[HN Gopher] Inter-brain sync occurs without physical copresence ...
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Inter-brain sync occurs without physical copresence during online
gaming
Author : programd
Score : 100 points
Date : 2022-08-31 14:43 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sciencedirect.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sciencedirect.com)
| im3w1l wrote:
| I wonder what it means that the brain wave synchronization
| decreased over the session. Did some signal cause them to start
| out synchronized and then they gradually drifted apart
| spontaneously? Also kind of wonder if this will replicate.
| tantalor wrote:
| Parallel Synchronized Randomness
|
| https://youtu.be/KlpGe7RN9zk
| dwringer wrote:
| I am also reminded of the series _Maniac_ on Netflix, which I
| highly recommend.
| meremortals wrote:
| edit: maybe not "without physical copresence"
|
| I believe something similar happens when musicians improvise/jam,
| especially Jazz:
|
| https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| Yeah I was about to mention this, or really any other highly
| synchronized activity with a degree of improvisation involved.
| Very cool feeling doing this kind of thing.
|
| I think the point of studies like this using a video game,
| though, is that it's a lot more reproducible.
| hammock wrote:
| Without physical copresence?
| vorpalhex wrote:
| There's no reason that isn't testable..
| hammock wrote:
| Brain sync is known in physically present people, and as I
| believe is understood to be in large part mediated by the vagus
| nerve in your gut.
|
| Interesting to see this finding in remote setting
| amelius wrote:
| I would be more surprised if it occurred without means of
| communication. Now it is just high level cognitive interaction
| shows low level correlation, which is not very interesting.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I know I always ovulated with my fleet mates in Eve
| mym1990 wrote:
| Me while playing League of Legends as my 4 teammates completely
| rip me to shreds for underperforming: "Yep, they are all on the
| same page, that's for sure".
| andrepd wrote:
| I equate League of Legends with drugs or junk food. It's not
| fun, not rewarding, not creative, not anything. I could play 3
| or 4 40m games and at the end have a completely empty feeling.
| It is, however, extremely addictive.
|
| I'll try hard not to get addicted to something that meaningless
| ever again. Games like LoL are the soul-sucking rock-bottom of
| games.
|
| My experience, of course.
| mym1990 wrote:
| I have played League for 10 hours straight before and thought
| "wtf just happened?". Its like time just evaporates and it
| really does feel like an addiction.
| standardly wrote:
| "It's not fun"
|
| What did you expect to get out of a game? If it isn't fun,
| don't play! That's why it felt meaningless lol
| adamrezich wrote:
| maybe it's just me but I've noticed a general steady decline in
| Dota 2 Turbo mode "toxicity" over the years.
| mym1990 wrote:
| Tons of initiatives going on in MOBAs to work on the toxicity
| problems, I hope they are working!
| adamrezich wrote:
| I usually end every turbo game with "ggwp, have a great
| evening everyone", and commend all of the other nine
| players unless someone was being an asshole (regardless of
| whether we won or lost, or whether that player performed
| well). I can't remember a time when Dota 2 was ever
| friendlier than it is now (been playing for over a decade
| now, since beta)... at least, in Turbo. I'm sure the other
| "full" modes still have quite a bit of nastiness as the
| games run longer there than in Turbo.
|
| the whole reason I play the game is what TFA is talking
| about, syncing up and pulling off cool shit with four other
| random people against five other random people online. when
| it works it's incredible.
| mym1990 wrote:
| Really good mindset!
| cevn wrote:
| I just play ARAM now, it's less toxic than ranked.
| amatecha wrote:
| The problem with ARAM is people play terribly and if you're
| actually trying to play well, it's pretty frustrating. People
| mess around and then are like "it's just ARAM bro" when
| you're like "yo wtf plz actually play properly".
|
| In general, League is a frustrating experience because it's
| basically inevitable that even when you're playing your
| absolute best, others on the team aren't. The occasional
| great experiences where everyone has that synergistic
| gameplay and excellent coordination/execution makes it all
| worth it (I guess), but every other match has me wondering
| "why am I still playing this?" heh
| [deleted]
| cevn wrote:
| I devote most of my competitive energy to Rocket League for
| this reason. Games are only 5 minutes long and you can
| actually solo carry. Also you don't have to re learn the
| game every 3 months when a balance patch hits.
|
| edit: I know what you mean. A great League game makes it
| all worth it, but those seem to be maybe 10% of the games
| and the other 90% you are just trying to be a kindergarten
| teacher trying to keep everyone from going afk.
| frostwarrior wrote:
| My entire experience with MOBAs is that people will rip you to
| shreds for not doing or knowing every overly specific thing
| people didn't know either when they had less experience.
| mym1990 wrote:
| Or don't even know currently but just want point fingers.
| Something about humans becoming anonymous really bring out a
| different side of us...
| moonchrome wrote:
| Not really about being anonymous as I've seen the same
| pattern when playing with people I know in real life,
| although playing with strangers removes a lot of restraint.
|
| It's more that those games create a scenario where you are
| going to be frustrated for 20+ minutes because of mistakes
| of others, and you likely started playing because you're
| trying to get away from frustration IRL.
| dwringer wrote:
| Unfortunately I can agree with this completely. I stopped
| playing Fortnite because of this. Although it can be fun
| without winning, when they introduced the victory crowns
| to reward multiple consecutive wins (along with an emote
| to rub it in everyone's face) it seemed like just enough
| to cause us all to start getting frustrated and screw up
| team morale.
| wincy wrote:
| Ugh I stopped playing league of legends because it just made me
| so angry and act so terribly. Screaming at my friends and just
| constantly feeling angry and frustrated. With the way the
| ranking system works this is basically guaranteed that you'll
| lose half your games unless you're a literally world class
| player.
|
| My wife's ex would piss in bottles while drinking vodka and
| playing. If I try to play League she'll throw the breaker
| because the noises are triggering to her.
|
| Now I play D&D because losing is just as much fun (or more
| fun!) than losing.
| [deleted]
| Fatnino wrote:
| Play D&D because losing is just as much fun as losing?
| wincy wrote:
| Hah just as much fun as winning. Losing at D&D can involve
| all sorts of weird and creative things happening depending
| on your Dungeon Master. Often times you might not just die
| in a conflict.
|
| Recently my character found a cursed necklace that guards
| against all but the strongest attacks and my bard is very
| excited and wearing it, feeling invincible. Little does he
| know, there's a very powerful evil being who can hear all
| his thoughts, knows where he is at all times, and can
| compel him to do his bidding.
|
| I'm pretty excited to see how the story develops, even if
| it eventually ends in my character's horrible demise.
| mym1990 wrote:
| When losing is all you know _sob_
| MengerSponge wrote:
| They played League for so long the word "Win" and its
| relatives "Winning" and "Victory" left their vocabulary.
| I'm surprised "fun" is still there!
| znpy wrote:
| If that's your experience with league of legends (and don't
| get me wrong, i _feel_ you) then don't even think about even
| trying OpenArena and similar. The amount of cheaters
| /aimbotters is astonishing, and the lack of a central
| authority means everything stays the same or only gets worse.
|
| I had to stop playing because... let's put it politely and
| say it was having a very bad influence on me.
| mym1990 wrote:
| I have recently transitioned to Teamfight Tactics and a bit
| of Fall Guys, and have had much more enjoyment from it. But I
| have also realized that everything in TFT is RNG based, and
| is almost equivalent to playing a slot machine where every
| pull takes 30-40 minutes.
|
| The scary thing with a 5v5 MOBA and a ranking system is that
| a large part of the game falls outside of your control unless
| you're that player that can consistently carry. So to that
| point, you really have to take time to study the game and
| psychology if you want to climb...but then you get wherever
| you're going and realize you have almost nothing of value to
| show for it.
| skulk wrote:
| > With the way the ranking system works this is basically
| guaranteed that you'll lose half your games unless you're a
| literally world class player.
|
| This is theoretically expected of skill-based matchmaking
| systems.
| ianbutler wrote:
| You are right about sbmm, but it doesn't make for a good
| progression system imo. If my hidden elo says I'm diamond
| or w/e I should cruise through early ranks instead of being
| matched with other diamond elo players climbing from
| bronze. It should only feel like a slog/be super
| competitive when the external rank matches the hidden elo.
| Not the entire time IMO.
|
| Some games get this right, others (looking at you Apex
| Legends Arenas Mode) does not and it just winds up being a
| terrible slog.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > If my hidden elo says I'm diamond or w/e I should
| cruise through early ranks instead of being matched with
| other diamond elo players climbing from bronze.
|
| Or maybe you should stop making new accounts and stop
| smurfing?
|
| I've been a beginner in plenty of games, and it sucks to
| be matched against someone far above your skill level in
| most games.
|
| ------
|
| I get it. A lot of people want to be matched up against
| weaker players so that they have an easy win. That
| doesn't make it fair for the losers in this situation.
| Furthermore, it weakens the community and turns it more
| toxic. Expert players (or even advanced/intermediate
| players) shouldn't seek out weak players and stomp them.
|
| 50% win ratios, for everyone, should be the default goal.
| You climb the Elo to keep 50% win/loss, and as you lose,
| you fall to 50% win/loss as well, or so the ideal is.
| That way, everyone is on fair grounds.
|
| If you want someone to "feed you wins", maybe play a PvE
| game like MMOs or something? But a competitive game is
| zero-sum by default. Half the players lose, and half the
| players win each game. So community managers need to
| spread the wins and losses around in a fair way.
| cube2222 wrote:
| Actually, I think matching you against equal players
| would be much better in such a situation, but you should
| gain much more visible elo for wins than you lose for
| losses (thus going up even with a 50% win rate).
| bick_nyers wrote:
| Lol so true. Why am I being matched up against top 500
| players when I am quite literally making my way through
| bronze.
|
| Just double my queue time until we find a good match at
| that point.
| bick_nyers wrote:
| There can still be issues. For example, how does the ELO
| system view previous wins/losses when calculating ELO
| gain/loss from future wins?
|
| Anecdote: My friends played the first few ranked seasons on
| my Xbox Overwatch account, they started at Bronze and
| eventually got to Silver. I decided to pick it up and play
| ranked with a different friend, we won 9/10 of the
| placement matches. I got ranked Silver, he got ranked
| Platinum. A month later, I make a new Overwatch account on
| PC and rank Platinum with ease.
|
| In these systems, if you gain a lot of skill in a short
| amount of time, or have bad luck early on in your ranked
| career, you can be held back in rank gains to the point
| that you are essentially stuck in place. Creating a new
| account generally allows you to advance significantly
| faster through the ranks.
| ben_w wrote:
| Back when I was in game dev, I really wanted to find a way
| to make them fun even when you lost. I never managed to
| grok that magic, but I did see it in e.g. Settlers of
| Catan.
| mym1990 wrote:
| This becomes a different beast when you introduce
| competitive play. In non-ranked there is this feeling of
| freedom to try new things, have fun, etc... but in ranked
| it feels like things are on the line(despite those things
| being so trivial as a few points up or down).
|
| Settlers is so fun because you really feel like you're on
| a journey the whole game, and while it is nice to win,
| you remember the interactions and experiences in the game
| as the valuable thing(IMO).
| andrepd wrote:
| Unless the dice fuck you over extra hard x)
| rintakumpu wrote:
| Play with a deck of cards instead of dice! 36 cards, six
| sevens, five eights and sixes and so on.
| jack_pp wrote:
| How is that supposed to help? A bad run is a bad run no
| matter the randomizer. Also cards need to be shuffled
| which wastes time if done correctly
| ben_w wrote:
| A deck of cards behaves the way the gambler's fallacy
| expects everything to behave: after enough bad luck,
| you're sure to get a good result.
| mym1990 wrote:
| And I actually only truly grasped this recently(the concept
| makes sense). My paranoid self always thinks that in a game
| like League, there are artificial matchmaking things going
| on to keep you at 50%, apart from a stagnation of skill. In
| truth, I probably just need to get better(at whatever,
| doesn't have to be League).
| jrockway wrote:
| Yeah, if you win 50% of your games it means the
| matchmaker is working perfectly. People really have a lot
| of trouble understanding that.
|
| Also, to improve, you probably have to lose a bunch of
| games while you're unlocking that new knowledge. The
| toxicity of teammates kind of steers people away from
| that. Thus people get stuck at where they place and never
| go up or down significantly.
| jnwatson wrote:
| I'm confused as to what folks think the alternative is.
|
| Winning is a zero-sum game. If they target something
| higher than 50%, there would have to be a reservoir of
| players willing to take less than 50%...
| mym1990 wrote:
| It's not hard to come up with designs where you
| effectively cycle types of queues to where the end result
| is 50/50, but the pathway to get there is psychologically
| manipulative(win streaks/loss streaks/etc...).
|
| Now, winning a single game of LoL is zero-sum, but you
| can't say that the ratings themselves are. Without
| knowing what the actual system is doing, we can't assume
| that players are losing/winning the same number of
| ranking points in a game.
| bick_nyers wrote:
| Unless of course if a team full of me would have a 70%
| winrate, and the system is compensating (because hidden
| ELO) by sticking me with teammates that each have 45%
| winrates.
|
| It still averages out to 50% winrate. Just because you
| can force a point of convergence does not mean it is the
| correct point of convergence.
| jrockway wrote:
| Yeah, I definitely feel this variance in matchmaking.
| play games with my friends every Saturday night and 8
| hours in after 5 beers, I doubt our MMR is quite as high
| as it was when we started the session. (The first game
| probably isn't great either!) But the matchmaker doesn't
| really know these subtleties, so sometimes the enemies
| get an easier than expected game. So it goes.
|
| The competitive ladder climbing meta is really about
| recognizing when you shouldn't be playing and not playing
| then. Interesting angle to optimize.
| mym1990 wrote:
| I don't think the system should even care for these
| externalities because they will eventually balance out
| across a player base and the net effect should be
| zero(everyone will eventually play against a team with a
| drunk person on it). But it creates a prolonged cycle and
| general frustration amongst the player base.
| bick_nyers wrote:
| Yeah, if I want to climb a ladder I have to play first
| thing in the morning (with physical exercise as well as
| warmup games), and make sure I quit at the right time.
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| The issue is that riot has designed it so the 50% has
| become the target rather than the metric.
|
| The result is that you'll go on win and loss streaks and if
| you play long enough it becomes obvious it's being
| manipulated that way.
|
| Winning 1 or 2 and losing 1 or 2 are just fine.
|
| winning 10-15 followed by losing 10-15 just feels bad and
| isn't worth it. And if you've played long enough you can
| start feeling when the tipping point is about to happen.
| The wins will start getting more and more difficult as more
| people on your team obviously don't belong in the game. Or
| vice versa, and you'll start getting people on your teams
| consistently such that nothing you do matters because
| you'll just win.
|
| Then you add in a dash of streamers and people doing
| "bronze to plat" challenges and it's just not fun. Either
| they're losing on purpose to tank their rank or they're
| pubstomping people far below their skill level.
|
| The end result is that it all just feels bad and the only
| people that end up playing a significant number of games
| are actively addicted to it.
| mym1990 wrote:
| Goodhart's Law!
| leach wrote:
| I don't even care when people are toxic, they are so easy to
| bait into raging when they are. I suck at league and say I do
| though so at least I'm honest.
| csense wrote:
| Headline says "online", but the description sounds like they're
| on the same LAN. This matters because the latency between the
| systems (LAN latency ~ 1ms, corresponding to frequency of ~1000
| Hz) is faster than the phenomena they're measuring (2-45 Hz).
|
| I'd assume the mechanism is that the player has a lot of
| physicality, so their brain's pretending the on-screen avatar is
| part of their body. If latency is artificially injected into the
| display or controls or both, do the brain waves develop a phase
| offset? Or does latency just cause the game's sense of
| physicality to break down?
|
| Is interactivity and real-time interaction a necessary component
| of brain wave synchronization? Or does it show up in non-
| interactive settings as well? How could this be tested?
|
| I'm thinking what might be going on here is the game forces
| players' brains' movement processing to physically simulate the
| same vehicle. The brains aren't syncing with each other, they're
| syncing with the on-screen object they're controlling -- which is
| the same for both players, causing their brains to sync --
| transitively.
|
| Simply put, if Alice's brain syncs with the vehicle on screen A
| and Bob's brain syncs with the vehicle on screen B and the two
| screens are in sync with each other because that's what the
| game's networking code is designed to do, the EEG ends up
| measuring Alice's and Bob's brains to be in sync.
|
| I'd be interested in extending the experiment: Instead of giving
| the two players a real-time multiplayer game, have them play a
| single-player game one at a time, and see if their brains sync to
| the gameplay in the same way.
|
| One problem is replicability. To produce the sync phenomenon, you
| might need a game where the controllable character with good
| "physicality" -- a tight feedback loop between its movement and
| inputs, to convince the player's brain to treat their on-screen
| character as an extension of their body. Give the player a
| character they can't control, and their brain isn't convinced the
| character is a part of them, and doesn't sync to it in the same
| way.
|
| But if you give the player a character they _can_ control,
| different people playing the game at different times will have
| different inputs, meaning the phenomenon could be there but you
| have no way to measure it. That is, Player A 's and Player B's
| brain waves might sync to their individual games, but you can't
| measure that with similarity analysis anymore, because in Player
| A's game the vehicle took a different track than in Player B's
| game.
|
| One way to solve this problem is to give them a character with a
| physicality they have to consider but can't control. For example,
| shooting targets from a vehicle -- your brain has to simulate the
| vehicle's path to aim your shots, but you can't control its
| movement directly. The players' brains' simulations of the
| vehicle might end up in sync, leading to their brain waves being
| in sync.
|
| Another way to solve this problem is to create a game with little
| margin for departure from the correct path -- think about a Mario
| Maker speedrun level with a tight timer. Successful runs by
| different players will have very similar character paths and
| controller inputs, because significant departure from the optimal
| path results in failure. See if brain waves of different players
| may end up in sync as they're executing the same moves with the
| same timing.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| We see this behavior in rats[0] and monkeys[1] using various
| methods of directly linking brains, and have shown that
| communication spontaneously occurs even without physical
| presence. Video games are one step of abstraction away from wires
| and electrodes, but the science is still there.
|
| Seriously amazing stuff.
|
| [0] https://www.livescience.com/27544-rats-with-linked-brains-
| wo...
|
| [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/scientists-have-
| linked-3-mac...
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