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In 1908, Psychologist Robert Yerkes and John Dodson invented a bell-curve diagram that illustrated the measured dynamics of stress and how it affects daily life. I'm quite fond on this psychological theory, and to date its relevant in that work places tend to try to optimise their employees in such a way that doesn't compromise either party. Therefore, what is the optimal stress pattern? Yerkes and Dodson suggested there is a optimal/peak level of stress that equalises ones own attentiveness and performance. They use the term Arousal, which describes the amount of stress and anxiety given by a task and relevant factors. Too much, or too little arousal compromises the performance of the individual, so how does one keep it center?

The reality is, the answer is actually quite complicated and its grounded in ethical matters of trouble and human individuality and variability. But with all peoplekind there do exist patterns of predictability, psychology and marketing dance with such patterns religiously. This is important as there is another study I am quite fond of though that I thought to re-research because the study was waning in memory. Robert Sapolsky, and his society of Baboons.

Robert studied the social structure of the Baboons, noting the hierachy of the baboon lives and how those that live under the more reverred baboons live significantly harsher lives of stress, anxiety, and health related issues pertaining to such circumstances. Almost like a hostile class structure of ranks, when a baboon lived in a society of higher-ups who gets all the resources, women, and power their health and ability declined, whereas in the inverse scenario where there exists no hierachy when the higher ups are gone and the society is equal such issues were less evident.

I'd like to think the two studies, Yerkes and Dodson and Roberts Baboons are interlinked. Both pertain to improving the dynamics of human relationships, and the reality is, all humans live in a hierarchical system such as in that of their workplace with bosses, supervisors, and fellow workers. Whoever sits at the top of the structure pressures stress down unto the lower levels as the Bell Curve of optimal stress and anxiety curves down into low performance work in the most important sector, the floor. Of course, this isn't always the case, and in fact if it is, it doesn't need to be this way, there are probably multi-structural means of hierarchal establishment that equalises responsibility, stress, and anxiety across each sequential point of a managerial system, but bureaucracy and passing the buck are effective levers for ignorance and immobility.

If you want to maximise the effectiveness of a worker, you need to stress them, but you need to stress them just rightly if you want a management system to be a well oiled machine. Part of that, as both studies would attest, requires the humility, structural insight, role acknowledgement, and humanity of all relevant parties.

Commonly when I did group work, superiors often prescribed us to regularly self-reflect and critique ourselves in the form of a two-pager and then come back to the case. That way, even if there are no impasses, someone somewhere somehow would've recognised something or checked something that may or may not be a fault in the project. To recall an old group project I did, in involved a case of likely suicide with a cadaver that had been severly damaged by the individuals un-fed dogs. Personally I was no expert on matters pretaining to the average PSI of certain breeds of dogs, but I did know my bullets and guns. I remember we had to consider a bunch of variables, so I ripped out a refill page and established a brainstorm. Every single one of us would take up a role in the investigation, and me, I handled the gun most part of the work. But there was a catch, and this was the most important part of my plan for the case as everybody seemed to be keen to try and take the whole thing at once; we made secondary delegations. In our group of five, we had to work with two of each other as a secondary individual to each persons specialisation, one primary, one secondary. This would be a means of including others in potentially unfamilair areas and improving strength and authenicity to the interpretation of data especially contextually across each specialisation matter.

This I don't think should always be necessary persay, the problem was, it didn't seem at all viable to just take the whole thing at once because of how scattered we all were in our know-how, devising this plan worked well to systemically breakdown the case piece by piece for later reconstruction. Were the case smaller, or be in a lab, the structure would have to morph entirely. But as a research group this would serve well for the assignment.

Something near to a week passes by, and we all get together. Paraphrasing what I said then, "Articulate everything you've discerned to us with your partner" and got everyone into establishing casual and relationship links to each component of the case. We kind of all became expert witnesses with sidekicks probing each other's information like an interrogative legal team. Naturally we couldn't cover every basis, aspects of the case that would've been helpful were otherwise kept from us, although our role was primarily just to investigate outside influences to a crime scene that we have to establish, namely the individual, whether the scene looks to be a probable suicide, what lead to a probable suicide, the gun, the dogs, and the investigative teams findings after. We also had to do a presentation, humbly speaking, we nailed it from introductions to limitations.

The point is though, each forensic individual tends to fancy themselves a specialisation. I know i've been interested in digital forensics and I happen to have investigated guns and suicide cases a bunch including relevant policies and societal effects and what have you. But even in the things I'm lesser involved with, that my team delegated to the best of our team, we still had to digest it together. Digesting too much of the case content seems only to hinder the progress we were making. One might argue "just make a plan, that was the answer", but I think a plan easily falls through without utilising the alleged strengths of the team alongside a mediator in a way thats linearly aligned with progress. This is especially true if one member is missing the knowledge on a particular subject matter, additional context is invaluable.

I've done research alone before, and all at once, sometimes it looks and feels great until a week after publication. The blight of it everytime is realising something that is of utmost importance, that then obfuscates over things equally of importance in other disciplines. But in that same realm, bias, assumptions, and confirmation need a companion to affirm. Simply put, not being lazy, planning, and establishing a multi-layered structure of teamwork task delegation with a team, makes me look back at things with a lot more confidence, and frankly while I still think of that case today, while there are probably still faults that I'd hope to someday recognise, it feels more secure. After all, in science nothing is 100% certain.

This post was written a while ago, but due to graduation, and a birthday I forgot to put it up. Its been a little since I engaged with the blog.

In my offtime, I spend time doing drawings, mapping, all for the personal projects for my games, but it helpfully doubles in my ability to create good diagrams and sketches. One of the challenges you'll regularly run into is frankly, doing these suck when you need a lot of them simply because having too little makes them look all the same. An airport, sports bar, casino, and corner store are all very distinct locations each with unique textures, patternable layouts, and atmospheres; if you're sharing the same 4-8 resources between them, they'll start to merge together and appear to be the same.

For starters, I do things on a partial isometric scale with toppers in the mapping I do, usually for game development. The reason being is an isometric view hides the wall closest to the perspective of the viewer, and the topper indicates the wall relative to the other spaces. In addition each texture for a wall has 16 variants which account for junctions and seamlessness between each texture least you get some really funky ugly clips. Doing all of this can take some time and isn't always all that necessary, the excess is merely a convenience. Then you realise after one of these, you'll need more, because one simply won't do if you're gonna convey multiple rooms, things, or places. Hopefully you haven't made this terrible decision and use a better isometric system, or daringly a worse one, in which case I salute you.

Now if you're curious as to the process of making these textures, its actually quite simple. You could make them by hand, or by taking a picture of something and emulating it, but your best tools are in your toolbar. Put it this way, a solid brown texture, 40% colourless noise, and a motion blur is very effective at making a basic brushed wood texture. Don't sleep on your blurs, median tools, and leveling. Textures are chaotic so embrace chaotic tools over and over until you can tweak no more. One more thing too, lord help us if you're gonna make a metal or stoney texture do not make it black on white. Tinge it with a tiny dolop of light blue hue or dark orange or something. That tinge, shouldn't make the texture look much different only but very subtlely, and trust me oh my god its better than just black and white metal and stone.

Now then onto some neat tricks for wall textures and stuff, firstly, colour variants, which is a fairly obvious one, but it won't get you far due to the fact the texture hasn't necessarily changed, and it is taxing on the theme of the map. The second one, decals, from paintings, marking and random props which helps depending on what you're using and how, but these two are merely supplementary. The big one is lighting and shading, which if rigged nicely can be very easy to do. I am personally shamelessly obsessed with warm lighting and abandoned azure lighting and it is crazy how it can completely set the scene for a map as opposed to just making more textures. None of this should come as a surprize to you because lighting for instance is a cornerstone of defining horror, coziness, and happiness. But lighting is also a directing force. In a movie, game, or a drawing, the lighting can be an indicator of not just mood, but where to put your attention as it directs the viewer into engaging with the lit aspect. Much like the classy green neon exit sign that flickers due to wear.

I learnt very early on, you can trick someone into thinking they're looking at something totally different if you can articulate the light well. That is until the cog in their brain start turning and they see the pattern layout. This happened on a Apartment map, in which there were six identical rooms of furniture layouts, but each with different lighting. I remember two Psychology papers I did in University that were throthing at the mouth about this very phenomenon in which, the eyes see light variabley to their cones to percieve colour, something about gangelion cells, its been a while so don't quote me. But we had this diagram in which we percieve dots in particular really well in a dithered picture of a room, and i wonder what it'd feel if the dots were inversed.

In closing, I don't really know why I wanted to write about the wall creation stuff, I was just doing it and felt excited during the mapping process of one of my projects. I've been designing a club you see and I couldn't quite make it click until I started working on the lighting, and not just because it was a club, clubs don't have to be all flashy lights, they've got their dinginess too. Otherwise it may has well been a well lit district street. Lights sure are special aren't they?