From: Ed Kummel (tech_ed_at_yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Mar 17 2004 - 16:02:29 PST
I have the same problem...especially on the Newt.
A good example of this is the solitare game. On both
the Newt and the PC, playing Solitare is different
then when you have a deck of cards in your hand.
Its something I call the "Panic Factor"
It works off the premise that if you panic, you focus
your attention to a greater extent (mild panic as
opposed to like a panic attack)
When I'm playing with a deck of cards, I know how many
cards I have left so I can make an educated decision
as to whether or not I should make a risky play. On a
computer game, I have no idea how many cards I have
left...so I don't know if I have enough to recover
from a bad move, or if I don't have enough left for
normal play...And just telling me the number isn't
good enough...the number is an arbitrary symbol that
means nothing!
The same thing in reading a book. While reading a book
(story) I get into the story to such an extent, that I
try to anticipate what happens next. I then look at
the remaining pages and say to my self, how the heck
is the author going to pull the protaganist out of
this one in the next oh...say..20 pages? It adds to
the suspence. On a Newton or any digital book, the
ending is a sudden thing...Many's the book I've read
on my Newton where the story ended and I was
like...what....that's it? It was so sudden! This
happened just recently with the Stephenson book "Snow
Crash" (available on my download site). I knew that
the story was ending...the writing was getting very
intense. I had already built what I anticipated was
the plot...but then the story just...stopped...it left
me hanging...anticipatory, yet disappointed.
I was never able to correlate the physical into the
virtual to that extent...and I've been the virtual
world since the mid '70s! 3/4ths of my life! I can,
however, traverse a virtual environment that is purely
virtual, with no construct in the physical
world...that's why I'm a web administrator...I "get
it"
Ed
web/gadget guru
http://newton.tek-ed.com (download Newton packages)
--- Doug Parker <doug_at_ispinn.com> wrote:
<snip>
> I work in a software house. Programmers here
> regularly page through
> thousand-line programs using a browser that only
> displays 13 lines at a time.
> I don't know how they're able to move about the
> document and remember what it
> was they've just reviewed, where it is in the
> document, or how it relates to
> the remaining 987 lines that are unseen. I don't use
> their programming
> tools--I'm a visual programmer. It's confounding.
>
> Were I to try to remember where I was on a long note
> (essentially one long
> virtual page), I would quickly get lost. Printing on
> paper seems to add enough
> structure to the viewed content that I'm able to
> remember more of what I've
> read and where I've been. (Let's see, I think it was
> on the top left of page
> near the middle of the document. If I were to review
> the note on the Newton,
> there might not be any page boundaries, so I might
> lose that crutch.)
<snip>
=====
"China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese."
- Charles De Gaulle, former French President
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