Happiness Terrains

Anyone with even a passing interest in computer video games from a few years back likely remembers the smash hit "The Sims". Players were offered the chance to build miniature houses, and then micromanage the lives of the inhabitants. The object of the game was to keep ones sims happy; failure to do so could result in sickness and even death. Keeping sims happy involved maintaining a clean home, buying nice things, and socializing with other sims in the neighborhood.

While you could exercise considerable control over your sims' behavior, it would be tedious to go full manual, particularly with several in your house. So the game provided means for the characters to take initiative. How did the underlying code handle the task?

Your first guess might be to program complex decision processes into the characters themselves, but this becomes rather difficult to implement. Instead, the developers attached happiness values to the various objects and rooms in the house.

Thus a nice lamp or sofa had a high happiness value, while the dreaded clown painting had a very low value. These values morphed an invisible terrain, much like planets and stars warp space and time. Characters approach a very happy object, and fall into it's warped field of happiness.

Pac-Man used a similar scheme, one of "Pac-Man here-ness" that ghosts used to figure out where Pac-Man was so as to eat him.

All of this makes for fun computer programming trivia, or so it would have, were I not in the process of reading Jane Jacobs' remarkable The Death and Life of Great American Cities. In it, Jacobs details what causes city neighborhoods to thrive or fail. Almost without exception, the causes are minute design details. Cities, it seems, have a happiness terrain.

For instance, the quality of a city neighborhood can depend heavily on such seemingly quotidian issues as the width of sidewalks, the number of restaurants, the length of blocks, and the density of buildings. Put a park in the wrong place, and you can turn a neighborhood into a slum.

The key to the whole system is casual interaction, that is, the ability to be around people you don't know, or kind of know, so as to watch. From such materials, public security, child safety, and enjoyable life can be wrought, without much direct interference by authority figures. Anything that encourages the casual mixture of people thus encourages city stability.

With all this in mind, I find myself wondering how often we ascribe responsibility to individuals, when at least some of the blame can be placed on the environment. It's dangerous to absolve a person's bad behavior for environmental concerns, but so often we look at a situation, blame someone, and move on, which fixes nothing. If it's possible to prevent trouble simply by tweaking an environment, then yeesh, why the heck not?

Returning to software and its creation, I find myself pondering my current work environment, and the effect that details of my office have on our work flows.

Why wouldn't shared offices vs. private offices vs. cubicles be an important decision? Why wouldn't light levels matter a lot? And not just on a minor level, but on system-shaping levels, levels that affect the whole company? Is the bathroom in a corner or in the middle? Where do people go to meet? We spend endless hours wondering about our machines and people, but often less time looking at how objects shape the system.

If we do think about objects, it is matters such as whether the chairs are comfortable. Rare, in my experience, is the deep soul searching inquiry: Does this arrangement make us productive?

With Jacobs on my mind, I'm increasingly wondering if neglecting those kinds of questions is not only a lost opportunity, but perhaps a terrible, terrible mistake.