#indexicality

UN JOUR DERRIDA  | Valerio Adami, Jacques-Olivier Bégot, Daniel Bougnoux, et al.

 indexical>aboutness>morphogenesis, 

  iconic>medium capacity>equilibration/entropy

1.

Schelling defines games of strategy as any situation in which each player's best choice of action depends on the actions (he expects) the other player will take (and vice-versa, reflexively). This is in contrast to games of skill and games of chance. "Strategy," then, is the study of conflicting parties' behaviors as they are premised on "the interdependence of the adversaries' decisions and on their expectations about each others' behaviors."

We will call "script" a set of moves, from start to end, across a game. Games of strategy are definitionally marked by their lack of a player-independent & globally optimal ("PIG-optimal") script—that is, a script which will produce the best possible outcome in every game against every possible player.

(Or at the very least, these games of strategy have not had their PIG-optimal strategy discovered yet, so a successful move, or script, is functionally indexical—"indexical" as in, "player and context-dependent.")

When moves are indexical, it means that their efficacy depends on the opponent's future move(s). In "Rock, Paper, Scissors," no single move is PIG-optimal. The efficacy of playing "rock" fully depends on whether the opponent will play rock (resulting in stalemate), paper (defeat), or scissors (victory).

2.

Strategy games span a continuum between cooperative and adversarial.

In games tending toward the cooperative side, it behooves players to be legible, and thus predictable. This is because, if any individual player's best move depends on other players' next move(s), then Pareto optimal aggregate play among all players requires players perfectly anticipating each other (so they are each, individually, able to make the best move dependent on each other). In a cooperative game of Rock, Paper, Scissors where winning consisted of matching moves (e.g. two rocks, two papers, etc), it behooves players to get into a rhythm, to repeat themselves, etc.

This goes some way, I think, toward explaining social customs and conventions, the inculcation of habit. It is a pro-social gesture to be legible, insofar as it allows other players in a social space to optimize around you. This reciprocal self-legibilizing allows for spontaneous organization, where sophisticated behavioral patterns emerge in e.g. conversational turn-taking, team sports, drivers who efficiently and safely manage an intersection with a broken traffic light, etc. Meanwhile, those who are unpredictable or illegible are "creepy," "unsettling," etc...

(Convention—settling on a shared script—is also computationally tractable, whereas assessing other players' next move in order to make your next move, when their move depends on their assessment of your next move, which depends on... is an NP-hard recursive problem. More on this soon.)

In games tending toward the adversarial side, it behooves players to be illegible, and thus unpredictable. This is because, if any individual player's move efficacy depends on his opponent's next move(s), then that player is disadvantaged if his opponent can anticipate, and thus thwart, his choice. For a competent opponent to know that he is about to play "rock" is equivalent to losing. So long as he can be anticipated, he cannot win, because in a game like Rock Paper Scissors, moves are fully indexical in their "quality" or efficacy. There is no "better" or "worse" move in a vacuum; only better or worse moves given an opponent's move.

Another high-level strategy, for adversarial games, is what I'll call "pseudo-legibility." This approach involves setting up an opponent expectation, by intentionally leaking information, or displaying a pattern, during low-stakes rounds of the game. Then, when a high-stakes round approaches, the player "cashes out" by breaking his pattern. Here he has flipped the script: by making himself appear predictable, he has in actuality made his opponent predictable.

For instance, a poker player may feign a tell, and then display that tell several times during small pots. Later in the game, when a large pots (and a good hand) comes around, he can once again display the tell, and lead his opponent to believe he is bluffing. At this point, he can just "take his opponent's money": he can "play" him by ratcheting up the bet and clearing house.

3.

Note that there is in some sense a player-independent optimal strategy for Rock, Paper, Scissors, which is pure randomness. The problem is that pure randomness will secure a lower win percentage against sub-optimal players than a player-dependent strategy would have. Randomness is only "optimal" in that, if one has no idea who his opponent is, it is the optimal strategy. We will call this a player-blind optimal strategy, or PB-optimal. In a one-round game of Rock, Paper, Scissors against an anonymous opponent—or in a multi-round, blindfolded game, where neither player learns their opponent's moves (and by extension, the outcome of the round) until all rounds are over—pure randomness is the most effective strategy.

(This has something to do with "exploitability"—@natural-hazard has written that "Traditional game theory sacrifices any plausible yet uncertain edge you might have for the guarantee that you will never be taken advantage of." But I have yet to integrate this concept of exploitability into my broader understanding.)

One interesting property of PB-optimal strategies is that they are also the optimal strategies when playing against other PB-optimal players. That is, the PB-optimal strategy becomes more and more effective the better the players one is competing against. In a tournament of professional Rock, Paper, Scissors players, winners would be those best at cognitively simulating randomness. In a tournament of amateur Rock, Paper, Scissors players, winners would be those best at reading their opponents, at "playing the player."

(Also, in some meaningful sense, winners would be playing the room: If, thus far in the tournament, you've noticed that players are rock-heavy, you might be inclined to play paper OR, alternatively, hypothesize that, since other players have thus far had outsized success—premium returns—on playing paper, then a preference for scissors may be a successful tactic.)

4.

Playing the player involves what we can call generalized reading. There are conceptual reasons to call it this, but the idea is bone-achingly simple: to play a player—to recognize his patterns and regularities, in order to exploit them—one must interpret the player. Look for clues, watch his face for tells, pay attention to how he responds to certain moves, or what biases or preferences exist in his play. And inevitably, if one plays with patterns, then these patterns are on display—all moves are publicly visible in their entirety by both players. One cannot play "rock" while hiding that one is playing rock. In this sense, information inevitably "leaks" in the process of play.

PB-optimal play, in other words, becomes optimal when player moves do not leak information. Only in the "blinded" version of Rock, Paper, Scissors can one "play rock" while hiding "playing rock."

In a game like Rock, Paper, Scissors, virtually all players are equally competent at selecting and deploying moves, conditioned on knowing what their opponent will play. (Each player knows rock beats scissors, scissors paper, paper rock. And each player is equally physically competent at using a given move; there is no level of skill that bars them from countering rock with paper.) Therefore, success in the game is one-to-one with success at anticipating one's opponent. This makes it an extreme case of strategic indexicality, the property of strategies depending on opponent strategy. But there is always, in games of strategies, an element of indexicality to a given move's efficacy—otherwise it would not be a game of strategy, it would have a PIG-optimal solution.

Randomness is PB-optimal insofar as it prevents the opponent predicting, at a rate higher than 1/3, what move one will play next. Illegibility is chosen deliberately as a descriptive term here: one cannot be "read" by one's opponent, when one plays randomly; there is no pattern to pull out of gameplay. It is ironic, and perhaps deeply important, that the strategy which is optimal when blindfolded is also the strategy which blindfolds (one's opponent.)

Pseudo-legibility, then, is a strategy of generalized writing. Insofar as your opponent is basing his moves on what he predicts you will do, and he is making predictions based on his interpretations of your previous play (including e.g. body language), then it is advantageous to present him with a false reading, a false interpretation. By planting such a false reading in his mind, one can thereby begin predicting his behavior while simultaneously remaining unpredictable oneself.

This occurs in situations of mixed conflict and coordination. When one feels like they have been "led on," or that they operated under a false impression, they feel they have been "played." They believed the Other was presenting—pro-socially and honestly—a certain pattern, and thus presented their own pattern pro-socially and honestly. This makes them manipulable to the Other, while the Other remains un-manipulable to them. (Because the Other's real patterns are unknown.)

5.

Strategy games get weirdly recursive, in their induction patterns, because one is not modeling what "is" but what their opponent believes. Simultaneously, the opponent is modeling what his opponent believes. Thus, one must model what one's opponent believes one believes one's opponent believes... etc. The "level" at which this mutual modeling bottoms out matters quite a bit, insofar as a player who is thinking too many "levels" deep will mis-model his opponent.

In this sense, strategy games share many structural similarities with Keynesian Beauty Contests, the world of fashion, stock bubbles, sexual fitness etc. A female of a species inclined to find those males handsome which other females find handsome is, in some sense, looking for genetics that will produce a sexually desirable offspring, to the extent that the sexual taste of females in her offspring's generation can be modeled via the sexual taste of females in her generation.

Hyperstition is at its most effective in such systems. The difficult part is breaking inertia, giving the meme a kick-start. But once it picks up momentum, this momentum builds via the positive feedback loops of a Matthew Effect. The meme goes "viral." This is known as runaway selection, and it can come at the cost of an organism's non-sexual fitness. That is, in optimizing for some intra-species game, it becomes less optimized for the inter-species game. Which, of course, is the opposite of how these things are "supposed" to work.

No, this is not the name of a B-film from the 1950s (although, that sounds like one of those films that would be so bad it's somehow good?). Instead, this is a post about how style and other visual elements are meaningful forms of discourse in creating and maintaining identity, such as, as is in the theme of this blog, lesbian gender.

Clothing and other visual identity markers are one way to communicate one's identity to the world. Style carries a lot of meaning in association, from cultural references and subcultural ties to stereotypical roles and ideologies. As such, clothing is a powerful form of discourse in the creation and maintenance of identity, community, and practise. Through the use of style, beauty, and other visual messages, "the body becomes part of a system of signification".

Style can also be used as a way to signify the characteristics that are important to a person or a community. Through the production of visual discourses of appearance, the connected meanings can be used in the construction of space, subcultural communities, and discourses that challenge hegemony. For example, in Lucy Jones' papers, there are frequent references to the Sapphic Stompers, a UK-based butch lesbian hiking group. Through the style of the members of the group and the stereotypes connected to their appearances, the group's collective identity as lesbians, feminists, hikers, and butches is projected.

Both butch (as with the Stompers) and femme are general identities that fall on a spectrum of different gender presentations and identities within the lesbian community. While these are the two most visible lesbian gender identities, there are many who do not identify as specifically femme or butch. However, similar discourses can be used to create other meanings regarding femininity, lesbianism, and the related roles, power dynamics, and agency associated with femininity, masculinity, and/or androgyny.

In the below videos by lesbian YouTubers Jessica Kellgren-Fozard and Stevie Boebi, there are a variety of different lesbian gender presentations explored and interpreted. The looks play off of different subcultures, stereotypes, and roles, and are all different expressions of femininity within lesbian gender identities.

As noted within this first video, different identity categories can be reflected through only clothing. For example, the first outfit ('dark cottagecore' - on the basis of the internet subculture of 'cottagecore') was first interpreted by Jessica as a 'Los Angeles witch' lesbian: a reflection of gender, sexual orientation, geography, and religion!

Each of the styles in these two videos is also a subversion of hegemonic and heteronormative femininity. The outfits are being worn by feminine people, commenting on different presentations of femininity, in a way that mirrors lesbian desire, power, and ideologies.

However, the meanings indexed by the visual styles are contextually based. Performance does not depend on the actions of the speaker (or wearer), but instead on the forms and meanings that exist elsewhere. If these outfits were worn in different places, or when interacting with different people, the interpretations of the styles may be different. However, in any case, these outfits will carry meaning to both the wearer, as well as the viewer.

Fuelled by political and economic trends in the 21st century, the concepts “New Nordic” and “Nordic Cool” have entered the global scene in design, cuisine, entertainment, and general lifestyle. Simultaneously, due to globalisation, individuals today are subjected to a higher number of language contact situations than ever before, in face-to-face communication as well as through foreign products and international advertisements. The term linguistic landscape, which refers to the visibility of languages in public spaces, was first introduced to linguistics by Landry and Bourhis in 1997. In their study, the linguistic landscape of an area is defined by the languages on public road signs, advertisements, and commercial shop signs. In practice all neighbourhoods, cities, and even entire countries have their own linguistic landscape, because all public entities include some form of written language. According to Landry and Bourhis, the linguistic landscape of a territory has two principal functions: an informational function and a symbolic function. While traditional linguistic landscape research can still be used to study the language uses and policies of localised physical spaces, a large part of the language we encounter on a daily basis reaches us through some type of advertisement or marketing, which is (usually) not contained within a specific neighbourhood or city. This type of sign is purposefully designed to attract our attention, to give us an association, and to sell us a product or idea. The language used on a product is a crucial part of its “unique selling proposition” (USP); a partially or wholly symbolic ideal, communicated through the product's label, packaging, and advertising.

Examples of product labels and designs involving faux Nordic.

Unlike countries such as France and Italy, which have been strongly associated with fashion and food for decades or even centuries, widespread positive associations related to Nordic countries are relatively new. In the last century the global perception of the Nordic countries abroad has shifted considerably, from being regarded as a poor and insignificant region in Europe at the start of the 20th century, to being considered one of the most progressive and happy regions in the word today. Designer furniture from Northern Europe has been marketed globally as “Nordic” since the 1950s, but it has seen a new peak of popularity in recent years with “New Nordic” and Scandinavian retro designs, alongside the general concept of “Nordic living”. Both Nordic interior design and fashion have come to be associated with positive qualities of simplicity and craftsmanship, and the conceptual aesthetics of “Nordicness” have spread into other domains. Nordic food has become defined with symbolic values such as ‘purity’ and ‘freshness’, qualities which, over time, have become intrinsic to the idea of “the Nordics”. According to Skou and Munch , this fascination seems to be “fuelled by different global, political, and economic trends and the reactualisation of the Nordic welfare states as historical role models.” As the popularity and recognisability of Nordicness becomes greater, fewer visual clues are required for people to identify a product as Nordic or Nordic-inspired. In some cases, the association can be created by using a full word from a Nordic language, even in situations where the target audience would not understand the word. In other situations, the names of products or businesses may be made up words that are simply intended to look like they stem from a Nordic language. Quite often, however, the writing system of one or several of the Nordic languages may be mimicked, with orthographic features borrowed into other languages in order to inspire associations of Nordicness or globalism.

Examples of product labels and designs involving exaggerated Nordic features in their names.