There are lots of omega-3-related self-experiments I’d like to do: 1. What about fish oil? 2. Is omega-6 bad for the brain? As my olive-oil results suggested. 3. “Blind” experiments where I don’t know what I’ve ingested. I wanted to use a design that involved many tests/day. This would be easy if the tests were fun, hard if they weren’t. Games are fun–could I figure out why and make a mental test that was like playing a game?
After talking with Greg Niemeyer, I decided that color, variety, feedback, and appropriate difficulty (not too little, not too much) were possible reasons games are fun. I constructed a letter-counting task with all of these attributes — and it wasn’t fun. I had to push myself to do it. These attributes may help, but not a lot.
Then, as I’ve posted, a friend gave me a bilboquet. For such a simple object, it was surprisingly fun and slightly addictive. Thinking about other addictive games, such as Tetris (I once played a lot of Tetris), I guessed that the crucial features of a game that make it addictive are: 1. Success is sharply defined. 2. Not too easy. 3. Hand-eye coordination. (Not any eye-body coordination: I did thousands of balancing tests but had no trouble stopping.)
I constructed a new task with these attributes: Click the Circle. A circle appears on the screen, you move the pointer to the circle and click on it; a new circle appears somewhere else, you move the pointer to click on it, etc. At the end there’s a little feedback: how long it took. Very simple.
This task, at least so far, is addictive. I think something else may be going on in addition to the three factors: we enjoy completion, especially visual completion. (Which Tetris had a lot of.) In this case the visual completion is the blank space that appears when I click on a circle. If I have a few dishes to do, it’s easy to do them–the promise of an empty sink (= visual completion) draws me to the task. In contrast, if there are a lot of dishes to do, it’s much harder to do a few of them. I’ll probably do none of them or all of them. If you have 20 dishes to do, doing them will generate a lot more pleasure (and thus will be easier to do in the future) if you can manage to create 20 completion moments than if they get piled up and there is only one completion moment.