Spontaneous order is one of those ideas that you find in all areas of life once you understand it. But it’s just as interesting to see people noticing the phenomenon without ever having studied the subject, but finding examples of it in seemingly obscure areas. I found the example of a video game critic and journalist noticing spontaneous order at work in a video test posted on YouTube. The object? How video games use color to convey ideas. He opens by saying:
As you can probably tell from my dress sense, I don’t put much emphasis on color. But I find it interesting that, without discussion or apparent collusion on the subject, video games have developed their own color language. Isn’t it interesting that in the world of real-world gear grinding, green means uncommon, purple means rare, and orange means super rare? Why is this still the case? Who decided this? I don’t remember taking part in a vote. But that only scratches the surface. Interface designers have long been able to use specific colors to instantly convey certain concepts to the player without any additional explanation required.
He goes on to list different colors and what they are often used to convey. Part of what makes this a good example of spontaneous order can be found in his comment above. These systems and conventions around color occurred “without discussion or apparent collusion on the subject,” without anyone “participating in a vote.” In other words, the patterns he identifies are the result of human action but not of deliberate human design. But there are some other elements of spontaneous order on display here.
First, a spontaneous order can often seem complicated, even contradictory, at first glance. For example, when explaining how video games have used the color green, he notes that what green conveys can be “everywhere”. It is often associated with health and healing in games, but at the same time it can be used for the opposite effect to signal poison. On other occasions, it can be used to indicate elemental damage, sometimes reporting damage based on “poison, acid, plants, and even wind”. As someone with many years of gaming experience, I can think of examples of all of this. And the curious thing is that even though green is used to indicate a wide variety of different, even contradictory, things, I was never confused as to what it was supposed to signal in a specific context. Simply put, I’ve never encountered something green in a game thinking it would restore health only to discover, to my surprise, that it was poison instead. That’s because color is just one way to convey ideas, and other points in a game’s context make it clearer what “green” is supposed to mean in a given case. Yet I doubt I can explain precisely what these other factors are and in what combination they are used to indicate precisely what green means in this specific case. I just know it when I see it. The information used is not the kind that can be easily articulated and categorized into discrete rules.
Second, once rules and conventions have emerged during this process, it becomes important to stick to them, because common knowledge allows individuals to reliably know what to expect in their environment. When game developers ignore the established order regarding colors conveyed, they end up confusing the player. Watching the video mentioned above triggered the memory imp in my brain which dug up an old essay years ago, discussing a specific example of this problem. In this case, the problem was with the red barrels. In a video game heavily focused on shooting, if you see a red barrel, there is a 100% chance that shooting the barrel will cause it to explode, causing massive damage to nearby enemies. (And in video games, the bad guys are usually athletic enough to make sure their base of operations is right next door). littered with these barrels because… reasons?) The “exploding red barrel” is one of the oldest clichés in video games. One game developer tried to break free from the cliché by making its explosive barrels green instead of red:
A representative of the Storm of bullets The design team, known as Arcade, blogged about the process of making the game’s explosive barrels. Initially, they wanted to go with green barrels to counter the red stereotype. However, in the heat of battle, they discovered that players were largely ignoring the barrels; they would see a green flash while running and it would not register as “explosive”. In this case, the team rightly decided that delivering an instant message was more important than making a style statement.
This is a trivial but real example of how conventions established by spontaneous order, even if they seem arbitrary, are still valuable because they help communicate important information. information and coordinating behavior and setting expectations.
Finally, the set of rules and ideas integrated into a spontaneous order cannot be fully categorized. This shows up in the video near the end, when a suggestion is made to people in the comments to “mention any video game color pairings I missed.” There are many examples in the comments, and I could think of a few more myself. This shows how any attempt to identify the rules that emerge from a spontaneous order will always be limited and partial – not being a deliberate design of a human mind, they cannot be entirely reduced to a system of rules explicit and articulated by a human being. spirit. That doesn’t make it pointless, of course, to try to figure out what those rules are. But we must always keep in mind that no single attempt will fully capture all relevant information.
