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Old 12-06-2018, 10:00 PM   #31
Ulzgoroth
 
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Default Re: Non-Iconographic disadvantage doesn't make sense.

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Originally Posted by Anthony View Post
That just makes it a specialized type of incompetence. Or a random quirk.
Hyperspecialized incompetence seems like something that obviously fails to be worth a quirk compared to other quirks with concrete effects.

On the other hand, if you actually can't operate a GUI (by some dubiously-plausible quirk of neurology) then on most modern computer systems you're not just Incompetent, you literally can't do anything on your own. You'd have to get help to navigate the GUI to get to the non-iconographic interface.

(Of course on the GUIs I use, icons have text labels or text tooltips, so you don't actually have to be able to tell the icons apart.)
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Old 12-06-2018, 11:01 PM   #32
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Default Re: Non-Iconographic disadvantage doesn't make sense.

I guess it could also characterise simple robotic AI which has OCR but not any image recognition function.
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Old 12-07-2018, 12:54 AM   #33
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Default Re: Non-Iconographic disadvantage doesn't make sense.

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Originally Posted by Anthony View Post
How is that not just vanilla Incompetence (computer operation)?
The Incompetence quirk hadn't been invented at the time. The effects, in GURPS Cyberpunk for 3e, of being limited to a command line, were very serious, because you only got a fraction of the number of actions of someone using a GUI. The problem is that the disadvantage has outlived its original context.
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Old 12-07-2018, 06:03 AM   #34
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Default Re: Non-Iconographic disadvantage doesn't make sense.

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Originally Posted by vicky_molokh View Post
They're not iconographics (alternatively: not ideographics), they're phonographics. They're not representative of concepts nor ideas nor creatures, but of sounds. You're conflating the two.
This is not an arbitrary difference - you have special places in your brain for processing sounds into languages. You could have a good enough connection between your visual systems and your language systems to still read (although I suspect you might be a slightly slow reader unless the damage was done with surgical precision) while the other pathways that help recognize things that do NOT have the assistance of a sound-meaning to help prompt recognition.

"Vision" has a large number of specialized subsystems and links to many other places in the brain. It's possible for just one link to be disrupted, or a series of subsystems to be disrupted but the brain tries to lean on other linked systems to "fill in" the missing function.

If you have just enough trouble processing facial expressions, you may not significantly notice it in your day to day life, but the step to taking a hyper abstraction like an emoji (which often isn't even the right way up) and untangling it may be slightly beyond reach. If you have just enough trouble processing the recognition of things, and you rely heavily on details of color, texture, depth, light and shadow, and movement (because you can't synthesize those details into a whole), the more abstract the representation the worse your ability to recognize it will be. Each layer of abstraction strips out details - textures, colours, light and shadow, depth information, contrast, etc. - and it strips away your crutches one by one.

I have middling prosopagnosia - I don't see faces as a whole, they're just a collection of features. I can connect those features enough to recognize people (usually) but I don't see "a face", I see "eyes that look like this, mouth that looks like that", a facial checklist. At times I can't recognize my partner of 20 years in the grocery store, even if he's facing me, but most of the time I'm ok. I love faces with very distinct features because if someone has a really unique nose, I just need to recognize their nose to know who they are.
Abstract representations of faces are a mixed bag. I'm OK at recognizing cartoon characters, even drawn in different styles, but a flat drawing of a real person is hard for me to recognize as that real person. My artistic style is photorealistic because of this.
I also don't suffer from that weird hallucination of seeing faces in things that aren't faces - cars don't have faces, wall plugs don't look like faces, etc. I can intellectually "get" why you all see that, but I don't. My "that is a face" recognition apparatus isn't active enough to get false positives like that. Basically, from my POV you all are just as bad as the Google Deep Dreaming AI that sees dogs everywhere.
A beneficial side effect is that I can read animal facial expressions pretty well - their faces are just a pile of individual features, like a humans, so I don't get thrown off by the parts not working together like a humans face parts would. They work together in another way, which I also don't get, but I can master the individual parts fairly well and I don't get "crosstalk" from circuitry trying to understand a cat or fishes [1] face like a humans.

I've wandered a bit off topic, but it is possible to have strangely specific visual problems - human vision is ridiculously complicated with a lot of post-processing being done to try and make sense of everything.

[1] Yes, fish have facial expressions. Not too many, but they still move their eyes, and some can stick out or suck in their eyes, and they still have (sometimes quite complicated) mouthparts, and some barbules or lures or fans or can change color, etc. A panicy frogfish cornered by a blindly trundling poisonous crown of thorns starfish very clearly expresses "oh crap" with its face.
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Old 12-07-2018, 07:08 AM   #35
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Default Re: Non-Iconographic disadvantage doesn't make sense.

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Originally Posted by Daigoro View Post
How is not being able to understand a GUI then not a disadvantage?
As the Machine that Changed the World series (Dream Machine in the UK) showed the whole purpose of a GUI was to make using a computer easier to not harder. As far as understanding it that would fall under Computer Operation

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Originally Posted by johndallman View Post
The Incompetence quirk hadn't been invented at the time. The effects, in GURPS Cyberpunk for 3e, of being limited to a command line, were very serious, because you only got a fraction of the number of actions of someone using a GUI. The problem is that the disadvantage has outlived its original context.
I think you mean that someone using a GUI only got a fraction of the number of actions available to someone using a CLI which is true. But CLIs are even more abstract then GUIs in the way their commands work.

Here are some DOS commands: CHCP, CALL, CTTY, and LOADFIX. Without looking those up how in the same of sanity could you say that is any more intuitive then an icon? Then you have UNIX commands which are different. vi, ls, and dd are even less clear then an icon would be.

I have to ask. Did whoever wrote GURPS Cyberpunk actually understand the real strengths and weaknesses of CLIs and GUIs or were they Captain Clueless?

Last edited by maximara; 12-07-2018 at 07:29 AM.
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Old 12-07-2018, 09:04 AM   #36
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Default Re: Non-Iconographic disadvantage doesn't make sense.

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Originally Posted by maximara View Post
As the Machine that Changed the World series (Dream Machine in the UK) showed the whole purpose of a GUI was to make using a computer easier to not harder. As far as understanding it that would fall under Computer Operation
A GUI makes computer use easy. Someone with this disadvantage would not be able to benefit from the GUI, which is why it's a disadvantage to the PC.


Quote:
I think you mean that someone using a GUI only got a fraction of the number of actions available to someone using a CLI which is true. But CLIs are even more abstract then GUIs in the way their commands work.
Hackers could purchase cheap "marquee" interfaces, which were text-only, or go up to fully immersive "environmental" interfaces, with a graphic virtual reality interface. In Cyberpunk 3e, environmental interfaces got more actions.

Quote:
Here are some DOS commands: CHCP, CALL, CTTY, and LOADFIX. Without looking those up how in the same of sanity could you say that is any more intuitive then an icon? Then you have UNIX commands which are different. vi, ls, and dd are even less clear then an icon would be.
It doesn't matter which is more "intuitive", someone with this disad just doesn't process icons. They have to type "save" or press ctrl-S. They can't recognise that the floppy disk icon does the same function.

Quote:
I have to ask. Did whoever wrote GURPS Cyberpunk actually understand the real strengths and weaknesses of CLIs and GUIs or were they Captain Clueless?
It was the Secret Service who were the Captain Cluelesses connected with that book.
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Old 12-07-2018, 09:47 AM   #37
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Default Re: Non-Iconographic disadvantage doesn't make sense.

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Originally Posted by maximara View Post
I have to ask. Did whoever wrote GURPS Cyberpunk actually understand the real strengths and weaknesses of CLIs and GUIs or were they Captain Clueless?
Whether or not they understood real computing, they were attempting cinematic genre emulation, wherein hackers in VR goggles use expensive, black market, and special-effects-laden "ICE" to do video-game-like battle in "cyberspace". Spending more money on an interface gets one better performance—and, as a coincidental side effect, more detailed descriptions. Which is the reverse of real life, where graphics processing slows one down, but it is the way it works in the sort of movies where people can get trapped inside computer games.

I seem to recall there's a sidebar or two which explain that real world system intrusion instead involves a lot of dumpster diving and social engineering, and a bit of technical coding; a realistic game would not use the cyberspace-ICE-battle rules.
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Old 12-07-2018, 10:11 AM   #38
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Default Re: Non-Iconographic disadvantage doesn't make sense.

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Originally Posted by johndallman View Post
The Incompetence quirk hadn't been invented at the time. The effects, in GURPS Cyberpunk for 3e, of being limited to a command line, were very serious, because you only got a fraction of the number of actions of someone using a GUI.
Which was still completely irrelevant to someone who wasn't a hacker.
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Old 12-07-2018, 12:18 PM   #39
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Default Re: Non-Iconographic disadvantage doesn't make sense.

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Originally Posted by Daigoro View Post
It doesn't matter which is more "intuitive", someone with this disad just doesn't process icons. They have to type "save" or press ctrl-S. They can't recognise that the floppy disk icon does the same function.
Which makes even less sense then the way Non-Iconographic is described. The "floppy disk" icon doesn't have to be a floppy disk; it can be a chest, a bookcase or anything else that makes it clearer on what it does.

I would like to point out that nearly all GUIs have a menu bar with text and those that didn't (such as BOB) tried to be even less abstract. Heck the better GUIs of the time had words underneath the icons telling you what they were.

You could (and some did) build a different GUI for the MacOS with Hypercard (1987) - which has a crossplatform successor in the form of LiveCode. An "emulation" of MacOS 7.53 with a later version of Hypercard can be found at Internet Archive which effectively shows how things worked back in those early days.

Non-Iconographic User: Ok I turned it on. That funny symbol is dark but there are these words at the top. Oh I move the pointer thing with this object connected to the computer. "File" looks interesting. Oh I can "open" something by clicking and holding the bject connected to the computer. Hey that funny symbol did something and now I have things that look like paper folders and a hand writing on something. This pointer thing can made them dark like the funny symbol was. Let's choose one and see what that "open" thing does now.

Are you seriously trying to say that someone who is Non-Iconographic cannot do the above?!?

Heck World Builder (1986) allowed you to build Myst like worlds which when expanded to 3d (as with RealMyst years later) could form a GUI for a cyberpunk world that emulated the "real" world. Roads are pathways though the net, buildings are the various organizations and security is "guards", safes, or what ever.

The more I go over this the less sense the Non-Iconographic disadvantage makes even by 1990 standards and it is totally idiotic by the time of the 21st century.

Last edited by maximara; 12-07-2018 at 12:51 PM.
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Old 12-07-2018, 12:40 PM   #40
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Default Re: Non-Iconographic disadvantage doesn't make sense.

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Originally Posted by maximara View Post
I think you mean that someone using a GUI only got a fraction of the number of actions available to someone using a CLI which is true.
No, that isn't what I meant. Cyberpunk has three kinds of neural interface: a very crude single-line text interface, where you have to sub-vocalise commands. Doing anything in that takes twice as long as an Icon interface, which looks like a GUI, and allows you to issue commands mentally. That takes twice as long to do anything as an Environmental interface, which is fully immersive VR.

The modern style of CLI usage, where you usually have several windows open and editors in some of them, isn't in the book. IME this form evolved out of GUI usage, since it demands the high-resolution screens needed for GUI work, and I first ran into it in 1995 or so.
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