Butterflies & Hurricanes Lyrics

I’ve always enjoyed Butterflies & Hurricanes because of its inspirational mood and appealing mix of rock and classical style.  I could never fully understand the lyrics, and for some reason, I was moved to look them up today.  They are excerpted below:

Change everything you are

And everything you were

Your number has been called

 

Fights and battles have begun

Revenge will surely come

Your hard times are ahead

 

Best, you’ve got to be the best

You’ve got to change the world

And use this chance to be heard

Your time is now

 

Don’t let yourself down

And don’t let yourself go

Your last chance has arrived

 

Best, you’ve got to be the best

You’ve got to change the world

And use this chance to be heard

Your time is now

I’m no musical expert, but to me Muse is creating a metaphor based on chaos theory.  Among other things, the song is drawing a parallel between the ability of a butterfly to change weather patterns and the ability of a human to change the world.  Let me explain.

What is Chaos Theory?

Chaos theory is a field of scientific study dedicated to studying the behavior of complex and dynamical (i.e. chaotic) systems.  It’s absolutely crucial to realize that the word chaos used in this context refers to a deterministic system.  In other words, given the right formulas, one could determine how the system will behave over time.  However, the system is complex enough that its outputs appear to be random over time – even though it isn’t purely random – hence the term deterministic chaos, or just chaos.

The Butterfly Effect

One of three core properties of a chaotic system is that it is sensitive to initial conditions.  This means, roughly speaking, that the points that are close to each other at the initial stages of a system will be greatly different in the future.  This implies that small changes in the points early on will result in very large changes later.  In 1952, Ray Bradbury illustrated the concept in a book about time travel, where he explained that the death of a butterfly during prehistoric times could lead to a much different reality in the future.

Edward Lorenz later reported scientific evidence of this concept while running a weather simulation.  To make things easier for himself, he shortened the decimal .506127 to .506 while inputting values into the simulation, which resulted in a much different output in the weather system.  After doing further study, he reported his findings in a talk Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?, choosing a butterfly as a nod to Bardbury’s book.  Ever since, the butterfly effect has been used to illustrate a core component of chaotic systems.

Using the Butterfly Effect in Game Design

The basic concept behind the butterfly effect is that a very small change early on can have a large impact later.  Because the changes made early on have a large impact, they are meaningful.  However, because the changes made early on are small, they seem meaningless.  This creates a dichotomy where the changes made to the system seem to have much less meaning than they actually do.  In addition, the difference between the perceived meaning and actual meaning is not realized until later.

The game designer can use this dichotomy as a tool in several ways.  If the player makes a wrong choice early on, the player could feel regret later.  If play continued after that regret, the player would be more careful about his decisions the next time around.  This tool is used in the game Jumpman to good effect.  The avatar in Jumpman has little friction, so a small movement causes the player to slide easily.  This is like creating a miniature butterfly effect every time the avatar moves.  As the player progresses through the game, he learns to be very careful about his movements, because one small error could lead the avatar to instant death.

Another way the designer could use this dichotomy is as a way to create hope.  If the player knew the meaning of the actions he made early on, he could gain hope that later those actions would have a large impact that would give him an advantage.  Chess is a good example of this.  Players must move the pawns first in order to free up the more powerful pieces.  This makes the first few moves in a Chess game pretty important.  In fact, expert players will be able to recognize a particular play style by watching the first several moves in a Chess game.  Being able to see the pattern early will help them to understand meaningful moves that could be made later.  This gives the player hope that he can overcome his opponent successfully.

A designer can also use the butterfly effect in the story of a game.  The most obvious way would be force the player to make decisions at certain points in the game, branching the story into alternate versions.  This was made popular by the Choose Your Own Adventure books.  Lately, Daniel Benmergui and Gregory Weir have used this technique in their games I Wish I Were the Moon and (I Fell In Love With) The Majesty of Colors.  Each game gives the player the freedom to explore the consequences of his actions made to the characters and the environment.  Those consequences are played out in short animations as endings to the game.  The final goal of the game is to experience all of the endings.  Both games are pretty small in scope, so the designers have not created a lot of room for the early actions in the game to branch very far and therefore to cause much impact.  The Majesty of Colors takes the concept a little further, and after playing it, one can see how this concept could be extended so that the stories become even more different over time.

I’m sure the best way to create meaning with the butterfly effect is yet to come.  Until then, these directions should be explored further in games.  Doing so just might change the world. . .

An overview of meaningful play

The concept states that the amount of meaning play has is the value of the relationship between the action and outcome.  So if an interaction has value to you, it is meaningful.  And in order for it to have value, you have to both understand it (discernable) and make sense of it in its context (integrated).

If that’s the case, then meaning is quantitative.  The qualitative aspect of meaning would refer to its type:  whether it’s positive, negative, or maybe even more specific types like funny, dramatic, thrilling, etc.  For the more math-inclined, the amount of meaning refers to the length of a vector, and the positive nature of it refers to its direction.

A positive, meaningless game?

Therefore, that begs the question:  Can you have a meaningless game that results in a positive outcome?  It seems like in order for you to have a positive outcome, you’d have to have meaning.  So if a game was meaningless, the positive outcome would have to come from somewhere other than the game itself.

Still, without actual meaning in the game itself, it doesn’t seem like there would be much meaning left to get.  Maybe a game would send a message just by its very existence.  Therefore, a group of meaningless games might result in a noticable positive outcome.    Does the very existence of a game have meaning?

To find out, I would conduct the following experiment:  create a series of games that are meaningless to play, but when presented as a group, have a positive outcome.  If successful, each game would result in a positive outcome that is a fraction of the total positive outcome of the group, while still remaining meaningless itself.