; I know I've read about disorders in the past, and convinced myself that I have them to the point where the symptoms begin to manifest in a way that I believe they would. It seems to be something medical students do a lot, when they're learning about diseases. Funnily enough, I used to believe that I had a brain tumour... Ha. But it's frustrating that I'm assumed to be just a delusional hypochondriac, because this anxiety thing is more than that. It's pretty much defined and ruined my entire life, and the Avoidant Personality Disorder label nicely explains symptoms I've already had for years, to the point where I feel comforted thinking "oh, it's just my AvPD acting up" rather than feeling more anxious due to the uncertainty about what was happening to me, as I did in the past. My well-meaning step-dad has also been trying to convince me, during the journeys to and from the hospital, than I can overcome this anxiety just by believing I can, because he's overcome anxiety himself in the past. Having a full-blown disorder isn't like that, though. It isn't the same as everyday anxiety in the same way that capital-D Depression is worlds away from normal sadness; disorders are much harder to control. A person unburdened by such issues might be able to "cheer up" or "calm down" because their feelings are transient, sensible, and directly tied to their thoughts... but for someone with a mental illness, they might actively resist the condition but be severely hindered by it anyway. I wish people would understand it rather than assuming, in a well-intentioned way, that I'm 'making it up', or 'talking myself into it'.

The doctor's disapproving face keeps coming up over and over in my mind, because that's how this condition works. It feels like a stab of shame and a desire to hide whenever it does, too. There've been studies that show that the limbic systems of people with social anxiety are overactive compared to controls when viewing faces expressing negative emotions, which is what this is... A hypersensitive part of my brain interpreting stimuli like other people don't. Limbic, emotional memories are also more powerful than 'normal' memories due to a direct connection between the amygdala and hippocampal (memory) system (sort of; it's complicated), which is why your strongest memories are likely when you were most emotional, especially when you were most afraid (I imagine this is the foundation of PTSD, too). It's a self-preservation system, ultimately. I'm just trying to keep some awareness about this, acceptance that this is just what this disorder does. It seems to be helping me cope, but it's not like I'll be going to a party and chatting to strangers any time soon or anything. I've got brain cancer anyway so I can't. Yes.

Anyway, my energy's still quite low, and the treatment eats up a lot of time, so I've not been doing as much as I'd like. I'm trying to make some progress on games though, at least.



Last time, I talked about the talking-to-random-people idea, but I've since redirected my attention towards the game based around associative memory.

I've got it working, sort of, but I'm uncertain how to actually proceed with it. See, the idea is that you view a series of random objects, and the interactions between those objects bind them together in a list in your mind, such that when you're prompted to remember them in the right order after you've viewed the sequence, your mind brings up the images of the interactions, and leads you from one random object to the next in that way. It's an extremely effective memory trick!

But this presents some issues in terms of making a game around it. I need to give the random objects some visual appearance, but I also need to have them interact in a way that's clear enough to embed itself in memory, and not so complex that it's too hard to make.

I'll give an example of what I've got at the moment. The gameplay sequence involves randomly selecting pairs of nouns, bound together by a verb. I decided that the nouns should be animate objects, because it's much easier to think of verbs for those; dogs can bark, but what action would a banana do? Currently I'm using text for each step of the sequence, and the list you're presented might look like this (you'd have to tap to progress between each of these sentences):



(The description of the first object, chosen randomly from a list for that object, is to cement that image in your mind, since remembering where the list starts can be the hardest bit. Once you've got that, you can use associations, but you can't use an association to bring up the first object. I could prompt the first object when the remembering happens, but I imagine it'd be more satisfying to remember it.)

After that, you'd be prompted to remember the correct objects in the correct sequence (though I've not coded this yet). Based on this little bit of text alone, can you remember these objects and the order they appeared in? It's only three objects so it's not difficult at all, but hopefully you can realise how effective the mental binding of visual interactions can be.

There are a bunch of issues I'm faced with, though.

For one thing, using text isn't a good idea. It's not simple, it could get repetitive and annoying, and it isn't cross-cultural. Ideally, the thing would be entirely visual. The only reason I have text so far was because I wanted to test the randomising of the lists and the selection of appropriate verb bindings.

But I'm also unsure about how to do the visuals. Making separate, animated models for each object - in either 3D or 2D - seems like way too much of an ordeal, so that's unlikely to happen. I could draw them, but my drawing skills are rusty so that's something I'd need to build up to. But what of the interactions? I originally envisioned them being animated, but that'd take a huge amount of time and effort. I could just draw a separate image that 'tells the story' of the interaction in a way that'd be effective, but I'd still have to draw one of those images for every object pair... and each new object added would mean I'd need to draw new interactions for every possible pair.

A cursory skim of the maths behind counting possible pairs suggests that I could use n(n - 1) to calculate the number of interactions based on the length of the list. For three objects, that's 'only' six different interactions. For 20 objects, that's 280. 20 is still a very small number; a list that short would mean that people would see the same objects again and again. 100 objects would mean I'd have to draw 9900 interactions. That's completely impractical.

I can't do away with the interactions though, because that's the whole point of associative memory. So I'm unsure what to do.

One thing I imagined was giving each object a number of drawn or animated actions, and it chooses a random one and the recipient either chooses from a random list of reactions, or has a programmed reaction for that particular action. For example, the dog object could have the actions Lick and Bark. It might be paired with a frog, and chooses to switch to a Bark image while the frog switches to a Sad image, suggesting a scenario where the frog doesn't like the dog's noise, without explicitly drawing or animating that (or writing about it).

That drastically reduces the graphics that need to be made, but I wonder whether people would actually form effective images of those pair-ups, especially if they were seeing the same objects repeatedly, paired with different objects. They might see the dog-frog combo the first time, but during the next run, they might see dog-clown, which might be confusing because they'd already formed an association for dog-frog.

It'd require a ton of art, and the repetition would mean that most people would become desensitised to the few objects very quickly. Content wouldn't be infinite at all.

One option is having procedurally-generated unique objects. For years, I wanted to make a game with procedural monsters, where for example you'd have a base body shape, but the body parts, colours, markings, etc would be randomised, producing relatively unique forms. So that came to mind here. If there were different objects each time, it'd avoid 'reusing' existing associations; every playthrough would be unique.

But associative memory depends on having existing conceptions of the perceived objects, and their properties. A dog licking a frog and feeling psychedelic is an effective mental image because dogs are known to lick, and licking frogs is known to have those effects. An image of a Frundch lomping a Kchat and feeling mardual as a result isn't going to work, even with images, because different mental processes would be at work trying to understand what those things even are.

I thought this seemed like an easy idea to work with, a quick one to make, but now I'm doubtful. I wonder whether it's worth trying to work through these issues, if I even can, or whether I should focus on the other idea for a bit and let my mind deal with the problem in the background. Hmm.



Christmas is coming up, so I imagine my next post will be around then. Though Christmas doesn't mean anything to me these days, it feels strange to talk about anything else, like it's this huge thing that consumes the world and everyone's thoughts even if it doesn't have that effect on me. It used to when I was a child, which is why I feel that way. It feels as if nobody would want to bother thinking about me or what I'm doing if their minds are on that, so it's wrong to write about anything other than how jolly the holidays are making me. Which is silly, I know.

Anyway, I'll try and do what I can, and to cope with all the brain stuff as best I can too.



EDIT: I've been thinking about this a bit more, especially considering a comment on one of the previous posts, and here's an idea that might possibly work.

Perhaps instead of random real-world objects interacting, the 'objects' are actually characters unique to this game, each of which has some 'elemental' affiliation... or I'd probably use the sentiments or something similar. When two are paired up, they 'battle', and the one with the winning element wins... or I'd probably think of some kind of taming equivalent, similar to what I was trying to do with the Taming Dreams take on JRPG battles. This idea is still brand new, so I'm still working on it.

People are familiar enough with these rock-paper-scissors elemental mechanics, and with games that have a bunch of new characters for them to form new mental definitions for (well, sometimes... though I get the impression that the more successful character-collection-building games are those that rely on existing mental definitions (that is, familiar franchises) to avoid this kind of definition generation, which is taxing to the mind, though unconscious).

So rather than a dog meeting a frog or whatever, you might have, say, a Sorrow creature paired with a Courage one, where the Sorrow one 'wins' their brief bout before moving onto the next one. Players would come to recognise these creatures, and while they might not originally have an understanding of them and their traits, it'd definitely come to them in time, likely quickly. It's somewhere between relying on existing understanding and using completely new, randomised objects.

I liked designing miasmon, and the sentiments system, so perhaps this could be an interesting use for those. I could design fairly cute creature designs, and instead of having a victory-or-loss combat system, there could be an "are they friends or not?" kind of thing, where a love heart shows for the 'dominant' one... or something.

Obviously my ideas here are fairly scattered and unrefined, but I'll go down this path, I think! See what I can come up with.