inner self

Today, I beat Antichamber.

Antichamber is a brilliant, extraordinary game; one that challenges all of your intuitions about three-dimensional space through a series of increasingly abstruse puzzles.  It's the hardest first-person puzzle game I've ever played, and I've played Dr. Brain:  Action Reaction.

Actually, that image above doesn't do this game justice.  Try this.

So you see?  There's a fourth dimension at work here, and I don't mean time.  The spatial relationships between objects that we take for granted are completely disregarded, and you have to create an entirely new system of understanding "place".

The game is also littered with cute little pictures that reveal sage words when you approach them, like this:

Duck?  Or rabbit?

Some of these are profound, some are silly, and some are just confusing.  But all of them comment or hint at the solution to a nearby puzzle, giving you some insight into what you are temporally proximate to solving.

The stark aesthetic of the game does wonders for the mind.  Without the distractions of a visually busy world, your brain is free to focus all of its energy on solving whatever problem is at hand.  In fact, the "exhibit" area, above, has more visual variety than any other spot in the game.  Most of it is just sheets of single unbroken colors, bordered by the occasional think black line.

I've always been interested in map projections.  Once you start learning about the mathematics that go into presenting a three-dimensional surface in two dimensions, you question a lot about something that may have seemed obvious to you before.  One of my favorite professors in law school had a phrase he liked to use whenever we came to an unresolved controversy:  "reasonable minds can differ."  The same goes for the higher questions of almost every field; you reach a point where wrongness ceases to be a factor in discussion, where every answer is equally wrong.  The reason there are so many map projections is because some are good for representing certain features, and some are good for others.  When you reduce the dimensions of something, you can't show it perfectly. Compromises have to be made.  People argue about which parts of the thing are best to lose, but everybody's losing something.

The next time you get into an argument with someone, stop and reflect on this fact.  Is the other person wrong, or just seeing things from a different perspective?  More importantly:  if you can't bring yourself to see from their perspective, it just may be that they have a better vantage point than you.