Smile, Crocodile! #11
choices & more choices!!
As a person who loves falling down rabbit holes, I’ve been drawn back to exploring game theory and design. Game theory is all about studying strategy - such as proving how many ways a game can be won or if certain games are rigged to one player. It’s fun to experiment on what problems are solvable and discovering how possible- or even inevitable certain things are under different circumstances.
A brief but fun example of this is the Monty Hall problem, which references the game show “Let’s Make a Deal”. Players are given three doors to choose from, one has a prize and the remaining two have nothing. There is nothing distinct about each door, yet the player is made to choose one. Following the choice, the host opens one of the remaining doors that was not chosen, revealing no prize behind it. The player is asked if they would like to change their decision to the remaining door or keep their choice.
According to the Monty Hall problem, it is statistically in your favor to switch choices – regardless of how many are left. While not guaranteed, if your initial odds were 1/3, they are now 2/3, as one guess has technically been made for you. Similarly, if you were given 100 doors, one you did not pick was revealed, and you were asked to switch again- your odds would be 2/100 in switching as opposed to 1/100 for keeping your choice. (here’s an article that goes into more depth on the subject)
It feels silly to consider probabilities for a game of chance, but I love it. Although as a longtime lover of reality tv competition, many game feel somewhat rigged at times, or less fair. In the case of Survivor, it feels like rules can be added at any time in some seasons with production having rigged certain advantages to be found by particular players. Rules can make or break a game in terms of fairness, and I’d be lying if I said watching a video analyzing the tv show The Mole recently didn’t spur these thoughts on. (You can click here to watch it)
There’s been a lot of discussion lately around what choices matter most -if at all. I’m not going to make this about the election though, as tempting as it is to talk about how angry I am about the state of things - how it feels like any “prize” we could have chosen might have been a singular car tire rather than anything decent, but we won a radioactive tar pit with complimentary ai generated photo of you as a dog - but for “real men” only. This avoidance is for my own sanity.
Continuing into my mid-twenties, I’m often confronted with people who have made very different choices than myself: good, bad, and just all around different. It turns out… people my age can do things like get married, pursue grad school, and own homes! Terrifying stuff, I know. These choices obviously aren’t random, but there are times when I get immersed in curiosity of how things could have gone differently. Maybe I could have gotten a “normal degree”, had a perfect “meet cute”, or travelled to a universe where the American housing market was reasonable, but somehow the choices I made feel inevitable.
When I feel less hopeful than I’d like, my dreams are at their biggest and most pretentious… “Biggest” is subjective though. Sometimes I write up plans for an art exhibition or comics fest I could organize, a brick-and-mortar business to start, a game I could make... you get the picture. Having the time or resources to do things is irrelevant when you’re making dream plans. Still, I love being an illustrator, am plenty happy with the people I surround myself with, and know that I’m fulfilling a long-time dream of mine. It helps to remind myself what choices have worked out, that I’m not alone in what I care about, and that art really does matter – to a lot of people too.
As I’ve said before, I did not go to a normal/ traditional college. I chose to go to art school with the goal of being an animator, quickly realized I didn’t want that, pivoted to illustration, and got my first job as an animator for a startup. Alongside of taking six hour studio classes nearly every weekday though, I had to take a bunch of mandatory art history classes. History is always fun for me, but as someone who lacks memorization skills, I did not do well on tests.
Lately I really wish I spent more time with art history. Art is a genuinely fun and fascinating lens to try to view the world, humanity, and social movements through. It’s an entire type of literacy- but one that makes more sense when you put it in perspective with specific points in time. I find that I am able to describe cultural events such as the popularization of the photocopier and zine culture pretty accurately - but struggle to cite specific people and dates. If I can’t reference specifics I might as well be playing a big game of telephone.
Being a cartoonist doesn’t technically require me to know my roots - plus all the other illustrator nerds who came before me carved such a good path that reading comics isn’t going to get you pushed into a locker anymore: it’s like we’re almost mainstream! I’ve still dedicated a lot of time to getting to know other cartoonists -past and present- as well as the technical stuff like the anatomy of a page, how to build a pitch, and how to make a script. I’ve spent so much time dedicated to comics across my entire life. My first comic was penned with my grandfather’s help at five years old on a big roll of kraft paper, and then I guess I just kept going. If only I had this level of dedication and interest in being a doctor or something, but I don’t regret this choice.
I know that a good chunk of you reading this are artists. Regardless of if you make money doing it or not, making art is inherently a good thing. I feel like a bumper sticker saying this but don’t regret being an artist - do you have any idea how miserable things would be if people stopped doing weird creative stuff? There are more than enough tech bros out there but you don’t see them quitting out of abundance regardless of how bad so many of their ideas are! Take up space and make something that maybe only a few people will care about.
Generative AI, greed, and other nonsense are taking choices and opportunities away from people. It’s selfish, simple in its cruelty, all with the purpose of maintaining a few fragile egos in charge. Going as far as to get rid of things like fact checking so nobody can call them out for being wrong is pathetic among other things. I’m really tired of having to adapt to these whims, and you probably are too.
It’s really… silly? Navigating a game show feels so much simpler than navigating being an artist. On a game show the rules are typically set! I don’t doubt it’s stressful but there are limits to what can happen with the choices available. Oligarchs basically want to change the dictionary so the preexisting rules mean something new and worse. Right now feels like an extremely important time to get to know the roots of what you care about. Learn what choices were already made by people who did what you want to accomplish. Even if the rules change, studying how similar games have been played can help how you move next!
Thank you for bearing with me on this one, the state of how artists and creatives have been treated lately has really been weighing on me. Planning to follow this up with something more lighthearted, but hope you have a lovely week and get some rest when you can!
Catch ya in the next one,
-Jayme