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Feedback loops and chaos
I have to be very careful when writing programs where feedback is immediate. I can all too easily get into something reminiscent of the "just one more turn" 4X players talk about, except in my case it becomes "just one more tweak". I can almost immediately see the results of my changes, but there's a random component to it as well.
Although I don't think I would get trapped in Skinner boxes - I don't even like game concepts based on them - and although coding + feedback is not directly a Skinner box, the kind of self-trapping feels at least somewhat like I imagine being trapped in one does. Sometimes I can say "okay, I need to get out of here. Stop doing what I'm doing, there are more important things to do". Yet I don't.
So I have to be careful; or I blink my eyes, hours have passed, and I've implemented an RPN-based random function generator in C++ just to automatically render a greater variety of fractals.
Although I don't think I would get trapped in Skinner boxes - I don't even like game concepts based on them - and although coding + feedback is not directly a Skinner box, the kind of self-trapping feels at least somewhat like I imagine being trapped in one does. Sometimes I can say "okay, I need to get out of here. Stop doing what I'm doing, there are more important things to do". Yet I don't.
So I have to be careful; or I blink my eyes, hours have passed, and I've implemented an RPN-based random function generator in C++ just to automatically render a greater variety of fractals.