Just read Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink” on the planeride home. I loved The Tipping Point, but I’d heard mixed things about Blink. While I think there are a lot of valid criticisms to be made about the book, I loved it. Gladwell has a distinctively accessible, anecdotal style of writing, and he talks about things that I simply don’t think much about, but have a lot of effect on my life.
Blink is basically about the “gut” reaction, and makes a case that “gut” reactions access a different style of mental computing that at times can harness more power than a careful analytical approach to understanding a situation. I think the basic thing that sat with me was that people of varying expertise have gut reactions of varying validity, and that you can “train” these gut-level reactions, and isolate them from phenomena that cause you to make bad gut-level reactions.
I dunno that one can train their gut reactions, other than that with increased expertise in a field, your ability to make those judgements improve. But the book did sort of put my personal thought process, at least as it relates to game design, into a framework where I can actually think about it in a *better* way, so that’s good.
For me, I’ll often play a game and have a very visceral reaction to it almost instantly. I can tell you whether a game feels polished, or “good” and I’m rarely wrong *within my own biases*. That is, I hated FFX 20 minutes after I started playing it. After the opening scenes, and the game settled into the meat of its gameplay, I almost instantly realized I didn’t like it – that there was something terribly wrong with the gameplay, and the content. It took me another 25 hours of *playing* the game to be able to point my fingers at what was specifically wrong.
That instinct, and the ability to understand what that gut reaction is pointing to is getting much, much better, though. I can often tell what’s wrong with a game in less than five hours of playtime, and put into words what that gut reaction pointed at. And that – the ability to put the problems into words, and attack them head-on – is one of the harder bits that Gladwell discusses in Blink. He refers to the gut reactions as inside a locked box, and that only in areas of expertise can people start to point at the roots of those reactions.
That is to say, I’ve achieved a level of expertise as it relates to game design.
What’s weird, though, is that both my mother and I have what I would have previously described as an “innate” ability to find the thing in a group of things that *costs* the most. Not necessarily the *best* thing, but almost invariably, the thing that’s the most expensive. Now, that’s just an unfortunate correlation, since it means I like expensive shit – but I guess it means that we’re both picking up on some sort of physical cue – texture, design, whatever – but because I’m not actually an expert on the subject, I have *no idea* what those cues are. The extent of this thing is that I can simply point to something that costs a lot. Talk about a lame skill to have. 😀
Anyway – it’s a good read, IMO – more that it simply gives you an additional framework to think about stuff, and that’s rarely a bad thing. Now that I’ve read it, I’d love to hear what others thought about it in more detail. Anyone?
I read blink a little over a year ago and enjoyed it a lot, as I have pretty much all of Gladwell’s talks that I’ve listened to. Gladwell is one of the best speakers I’ve ever heard—I think he is actually a better speaker than writer.
Still, “enjoying” and “agreeing with” are two different things and that is something I struggle with when I read Gladwell. He’s a great story teller and is able to take psychological research and wrap it into a compelling human story with a focused point that makes you [i]want[/i] to believe.
One critic has coined the term Gladwellian to refer to what she believes is an tendency to misleading oversimplification on his part. While I do think that criticism applies to some of Gladwell’s articles I’ve read, I feel it is inaccurate in the case of Blink.
I took the basic thesis of Blink to be that our gut-level reactions to our experiences were surprisingly complex and influential and can be both amazingly correct or profoundly wrong. I can’t disagree with this. I think he provided ample evidence for this in his book and it meshes what I see in my own experience. Some people have taken the book to say that rapid cognition is the only thing that matters, or that you should trust your gut instinct, but I can only imagine that those people didn’t get to the Amadou Diallo chapter.
If you’re interested in rapid cognition, and have some time, I highly recommend Sources of Power, by Gary Klein (). It goes into much greater depth than Blink. I read it first, which contributed to my disappointment in Blink, because Blink seemed very shiny and shallow in comparison to the detailed research that Klein did.
Klein = ordered. Thanks! Sounds like he covers even some of the same anecdotes that are in Blink – I’d love to hear a different person’s perspective on how it all goes down.