Posts Tagged ‘audience’
Episodic and Semantic Memory
If I ask you to tell me what 3+2 equals, you would probably do so instantly. On the other hand, if I ask you to name in the last movie you saw the theater, you might have to think about it for a second or two. Those two different types of recall illustrate the differences between semantic memory and episodic memory.
I’ll start with episodic memory first. As the name implies, episodic memory is a form of long-term memory that records events from your life. Such episodes might include your wedding, the birth of a child, or something as mundane as getting out of a cab and stepping directly into a puddle. These episodes make up your internal autobiography, which is your personal record of your experiences.
Semantic memory, by contrast, refers to a subconscious knowledge that forms the basis for how we speak our native language, perform tasks we’ve done thousands of times, or interact in social settings. Semantic knowledge is often tacit, meaning that it is hard to quantify or describe. In many cases there is no need to write down the rules of behavior because everyone in the situation knows precisely what they are supposed to do. You’ll find this is true of families around the dinner table or groups of friends who go out for drinks after work.
Episodes from your life provide terrific fodder for scenes if you’re an improviser or for presentations in business. The trick is to find episodes that are directly relevant to your audience’s needs and to resist the temptation to stray too much from the truth. It’s one thing to tell your significant other a slightly exaggerated version of your exploits, but it’s quite another to tell an obviously untrue story in a business presentation. Conference goers have seen lots of presentations and they can smell a fake a mile away. Play it straight—don’t give in to the temptation to exaggerate too much.
Prisoner’s Dilemma, Part 3
My previous two posts discussed the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a classic 2 x 2 game structured so each player feels compelled to violate the trust of the other player. Researcher Robert Axelrod tried to find the best strategy for playing the Prisoner’s Dilemma by holding a tournament among computer programs playing the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Every program would play every other program, a second copy of itself, and a program Axelrod created that randomly chose whether to cooperate or defect. In that first tournament, which had 14 entrants, a program by Anatol Rapoport named Tit for Tat won.
The strategy behind Tit for Tat is extremely simple: Start out by cooperating, but if the other player defects, defect on the next turn as punishment. If the other player did not defect on the next turn, the program would switch back to cooperating. So why would this program win? As Stevens points out in his course, the best the program can hope to do is to tie. It never tries to take advantage of the other player, so it will never get a higher payoff in any round than the other program. What happened was that Tit for Tat minimized its losses. It punished other programs for defecting, but it only did so once if there was just a single defection. This strategy of minimizing its own losses while minimizing the other programs’ gain due to bad behavior made Tit for Tat the best program of the bunch.
The key to the success of Tit for Tat is that it elicits cooperation. Axelrod noted that the program is nice, provokable, forgiving, and straightforward. Among humans playing the game, or for computer programs with a memory of past turns, playing Tit for Tat lets other player accurately predict the consequences of their actions. In the first Prisoner’s Dilemma tournament, the top eight programs were all nice, which meant that they were never the first to defect.
The participants included a program called JOSS, which was the same as Tit for Tat but threw in the occasional defection at random intervals. The program’s design was meant to take advantage of the occasionally high payoff from an unchallenged defection while retaining the benefits of cooperation. Unfortunately, this strategy resulted in extremely low scores because its actions weren’t predictable. One very negative consequence was that it created a series of moves versus Tit for Tat, and variations of Tit for Tat, in which each program defected on alternate turns and led to dismally low scores.
In Axelrod’s analysis of the first tournament, he noted that there were three strategies not included in the tournament but that, if submitted, would have won. With these results made available to potential entrants, along with randomizing the number of rounds each pair of strategies competed against each other to invalidate “late round” tactics, he ran a second tournament. This new competition attracted 62 entries. Tit for Tat won again. From the results, it’s easy to see that there is a penalty for being the first to defect. Axelrod wrote:
What seems to have happened is an interesting interaction between people who drew one lesson and people who drew another from the first round. Lesson One was: “Be nice and forgiving.” Lesson Two was more exploitative: “If others are going to be nice and forgiving, it pays to try to take advantage of them.” The people who drew Lesson One suffered in the second round from those who drew Lesson Two….The reason is that in trying to exploit other rules, they often eventually got punished enough to make the whole game less rewarding for both players than pure mutual cooperation would have been.
The lessons for improv and business are obvious, so I won’t belabor them. I would point out that the Prisoner’s Dilemma is an inherently grim scenario, so it’s best not to get into this type of situation in the first place. Because each player faces potential catastrophe if they don’t protect themselves, you can allow the players to communicate and not guarantee cooperation.
Next up: further insights into the nature of competition in the Prisoner’s Dilemma scenario.
Improv and Limitations
This post continues my brief series on how you can learn about improv and business from non-improvisers. I’m drawing this set of examples from 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School, by Matthew Frederick.
Frederick points out that limitations encourage creativity. Some improvisers, particularly younger ones, want to perform with either no or minimal constraints on their creation. For them, true improvisation isn’t constrained by suggestions or game rules. Instead, they might not even get a suggestion before starting…something… based on whatever comes to mind. This type of production can work, but the process relegates the audience to the role of passive observers. As I’ve said several times before: if audience members expect to see improvised theatre but have no chance to affect the performance, how do they know what they’re seeing is truly improvised?
Like architects who work within the constraints of space, physics, budget, and client desires, improvisers should strongly consider ceding more control to their audience. Stepping out of the constraints imposed by high school and college instructors and spreading one’s wings feels wonderful to the performer, but it’s not as satisfying for audience members who expect to participate in the process. Rehearsals, workshops, and performances for other improvisers present wonderful opportunities to work from scratch and indulge. Paying audiences deserve the chance to play their role, too.
Significant Objects and Events
I have one more post to go in my listening series but I had to tell you about the book Significant Objects, just published by Fantagraphics. The idea behind the project was to sell 100 mudane items such as ashtrays and gold-colored rabbit candles on eBay. The twist was that the item description was actually a short-short fiction piece by professional writers such as Meg Cabot, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Scarlett Thomas.
So how much value did the stories, which were clearly labeled as fiction, add to the items? The items cost an average of $1.25 to acquire and sold for a total of nearly $8,000. That’s a profit of about $7,875, or over 6,000 times acquisition cost.
When I was young, I heard a story about an auction where the auctioneer was having a hard time getting anyone to bid on a guitar. One of his assistants picked up the guitar and played a beautiful song, causing the price to go through the roof when the bidders realized the object’s potential. That story is probably apocryphal, but the lesson remains: you make something significant by how you relate to it, whether by making music or writing a story about it.
As improvisers, we use our audience members’ suggestions to create our work. We have a duty to them to make their contributions significant by honoring what they gave us, especially if we’re replaying their day or referring to an important event in their life. Remember also that we can do harm. It’s one thing to show how a person’s day could go wrong, but it’s another to dismiss what they’ve said or done.
Keep your audience’s needs at the forefront of everything you do. After all, they’re the most important group in the theatre.
Improspectives 